Selwyn Duke
The Democrats' one-night stand with the Founders
By Selwyn Duke
"I'll respect you in the morning" is what I half expect to hear. Of course, the Democrats now invoking the Founding Fathers' memory in their effort to impeach President Trump won't respect our colonial progenitors at the next dawn anymore than they did at the last one.
Nonetheless, the Left has interrupted its regularly scheduled programming of trying to tear down the Founders' reputations and life's work – the Electoral College, the First and Second Amendments, and the Constitution generally – to claim that those Enlightenment men are on their side.
Nancy Pelosi (D-Fruits and Nuts) has proclaimed that Trump's actions "are in defiance of the vision of our Founders." Democrat Jerrold Nadler, from the state (NY) that allows prenatal infanticide up to birth and that's giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens, asked a shill college professor of an impeachment "witness," "[I]f Washington were here today, if he were joined by Madison, Hamilton and other Framers, what do you believe they would say if presented with the evidence before us about President Trump's conduct?"
My, my, as Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson put it Tuesday evening, "Democrats care deeply and passionately about the Founding Fathers." For sure. Just watch a selection of them in Carlson's segment below, if you have a strong stomach and high tolerance for shameless sanctimony.
Now, Nadler's hypothetical is interesting because I've occasionally indulged the thought exercise of what would transpire if a Founder – let's say, George Washington – could be resurrected from the dead. After he recovered from the shock of our technological advancement and moral debasement, I imagine he'd have lots to say.
How much of it, though, would be in praise of the Democrat program? What would he say about sex as social construct, personal pronoun tyranny, putting boys masquerading as girls in female spaces and the Sexual Devolution generally? Widespread prenatal infanticide? Open-borders cultural genocide? Rule by judicial and bureaucratic fiat? Proposals to eliminate the Electoral College and Senate? Feminism? Multiculturalism? Attacks on Christianity? The exalting of Islam? Hate crime law? High taxation? Federal overreach? The redistribution of wealth?
Speaking of which, how about socialism? Note that Founder Samuel Adams spoke for many of his comrades in warning of the "Utopian schemes of levelling, and a community of goods." So is there one aspect of the modern Democrat agenda – just one – of which Washington or any other Founder would approve? Help me out here.
The notion is ridiculous, of course. The Founders would have an earful for most of us, don't get me wrong, but they'd absolutely view today's leftists as aliens.
That's how the Left views them, too. Leftists don't hide their disdain for "old white men," whom they despise at least partially because that demographic most opposes their agenda. They also loathe the Founder fruit that is the Constitution – which Barack Obama bemoaned was merely "a charter of negative liberties" – basically because it's a conservative document.
By this I don't mean just the obvious, which is that it prescribes limited government. It's also that conservatism is about conserving the status quo – standing "athwart history, yelling Stop," as William F. Buckley put it – while liberalism is about changing the status quo. Yet since the Constitution's Amendment Process makes it painfully hard to change, the document does (when adhered to) conserve a status quo.
So it's no surprise that lawyer and CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called the Constitution "broken" in 2013 and stated that outside "Washington, discontent with the founding document is bipartisan and widespread" (among pseudo-elites, yes).
Toobin pointed to a University of Texas law professor, Sanford Levinson, who, when asked if he would have signed the Constitution, reluctantly said yes in 1987 but no in 2003. Toobin was making his case for how a positive evolution of thought takes us beyond constitutional limitations, but he only demonstrated how Levinson managed to get not only older, but dumber in 16 years' time.
But since the Democrats are now romancing the Founders, here's another thought exercise: Imagine we could resurrect all those men and let them take the place of our current president, congressmen and senators for some years so that they could restore our government to founding principles. Would you agree? I'd sign on that dotted line.
No matter what the Democrats would say hypothetically, though, this would be their worst nightmare. Their feelings toward the Founders range from indifference to contempt to hostility, which is why they demean them in history books and propose removing monuments to Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Oh, don't think it's really about slavery, either. Islam's Mohammed was not only a warlord, caravan-raider thief, mass murderer and user of torture, but a slave owner and trader. Yet no leftist would dare besmirch his memory. Nor do our liberals trouble much over Muslims' enslavement of blacks in Africa today. No, leftists hate the Founders because they hate Americanism.
If the Founders could live again and run for office in 2019, the Left would be vicious in its vitriol, calling them racists, bigots, homophobes, sexists, xenophobes, white supremacists and, well, you know the wash-rinse-repeat pattern.
Worse still, though, is what leftists are doing to the Founders right now: associating them with themselves. Why, if the Founders weren't in a place beyond the reach of worldly defilement, they'd likely feel in need of a Silkwood-intensity shower.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.
© Selwyn Duke
December 19, 2019
"I'll respect you in the morning" is what I half expect to hear. Of course, the Democrats now invoking the Founding Fathers' memory in their effort to impeach President Trump won't respect our colonial progenitors at the next dawn anymore than they did at the last one.
Nonetheless, the Left has interrupted its regularly scheduled programming of trying to tear down the Founders' reputations and life's work – the Electoral College, the First and Second Amendments, and the Constitution generally – to claim that those Enlightenment men are on their side.
Nancy Pelosi (D-Fruits and Nuts) has proclaimed that Trump's actions "are in defiance of the vision of our Founders." Democrat Jerrold Nadler, from the state (NY) that allows prenatal infanticide up to birth and that's giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens, asked a shill college professor of an impeachment "witness," "[I]f Washington were here today, if he were joined by Madison, Hamilton and other Framers, what do you believe they would say if presented with the evidence before us about President Trump's conduct?"
My, my, as Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson put it Tuesday evening, "Democrats care deeply and passionately about the Founding Fathers." For sure. Just watch a selection of them in Carlson's segment below, if you have a strong stomach and high tolerance for shameless sanctimony.
Now, Nadler's hypothetical is interesting because I've occasionally indulged the thought exercise of what would transpire if a Founder – let's say, George Washington – could be resurrected from the dead. After he recovered from the shock of our technological advancement and moral debasement, I imagine he'd have lots to say.
How much of it, though, would be in praise of the Democrat program? What would he say about sex as social construct, personal pronoun tyranny, putting boys masquerading as girls in female spaces and the Sexual Devolution generally? Widespread prenatal infanticide? Open-borders cultural genocide? Rule by judicial and bureaucratic fiat? Proposals to eliminate the Electoral College and Senate? Feminism? Multiculturalism? Attacks on Christianity? The exalting of Islam? Hate crime law? High taxation? Federal overreach? The redistribution of wealth?
Speaking of which, how about socialism? Note that Founder Samuel Adams spoke for many of his comrades in warning of the "Utopian schemes of levelling, and a community of goods." So is there one aspect of the modern Democrat agenda – just one – of which Washington or any other Founder would approve? Help me out here.
The notion is ridiculous, of course. The Founders would have an earful for most of us, don't get me wrong, but they'd absolutely view today's leftists as aliens.
That's how the Left views them, too. Leftists don't hide their disdain for "old white men," whom they despise at least partially because that demographic most opposes their agenda. They also loathe the Founder fruit that is the Constitution – which Barack Obama bemoaned was merely "a charter of negative liberties" – basically because it's a conservative document.
By this I don't mean just the obvious, which is that it prescribes limited government. It's also that conservatism is about conserving the status quo – standing "athwart history, yelling Stop," as William F. Buckley put it – while liberalism is about changing the status quo. Yet since the Constitution's Amendment Process makes it painfully hard to change, the document does (when adhered to) conserve a status quo.
So it's no surprise that lawyer and CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called the Constitution "broken" in 2013 and stated that outside "Washington, discontent with the founding document is bipartisan and widespread" (among pseudo-elites, yes).
Toobin pointed to a University of Texas law professor, Sanford Levinson, who, when asked if he would have signed the Constitution, reluctantly said yes in 1987 but no in 2003. Toobin was making his case for how a positive evolution of thought takes us beyond constitutional limitations, but he only demonstrated how Levinson managed to get not only older, but dumber in 16 years' time.
But since the Democrats are now romancing the Founders, here's another thought exercise: Imagine we could resurrect all those men and let them take the place of our current president, congressmen and senators for some years so that they could restore our government to founding principles. Would you agree? I'd sign on that dotted line.
No matter what the Democrats would say hypothetically, though, this would be their worst nightmare. Their feelings toward the Founders range from indifference to contempt to hostility, which is why they demean them in history books and propose removing monuments to Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Oh, don't think it's really about slavery, either. Islam's Mohammed was not only a warlord, caravan-raider thief, mass murderer and user of torture, but a slave owner and trader. Yet no leftist would dare besmirch his memory. Nor do our liberals trouble much over Muslims' enslavement of blacks in Africa today. No, leftists hate the Founders because they hate Americanism.
If the Founders could live again and run for office in 2019, the Left would be vicious in its vitriol, calling them racists, bigots, homophobes, sexists, xenophobes, white supremacists and, well, you know the wash-rinse-repeat pattern.
Worse still, though, is what leftists are doing to the Founders right now: associating them with themselves. Why, if the Founders weren't in a place beyond the reach of worldly defilement, they'd likely feel in need of a Silkwood-intensity shower.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.
© Selwyn Duke
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(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
