This is the people I deal with! I asked a former employee to define what a politician is and at the end this is what I get for questioning political people! Timothy, to be blunt, your last comment was just too flaming stupid and offensive to support any continued interaction. I dont need any more glassy-eyed cultish idiots eating up my precious time, thanks. Heres my final reply to you on Andrews thread, and my final interaction with you on this Earth: Timothy, Im a lawyer, a sociologist and a former US History and US Government teacher. Ive studied the Constitution intensely through three different lenses (that of a lawyer who took Constitutional Law and a slew of other courses that referred back to the Constitution constantly as well as two centuries of case law interpreting the Constitution), a sociologist who cognitively mapped the Federalist Papers, and a US History and US Government teacher who studied it anew to teach it at the high school level). You want to declare your absolute certainty about something that clearly is a bit more subtle and complex than you acknowledge, thats your choice. But, to quote you, sorry, youre wrong. The Constitution is a very short and very ambiguous document, with many terms not defined. What is due process? What constitutes it and what doesnt? What does it mean to establish a state religion? Is favoring one religion over others sufficient, or isnt it? If Congress will pass no law abridging freedom of speech, how are libel and the incitement of violence illegal? If the federal government is in charge of interstate commerce, can states pass laws favoring their own businesses over those of other states? As a historical fact, the Constitution was drafted to strengthen the federal government as a result of the country falling apart under the toothless Articles of Confederation. The driving principle of the Constitutional Convention was how to draft a document strong enough to provide for national coherence and functionality. Yes, limiting the power of the government was a principle that was honored in that process, but that was NOT the purpose of the Constitutional Convention; in fact, the purpose was to save the country from the disaster of an overly-limited federal government. At the very beginning of the 19th Century (1800s), Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall instituted the doctrine of judicial review, by which it became the Courts responsibility to determine what is and is not in accordance with the law, and particularly the foundational law, the Constitution. This was absolutely necessary to the survival of the Constitution as a functioning document, because without it each faction simply insists that the Constitution upholds their own dogmatic beliefs, and reads into it the imagined proof that it does so, just as the Tea Party/Libertarian/Evangelical Christian unholy trinity so assertively does today. Its utter bullshit, but since you keep telling one another that it is the one absolute truth (trademark characteristics of your various dogmatic ideologies), you are perfectly insulated against fact and reason and so immune to the obvious fallacy on which you rely. Your notions of where the line is between liberty and tyranny (the requirement for drivers licenses, the existence of a penal system) are an expression of the absurd ramblings of an untethered fanatic. For one thing, we dont live in the 18th century anymore, and the founding fathers never intended us to pretend that we did. They never intended to become so idolized at such cost to the real lesson they provided, nor for their foundational legal document to be reduced to a sacred scroll. They were inspired by Enlightenment era philosophy, by the notion that rational people could govern themselves through the use of their own reason in service to their shared humanity, not by the notion that whatever they said and did would become the tyranny to which future generations must mindlessly adhere. You would honor them better by emulating them more and idolizing them and their archaic historical context less. We live in a wonderful system that they established, but the responsibility to use our own reason within the rather fortuitously supple framework that they provided remains with us, today, and always. THATS what they were all about, and thats what we should be about, not the silly shouting of shallow slogans and the declaration that because you can wave your flag with gusto you are omniscient and infallible. You can say sorry, youre wrong all you want, but until you remove your head from its current location all I can hear is a muffled sound emanating from your anus. Cheers.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 07:41:31 +0000
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