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To: capitan_refugio
I have cited many, many authors, historians, law professors, and jurists in support of my views.

For the most part your "citations" consist of a narrow select handful of persons. For a while you were using Bill Rehnquist until you discovered that he endorsed a view contrary to Lincoln's in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. That effectively leaves you with only three persons you've quoted in any substantial degree. One is a left wing Southern Poverty Law Center-funded slavery reparationist. Another is a left wing "metaphysical" Berkleyite law professor. The third is nominally a conservative, but a crackpot one at that who has more or less managed to piss off the rest of the movement with his pompous and intellectually shallow ways, save for his own narrow cultist following at his own school, most of whom are equally pompous and shallow.

I admit, quoting Prof. Paul Finkelman was difficult

So I take it you are no longer denying that your use of him was part of a secret and intentional plan to slip in a left wing wacko to see how we'd respond? As if the gobs of egg dripping off your face didn't already give that away...

but it did illustrate that even the lefties recognize Taney for the schmuck he was.

Odd. Most people would take virtually anything a left wing nut job like Finkelman said with a substantial grain of salt, yet here you are giving credibility to him since in this (lone?) case he happens to agree with you. I, of course, prefer Justice Curtis' assessment of Taney as both credible and credentialed.

How do you reconcile that Finkelman on the left, and Jaffa on the right, share the same lack of regard for Taney's pro-southern judicial activism?

That's a question for Jaffa to figure out and it may even raise the issue of just how truly conservative he really is. On a similar note, how do you reconcile Jaffa with Karl Marx, who was one of Lincoln's biggest and most outspoken admirers in the president's own lifetime and one of the few public writers who lavished gushy praises upon Lincoln before the assassination when most GOP radicals had not yet discovered that the man they despised almost as much as the south could be used as a martyr for their cause in death. And how do you reconcile the fact that the Claremont Institute writers love to quote civil war "history" from James McPherson, a known marxist red daiper baby who writes lots of books on the civil war?

Put another way, Harry Jaffa's views of the civil war have placed him in some extremely odd and very leftist company.

234 posted on 08/28/2004 11:10:45 AM PDT by GOPcapitalist ("Can Lincoln expect to subjugate a people thus resolved? No!" - Sam Houston, 3/1863)
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To: GOPcapitalist
"So I take it you are no longer denying that your use of him was part of a secret and intentional plan to slip in a left wing wacko to see how we'd respond?"

I don't know how "secret and intentional" it was, as I posted on the late, great thread that I wanted you to see what a "real leftie" was like. I'll reiterate the point; when the lefties and the righties come to the same conclusion about Taney, you just can't deny it any longer.

BTW, you are beginning to sound paranoid.

262 posted on 08/29/2004 1:53:32 AM PDT by capitan_refugio
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To: GOPcapitalist
Put another way, Harry Jaffa's views of the civil war have placed him in some extremely odd and very leftist company.

Google up Jaffa's vita online and the reason jumps out: boyhood infatuation with Lincoln. It's personal and emotional/psychological on Jaffa's part. He is the source of the Lincoln-worship among the Claremont Declarationists, which is shared by some other Chicago "big-government conservative" {you should pardon the oxymoron) Straussians, few if any of whom seem to have been given any pause by the emotional and personal (to Jaffa) foundations of their cultivation of Lincoln and his acts.

Part of the reason for Jaffa's early hero-worship may lie in the fact that Lincoln championed an ethnic minority (no, not the Irish -- he used us for cannon fodder), which would have been psychologically key to a young urban ethnic exposed to the usual peer harassment.

Once that hero halo is bestowed, woe betide anyone who invites that brilliant young man to grow up a little and see the whole man.

279 posted on 08/29/2004 12:39:14 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur)
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