Posted on 07/13/2004 8:03:30 AM PDT by Mike Bates
While I do admire the Founders of this Nation, I don't worship them as some do.
At the end of the day, they were Men. With all that entails, good and bad. They changed the world in a way we still don't appreciate, to be sure.
But they were Men, with feet of clay, just like any one of us.
Jefferson wanted a lot of stuff in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence that didn't make it into the final versions. Too bad they didn't, but practicality and politics said they couldn't.
I am so sick of this one. What "lies" are these people referring to?
They may have had FEET of clay, but the current generation of liberals have the clay all the way to the tops of their heads, including their well-styled coiffures.
I suspect he ignores what his God says about homos, those who murder the innocents, and anything remotely sounding like that classic rightwing religious bludgeon, 'sin'.
I actually met someone (a self professed Liberal)who, after 9-11, said he didn't care if a plane crashed into the Whitehouse "because George Washington had slaves". Unbelivable!
Liberals should be required to wear headphones plugged directly into the reverberations of history.
when psychos babble.......
Don't even bother. Some people are just idiots.
That's kind of not true. The Constitution specifically set aside any discussion of slavery for a period of 20 years, the Framers knowing that slavery was the one issue that would kill the Republic before it had any chance to live. If any specific anti-slave-trade or anti-slavery had found its way into the Constitution, it would not have been ratified in the South. And when Philadelphia Quakers, led by Franklin in the last years of his life, tried to get the new Congress to debate the issue of slavery specifically, a deal was brokered to more or less "table" the issue for another day.
It took a real, live shooting war to decide the slavery issue. The Constitution, as written by the Framers, was purposefully silent on the issue.
Oh, give me a break. At the time of the Constitution, slavery was perceived as a dying institution, economically unsustainable, which is why they agreed to ignore it and leave it for the states to figure out. Hell, they couldn't bring themselves to use the word "slave" in the Constitution. It's all "Persons in Service." But the economics of slavery were completely transformed by the invention of the cotton gin. Suddenly it became hugely profitable to own slaves, and once that happened, there was little chance the south was ever going to go for emancipation. Not as long as the slaveowning aristocracy ran things. The northern states had all abolished slavery in a 23 year period, from 1777 to 1800. How many states ended slavery in the 65 years after that? Zero. Instead, the south agitated for expanding slavery, into Texas, into California, into Utah, into Kansas, into Missouri, into New Mexico. They wanted to annex Cuba just to add more slave territory.
In the 1850s, slaves were the largest capital investment in the U.S., with a value of $1 billion at a time when the federal budget was $25 million, and they were only getting more valuable, individually appreciating at about 10% a year.
The problem with "debunking" the Founders is that it leads one to fail to apprehend the very high standard of political genius that went into designing and implementing a form of government unique in the world at the time and still very unlike any other. One need not swing from extreme to extreme in regard to these gentlemen - they certainly weren't saints but that does not mean that they were "criminals." Most of the signators of the Declaration of Independence paid dearly in their personal lives for the temerity of defying the King, with us as the beneficiaries. If some pinheaded liberal crybaby wants to miscategorize them it's only because he miscategorizes everything else.
The person you met is also ignorant of history as George Washington never lived in the White House.
But he got his wish because Washington was inaugurated in NYC not far from where the twin towers used to stand.
Whoa...you obviously know your US slave history. But, for the sake of clarity, in NY State it was still legal to own slaves until 1821, based on the laws passed in the late 1700s.
All in all, there was plenty of bad behavior to go around, but the original point, that slavery was far from a dying institution and was, in fact, becoming increasingly profitable, still stands.
I come to this by way of NYC history. An interesting side note in case you did not know: the slave auctions in NYC were held where Wall St. meets the East River.
And then it's often the Lefties who claim that conservatives have polluted political discourse with their extremism.
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