Posted on 06/16/2005 12:48:22 PM PDT by milbuf
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. "For the traitor appears not a traitor he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear." Marcus Tullius Cicero 42 B.C
If Durbin is correct and we are now under Stalinism, then surely Durbin and his ilk ( and their families ) would disappear one night and all pictures, speeches, names on lists, etc. would simply vanish as if they never existed. No one would utter their anmes in public. See the fascinating book "The Commissar Disappears" for examples.
See there, every cloud has a silver lining, eh?
As an Illinois resident, I'll tell you that there is a better chance of a meteor hitting you square on the forehead, than of the IL GOP actually doing something worthwhile!
Who is going to stand up to him?
I would love to see Jack Ryan make a statement!!!
Yep, the fall of the Roman republic is very telling. If Cato and company hadn't tried to force Caesar back to Rome to run for consul so they could have him arrested, and hadn't denied him his triumph, no telling what history might have recorded. But then, if the Gracchi hadn't stretched the Roman constitution to the point they did, then a whole lot of things might not have happened....And if Marius hadn't gone crazy...or hadn't gotten Sulla mad at him...
These things don't happen overnight. There are a chain of events that lead up to the explosion point.
You can Darling of Al Jazeera to his resume.
bmpp
You can add Darling of Al Jazeera to his resume.
Dirty Diaper Durbin ping
Cicero quote is, among other things, a reminder that "classical education" in original sense of reading Latin (possibly also Greek) and familiarizing oneself with those of antiquity who have stood the test of Time, necessarily exposes students to an invaluable perspective, rendered ideologically neutral by its very remoteness. If you had the choice of concentrating on "gender studies" or some such BS vs. Cicero and his brethren writing over a thousand years in circumstances more difficult and dangerous than our own, which would you realistically think might guide you better?
Read both Caesar (especially the Civil War) and Cicero...But Cicero's latin is considered some of the most elegant...
Good place to start looking is here:
http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/index.html
They have online translations.
I just sent DICK a hate letter. I wish I had seen this quote five minutes ago.
All the Illinois GOP can do right now is piss itself. They are totally vanquished. Illinois will never see another Republican go to the US senate. The state house will keep on going to the rats as more and more morons get converted to the dark side. Illinois is lost for good.
Now people know why I chose this name...it's because of POS like little Dick Durbin.
gotta git ping...
"Illinois will never see another Republican go to the US senate. The state house will keep on going to the rats as more and more morons get converted to the dark side. Illinois is lost for good."
That's pretty strange. Illinois is a state where the GOP should be doing pretty well. Alot of working class whites, middle class suburbanites, and is largely rural. It doesn't seem to follow the usual demographic pattern of a "blue state" (over-educated, wealthy, coastal, urban, etc...)
bttt
It's unlikely that any leader of the Roman Republic ever imagined Teddy Kennedy or anybody like him. But, then again, the Roman Empire fostered some very strange behavior. Those later Romans would probably be very comfortable with Teddy Kennedy, Bobby Byrd, and Dick Durbin.
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