Posted on 07/28/2008 12:01:54 PM PDT by BGHater
ping to posts 78 and 80.
Which stands against exactly what you tried to describe him as.
Game. Set. Match.
Not in the slightest. As I said twice on this thread, when Thomas Jefferson was elected he governed as a moderate federalist of the Madison variety.
I never claimed at any point that he was a member of the Federalist Party or claimed to be - I merely pointed out that he governed as one according to Madisonian principles.
I would point out that you falsely characterized his position as one of being "dead against" the Constitution, when in fact his own correspondence shows that he quite liked the Constitution and supported its ratification even without the Bill of Rights - even saying that it was his "first wish" that the nine states required for the Constitution's enactment move to ratify it even before there was a Bill of Rights.
And while you have falsely attributed views to him that are identical with the classic Anti-Federalist positions (namely that he was "dead against" the Constitution, that he "was firmly against" the Constitution, that he thought the "whole thing was a bad idea"), his letter presented above shows that he saw himself as "much farther" away from the Anti-Federalists in his thinking than he was from the Federalists.
You have tried to set up a narrative on this thread that Jefferson preferred the Articles of Confederation and only wanted them revised, that he was "dead against" the Constitution, that he opposed its ratification without a prior Bill of Rights.
In historical reality, he was a critic of the Articles of Confederation, he supported his friend James Madison's strategy of scrapping them and replacing them with a Constitution according to the "Virginia Plan" (a Plan that mirrored Jefferson's own excellent work regarding the Virginia Constitution) and he supported the ratification of the Constitution by the nine requisite states even if it did not yet have a Bill of Rights.
So the subsequent historical facts - specifically his Presidential policies which followed the moderate Federalism of the Madison variety - show Jefferson to have been a consistent thinker on these matters. Your false portrait of Jefferson, making him appear to be a foaming-at-the-mouth Anti-Federalist, makes his Presidency look like the actions of a schizophrenic or a hypocritical sellout.
Game. Set. Match.
Were this a game, you would not have qualified for the tournament in the first place, but it isn't a game in my view.
I believed I was having a serious discussion about the political philosophy and principles of one of our most important Founding Fathers.
You presented a hodgepodge of decontextualized, edited snippets of Jefferson's writings compiled by someone else - really shoddy scholarship no matter which website it was cribbed from.
I presented you two letters in their full historical context without removing chunks of the text to reshape Jefferson's thought.
If you notice, I bolded Jefferson's statement that he was not a member of the Federalist Party. Why would I do that if I thought it would injure my case? Why didn't I just cut all that part out entirely and replace it with ellipsis like your source?
I didn't because I wanted to present his unvarnished and unedited thoughts - and those thoughts in their entirety and in their full context, explode your caricature of Jefferson and demonstrate his true views: he was a supporter of the Constitution first, and a critic second, and that while he was not a member of the Federalist Party he wanted nothing to do with the Anti-Federalists from whom, in his own words, he was "much farther" than from the Federalists.
As I said twice on this thread, when Thomas Jefferson was elected he governed as a moderate federalist of the Madison variety.
So... which is it? Pure or Moderate?
I would argue that the Federalism of Madison is pure, since he was the principal author of the Constitution itself and because it was his Virginia plan that was approved at the Philadelphia Convention. I would point out that Federalist Paper 51, which is considered the blueprint and manifesto of the Federalist position, was authored by Madison.
I would also argue that the Federalism of Madison was moderate, as opposed to the more aggressive and doctrinaire stance of Hamilton - that Madisonian Federalism steered the middle course between the extremes of Hamilton on one side and of the Anti-Federalists on the other.
Madison would have been happier with a National rather than a Federal government. The guy was a closet monarchist...
What actions or statements of Madison lead you to believe that? This was the same man who opposed the chartering of the First Bank of the United States.
This was also the guy that was against the BoR and for allowing the President to serve for life.
Initially he was, because he believed that the state constitutions would guarantee individual rights and that the insistence on a federal enumeration of rights was a tactic being used by Anti-Federalists as an excuse to scrap or rewrite the Constitution.
In the end, he drafted the Bill of Rights - the ninth and tenth Amendments were particularly ingenious and of his own devise - and campaigned for its adoption by Virginia and the other states.
and for allowing the President to serve for life.
He didn't support a life Presidency, but he did oppose term limits on the grounds that the people should be allowed to vote for any qualified citizen they want as many times as they want.
I'll point out that he himself was well-positioned in 1816, as the popular victor in the War of 1812, to run for a third term as President but declined to do so.
Mason, not Madison, drafted the BoR.
George Mason authored the Virginia Declaration of Rights.
James Madison authored the Federal Bill of Rights, which was in some particulars modeled on Mason's prior work.
His late campaign manager was Jewish, you moron.
There are some Paul supporters out there in Internetland who have postulated that the timing of Snyder's death was suspicious and was perhaps a sinister Zionist plot against Snyder for supporting Paul.
Well they're as stupid as the dude who claimed Paul was an anti-Semite.
Which includes the EXACT wording Mason used. Plagiarism isn't authoring".
I’ll be in LBI this weekend, by the way. You should stop by the restaurant and say hi.
Apparently slandering our Founders is one of your pastimes.
There are a few phrases here and there in both documents that are the same, but the two documents are radically different and Madison's is far superior.
Mason's does not protect against double jeopardy, it does not prevent the establishment of religion, it does not protect the right to assemble, it does not protect the individual right to bear arms, and does not protect the citizenry from forcible military quartering. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments are wholly new in concept and in language.
Calling the Bill of Rights a work of plagiarism is like calling the Gospel of Matthew a work of plagiarism because Matthew consciously quotes the Old Testament.
BTW, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence also incorporates language from Mason. Is Thomas Jefferson also a plagiarist?
Face it, you were wrong about the authorship of the Bill of Rights.
http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/B/gmason/gmasxx.htm
http://www.constitution.org/gmason/amd_gmas.htm
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/nation/bofright_1
Get going... you've got a lot of 'splainin to do...
Wait a minute! Are you telling me that thousands of sites on the Internet haven't done their homework?
That's a shocker.
BTW, your constitution.org link is the one that comes the closest to the full story.
Get on it yo'... some of those are "institutions of higher learning" including Gunston Hall. home of all things George Mason.
Go tell 'em they are wrong...
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