Category Archives: Founding Fathers

The Tyrant’s Warring Factions

Constitution, Crime, Founding Fathers, John McCain, Media

I’m not quite convinced ordinary individuals should share the nation-wide outrage over the dispute between Congress, on the one hand, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on the other.

What’s it about? Explains AMY GOODMAN of “Democracy Now!”:

The Central Intelligence Agency has admitted its officials spied on a Senate panel probing the agency’s torture and rendition program. An internal probe found 10 CIA employees monitored Senate staffers’ computers. This development comes days after another revelation of CIAspying on Congress emerged. According to McClatchy, the agency has also been spying on emails from whistleblower officials and Congress, triggering fears the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistleblower cases.

This CIA infraction is said to “violate the constitutional separation of powers and may also have been a violation of a federal computer fraud.”

McMussolini is upset. He doesn’t much appreciate any upset in the balance of his power.

Seriously, separation of powers has become nothing but a slogan. Very little remains of the Founder’s constitutional scheme. The people who were supposed to benefit from the dispersion of power inherent in that scheme, now labor under a centralized power.

Isn’t it curious how much fuss is generated by the media-congressional faction when their rights and privileges are messed with? Forgotten in the self-serving din is the spying that goes on against the people. The people themselves forget and become distracted by the whining of those in power.

For all I care, the CIA and Congress can devour each other.

UPDATED: Desperately Seeking Desperadoes in Diapers

Business, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Nationhood

“Desperadoes in Diapers” is the current column, now on The Quarterly Review. An excerpt:

“First they came: thousands of unaccompanied illegal minors rushing the South-Western border. Then came the theories as to why they came. Determined not to miss a trick, America’s traitor elite—open-border interests and enemies of private-property rights—called the arrivals refugees, victims of nativist Know-Nothings who want invaders turned away. The desperadoes in diapers were also said to have fallen victim to a sudden deterioration in conditions in Central America. No proof has been advanced for the claim that, all of a sudden, things in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have worsened. Because they reason in circles, no-border advocates deploy no logic to justify their claims. Only this did these Aristotelians say:

That Central American minors are arriving, hat-in-hand, is in itself proof that their homes have become uninhabitable. Quod erat demonstrandum (as Erik Rush likes to say); Q.E.D.; case proven.

Having been given the go-ahead by media mogul Rupert Murdoch—he came out for de facto limitless importation of third-world immigrants—his employees at Fox News cued the violins. Shepherd Smith was weeping and gnashing his teeth: “Not politics, but the disgusting conditions in their countries have sent these kids to our shores,” he asserted. “What is a caring nation to do? Their parents love them so much; they gave them to smugglers for a better life.”

However poor, this here mother would never have handed over her daughter to a smuggler. But what do I know about parental love? No more than the nation’s first president knew about the glue that was meant to keep America together.

In his Farewell Address, George Washington presented what historian Paul Johnson calls “an encapsulation of what [he] thought America was, or ought to be, about.” America, said Washington, “is a country which is united by tradition and nature. ‘With slight shades of difference, you have the same Religion, Manners, Habits and Political Principles.’”

What a dummy!

“The children, the children,” wailed Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. “It’s all about the children. We are the United States, what do we do about the children?” Such showy “humanitarianism” invariably means the following: Working people in the U.S., with children of their own to mind, will be roped into supporting the children of the world. Enslave one set of people to whom American politicians are beholden by law, for the benefit of another.

Where’s the humanity for the non-consenting host population? …

Read the compete column. “Desperadoes in Diapers” is now on The Quarterly Review..

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UPDATE (7/3): Myron Robert Pauli: “I liked the quote of John Quincy Adams. Historian David McCullom said he was the most intelligent of our Presidents. His nickname was Old Man Eloquent. When one plots the trajectory from John Quincy (‘America does not go around in search of monsters to destroy …. She might become the dictatress of the world’) Adams to Bush-II and Obama, it makes me want to cry. – – – Arguably, I am a classical liberal but not a libertarian anarchist OR a welfare-socialist. I do not want foreign mobs taking $$ and turning the country even more socialistic nor do I want to have to turn my own home into a personal fortress to keep out the horde. The reality of modern America is that Washington and Adams would essentially be intellectual outcasts in America of 2014.”

Morality And Religion

Constitution, Founding Fathers, History, Law, Morality, Religion

On this Good Friday and Passover, it is worth remembering George Washington’s message on morality and religion, in his 1796 Farewell Address.

“Washington—in light of the dreadful events which had occurred in Revolutionary France—wished to dispel for good any notion that America was a secular state. It was a government of laws but also of morals,” writes historian Paul Johnson, in The History of the American People. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,’ he insisted, ‘religion and morality are indispensable supports.’ Anyone who tried to undermine these ‘great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens,’ was the very opposite of a patriot.” (P. 229)

There can be no “security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice.” Nor can morality be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

What Washington was saying, explains Johnson, is that America, “being a free republic, dependent for its order on the good behavior of its citizens, cannot survive without religion. And that was in the nature of things.” (P. 229)

It’s hard to reconcile modern-day USA with the America the Founding Fathers bequeathed and envisaged. The law, a branch in what has become a tripartite tyranny, has plunged Americans into a struggle to express their faith outside their homes and places of worship.

Forgotten in all this is that religion is also a proxy for morality. (And I say this as an irreligious individual.)

A Law Unto Themselves

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Healthcare, Justice, Law, The Courts

Why stage a judicial intervention when you can sit back and let the executive and the legislature accrue more power, a power that invariably will redound to the Courts as well?

On Monday, the High Court, which should check the other two branches of government—how is that working out?—decided against taking up “the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program that collects bulk telephone data of millions of Americans.” (NJ)

When the Supreme Court has the chance to strike down rights-violating laws and legislation (like the Obamacare individual mandate)—it so often declines.

“Monday’s decision,” concludes the National Journal (too charitably, in my opinion), “reaffirms expectations that the justices would rather allow the issue to percolate within the circuit courts first.”

(At least NJ covers such stuff.)

In the case of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, John G. Roberts Jr., chief of the country’s legal politburo of proctologists, rewrote Obamacare, and then proceeded to provide the fifth vote to uphold the individual mandate undergirding the law, thereby undeniably and obscenely extending Congress’s taxing power.

Face it, the idea of a judiciary that would police the executive as an arm of a self-correcting tripartite government is worse than naive. Rather, it WAS recklessly naive of the American Founding Fathers to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve as a check on one another.