[Waco]

Being a turd is an awful way to waste a lfe.

[Clemenza]

Great article regarding "Euro-Peon" attitudes.

[ml/nj]

Paul Johnson on Mr. Jefferson:

From claret to concubinage, there was no delight he did not sample, or rather indulge in habitually. (p. 242)

So Jefferson's wife was in intimate daily contact ... with her husband's concubine. (p. 242)

Jefferson's expensive tastes might not have proved so fatal to his principles had he not also been an amateur architect of astonishing persistence and eccentricity. (p. 244)

It is just as well that Jefferson had no sense of humor: he constitutes in his own way an egregious comic character, accident-prone and vertiginous, to whom minor catastrophes accrued. (p. 246)

As originally built his bedroom [at Monticello] accorded him no privacy at all, a curious oversight considering he had a passion for being alone and unobserved. Thereafter the search for privacy became an obsession in the many changes of design ... Contemporaries assumed they were there so his alleged mistress, Sally Hemmings, could slip in and out of his chamber unobserved. (p. 247)

(Page references to the hardcover edition of A History of the American People)

Why does anyone pay any attention to what this guy says?

ML/NJ

[Clemenza]

I should note that I disagree with Johnson's first point. We are NOT A DEMOCRACY. Our Republican form of government protects the minority (think gun owners and fundamentalist Christians) against, what Jefferson called "the tyranny of the majority." He also tends to forget that some of the most asinine ideas of this country's history (Prohibition, the Free Silver movement, Anti-Masonic parties) were the product of Populism.

[TheCrusader]

'Intellectuals' = prideful baloons awaiting the inevitable burst through the pinprick of logic and faith.

[G.Mason]

You were correct. This is a must read.

In fact I enjoyed it so much I am tempted to re-enlist in the military, in hope that one day (soon) we will invade those Euro-weenies and kick those elitest scum suckers all over that polluted continent.

First we shall tune up our Euro-weenie fighting skills on the American elite, and of course the non-elite Democrat Party types before we go.

[onja]

Just for your info. We aren't a democracy. We're a republic. Athens was the only true democracy.

[Fee]

When you lose power (control of events) nations naturally lash out at the gaining power. I think it is more with human's tribalistic nature. Not long ago we Americans were angry at the Japanese for building better cars, steel, electronics, and accumulating more money than us. It got so bad, that we rejected the right of a Japanese businessman from buying one of our financially strapped baseball teams. We claimed that only Americans can own baseball teams (of course Canadians exempt).

[Capt. Tom]

Hence, the argument goes, the U.S. is not so much an "educated democracy" as it is a media-swayed and interest-group-controlled populist regime.

Well?? - Tom

[Vasilli22]

bump

[goldstategop]

Like Robert Kagan wrote in his now famous monograph, "Of Paradise And Power," Americans are Martians and Europeans are Venusians. The differences spill over into everything and with each passing year, the gulf between the Atlantic grows ever wider. Americans are faulted for being a nation at the same time the Europeans have struggled to suppress nationalism once and for all. That perhaps as anything, is the impetus behind European Anti-Americanism. Europe's elites cannot in the final analysis, bear to see America succeed where they have failed. And not only has Europe failed to regains it once pre-eminent place in the world, the very fact of American hyper-power at one remove only testifies to European impotence and decline. The Europeans have detached themselves from involvement in the world at large in inverse proportion to America's deep entanglement in its affairs.

("Denny Crane: Gun Control? For Communists. She's a liberal. Can't hunt.")