[backwoods-engineer]

the arrogant, shifty, and high-hatted Alexander Hamilton's boots to the fire long enough to secure our rights.

Your whole post was good, but that right there just warmed the cockles of my heart, FRiend.

[lentulusgracchus]

Thanks for the kind words. I'll never let up on Hamilton, for committing something like high-political fraud on the Constitutional Convention with his b.s. "opening position" which was intended only to drive the convention to the left, in favor of statism.

He also opposed the BoR on grounds that there is no need to spell out in writing, rights possessed by the People, when the ground assumption is that they have them. Think for a minute how long that assumption would have stood up to the power-grabs of FDR, LBJ, and William O. Douglas (Mr. "Penumbras and interstices"). Like taking candy from a baby, for someone like any of those people. I also liked the classy way Hamilton defended himself during the XYZ Affair, by offering the honor of a married woman as his alibi. The army officer whose wife it was, should have shot Hamilton right there, and spared Aaron Burr the trouble.

His class especially showed itself during the Whiskey Rebellion, when he dumped a tax on people he calculated would be unable to resist it politically. Friendless bumpkins who lived across the mountains and had no good way to get their harvests to market. (So they distilled them instead, floated them downriver, and good good prices in the river towns .... which brought Hamilton sniffing.)