Posted on 03/15/2005 10:12:50 AM PST by quidnunc
Is the US still at war? Fighting as vague a conflict as the war on terror is hard, polarizing citizens and rendering difficult Washington's decisions about civil liberties at home. Washington is also preoccupied with sustaining its alliance with London. The US is aware that Britain may eventually opt for the Eurosphere over the Anglosphere. But these tensions are not new, as James Grant points out in a new biography of John Adams, America's second president. Compare the Adams presidency to the current one and several truths emerge.
The first is that quasi-wars split electorates more sharply than traditional wars. Napoleon Bonaparte was not about to sail into Boston harbor. Still, in the late 1790s, France's Directoire — the latest in a series of increasingly extreme regimes — was granting privateers license to attack foreign ships. In 1797 French corsairs intercepted more than 300 American merchant vessels. At what point, the young US debated, do such acts of violence become war? Like President George W. Bush, who created the Department of Homeland Security, President Adams created a government department to handle the new brand of conflict: a Department of the Navy.
The uncertain status of the Franco-American relationship polarized America's two big parties. Thomas Jefferson and his Republicans refused to vilify the French, whom they knew, after all, as fellow revolutionaries. Adams and his Federalists viewed the pro-French Republicans as reckless — much in the same way that Realpolitiker view the Bush administration's nation-building as reckless. Sounding for all the world like Henry Kissinger, Adams wrote of the Jeffersonians that by "their King-killing toasts" as well as "their everlasting brutal cry of tyranny, despots and combinations against liberty" the Jeffersonians might "involve us in a war with all the world". …
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at techcentralstation.com ...
There's a whole book on this subject:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385512198/qid=1110910688/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-3000245-3669434
John Adams was not unique. More recently, noted blue-collar philosopher Al Bundy expressed antipathy towards the French.
LOL!
Most sane, reasonable men of good character loath the worthless cheese sucking surender monkees.
http://www.twainquotes.com/French.html
Mark Twain thought lowly of the french as well.
Didn't Thomas Jefferson found the Democrats or is the author talking about something other than political parties?
An excerpt can be found here:
http://www.oldestenemy.com/read.php
Mark to read later.
"The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Dutch, and I dno't like anybody very much" - Lehrer
Nothing like finding one of my old favorite songs from long ago and far away is soooooo very much on point.
Whodda guessed it - even the Adams family dislikes the French. ;-)
Great link - thank you!
I forgot the main course - do dead Twain's The French & The Comanchees in his book Letters From The Earth.
He compares the French and the Comanchee - priceless! Well, low priced at Amazon.com.
Wasn't his cousin, Ted Bundy French?
COMMUNIST
Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it -- it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
The Democrats claim to trace their history to Thomas Jefferson; the pre-Civil War Democrats may have been more in the Jeffersonian tradition than the Whigs were, but some of Jefferson's ideas had become accepted by everyone.
GEE now days if if you want to hate the french you'll have to get in a long line, it was so much simpler for John Adams and his contempories............................
Good book. I really admire John Adams. He really helped shape the policies. Very forward thinker.
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