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I'm sorry my efforts haven't met with your approval any better than that. All I can say is, I'll try harder. I'd like to think I'm fair to the other side and to the subject at hand, but the lumps of history are lumpy enough based on the facts in view.

My basic argument has always been that American history has seen the sad playing-out of a destructive tendency which was present at the Philadelphia Convention, at the beginning, and which now threatens American exceptionalism, as unlimited-government, access capitalists and Marxist-collectivist termites labor in tandem to assimilate America to a despotic new world-state.

My personal view of American history to this point is that the tendency has been for the American people to lose sight of their rights and liberties and to fail to defend them, as members of hustling, self-promoting elite groups claim more and more discretion and decision-making for themselves, and seek to reduce the People to a "resource base" at the bottom of a typical social pyramid and concurrently consign their Bill of Rights to an Orwellian "memory hole".

Even Ronald Reagan couldn't keep the pigs from the trough or the rats from getting at the baby.

</mini-opus>

You don't need to try harder. For I am not talking about you in my post. (I should have clarified that up front... sorry)

Just as in the Arab-Israeli debate, there those who want to know the truth and discuss it... unfortunately, the argument has been overrun by those who are agenda driven and the agenda (and not truth) is what it is at stake. It is the agenda that causes some to stalk these Civil War threads like junk yard dogs tearing away at anyone and anything that might besmirch the agenda.

There are Freepers on both sides who do not do this but there are Freepers on both sides who do.

Many Freepers have come to the thread believing that this would be a good place to discuss the war... only to be driven away by the antics of the few. I wonder why these Freepers are content to have the same argument countless times with the same Amen corner.

Your mini-opus was wonderful.

My personal view of American history to this point is that the tendency has been for the American people to lose sight of their rights and liberties and to fail to defend them, as members of hustling, self-promoting elite groups claim more and more discretion and decision-making for themselves, and seek to reduce the People to a "resource base" at the bottom of a typical social pyramid and concurrently consign their Bill of Rights to an Orwellian "memory hole".

I think you've got something there and I believe the best example that we've ever had of such a hustling self-promoting elite group is the slaveowning interest that was behind the formation of the Confederate States of America.

Once again, the words of prominent Confederate Zebulon Vance apply:

"The great popular heart is not now and never has been in this war. It was a revolution of the politicians, not the people."