McCotter is one of the good guys. He also has a good sense of humor. I like his appearances on Red Eye.
ping
I like this Thaddeus McCotter....a lot.
This principle was based on the "proper study of man," recognizing the corrupting influences of power; that power corrupts and also that those already corrupted by its "heady wine" are drawn again and again, quite naturally, to its addictive flame was mixed into the government's foundation when it was first poured.
On first glance at government in action today, however, you might conclude that government had reached some sort of new immunity from critical oversight. A longer look will dispel that superficial notion, however, and quickly reassure you that, other than its sheer size and scope, governments have not changed very much after all.
What we hear today is an echo of the way things have functioned pretty much from the beginning.
What has changed is the Free Press, which today, in the guise of "Journalism," has gradually been subverted to serve the powerful at the expense of the powerless. And even this is no real change, except perhaps on the label.
If you were able to step free from today into the America of the middle 19th Century the pattern would easily be recognized, and at the same moment it would seem alien. Four and five generations back, at the beginning of the Civil War, every town large enough for a tavern usually had two, three, perhaps four or more "broadsheet" newspapers, for example.
While there was no radio or television there was no shortage of news, and even a rudimentary Internet had begun to branch out across the landscape in the form of Samuel Morse's telegraph.
One big difference would be clearly alien. Each of those broadsheet newspapers operating wherever two or more were gathered were unapologetically partisan in purpose and in message.
Today what some call the "mainstream media" labors under the burden of having to sell information within an illusion of "neutrality." A century and half back, no blue sky could be seen between a political Party and its Press. If you didn't like the message its opposite might be available next door. No one conceived of a "middle ground," in contrast with today's Journalists, to whom a murky middle has become the very language used to spread partisan messages.
At the beginning of Abraham Lincoln's administration in 1861 the nation was already at war with itself. It was more than just "deeply divided." South Carolina, whose sea port at Charleston was the source of two-thirds of the federal government's revenue in the form of tariffs, had already declared independence, citing the Lincoln's election as its cause. It was a "present crisis" before Lincoln took the oath, and a month and half later the nation was in a shooting war with itself.
The Democrat Party of that time was as divided as the nation, setting up the opportunity for the new Republican Party to elect its first President and to consolidate a new base of power. During Lincoln's first year Democrat newspapers in the North were effectively criminalized, as many Democrat office holders and newspaper publishers were thrown into federal stockades without benefit of arraignment. Mobilization of a standing army and the deliberately turned blind eye of Lincoln gave members of his cabinet an excuse to make war on the new Party's enemies.
In 1861 they called it the "Summer of Rage," and it was characterized by official and unofficial organizers of the new Republican Party gathering their own versions of our Flash Mobs to riot, loot and pillage any and all who dared to criticize the new government.
Throughout the course of the war, one that ended with Republicans as the dominant force of a re-worked relationship between the States and Washington, opposition on the home front was effectively silenced.
Whether those methods used by Lincoln were right or wrong is not at issue. Lincoln himself set everything second, including slavery, to preserving the Union. Eventually those methods worked, and the institution of African slavery in the United States was shut down in the bargain.
Any debate on whether those ends justified the means is a waste of time unless the means Lincoln used are one day applied to achieve an end thought as noble.
So, it was a little disquieting to see a popular new regime inaugurated in January 2009, as led by a president so quick to invoke Lincoln at every turn on his first day in office. Aside from not having to travel in disguise, as Lincoln did to evade angry mobs of protesters in Baltimore and elsewhere on his train trip to Inauguration, the president-elect symbolically followed that same path to Washington 148 years later.
He ate the same breakfast as Lincoln did his first day in office and took the Oath on the very same Bible.
Barack Obama's genetic heritage was heralded passionately enough to excuse this symbolism, of course, at a historic moment when a man of African descent became president he quite naturally called on a semi-deified Abraham Lincoln for his blessing. It took a passionless point of view to wonder whether something more than Lincoln's ends was being evoked. Perhaps, as some believed, the 14th President's means were being celebrated as well.
Nothing President Obama has done so far has soothed this disquiet.
On the contrary it sometimes seems as though he were determined to create greater and even greater crisis so those means applied by Lincoln and his Party might excuse a second re-working of relationships, this time between Washington and the American Citizen.
How else can we look on an otherwise insecure-looking intolerance of dissent exhibited by his cabinet? This administration's adolescent and unseemly attacks on FoxNews, which is no different than any other mainstream news outlet in seeking a perspective from a illusory and "balanced" middle ground, are difficult to understand in a Capital City where Franklin Roosevelt once said nothing happens by accident.
Most disquieting of all, however, is the fact that President Obama lacks a domestic war as Lincoln's excuse for silencing dissent.
It would be too narrow, however, to credit someone with being sophisticated enough to remember the model left to us by Lincoln not to also credit him with remembering a wide variety of models from the not-so-distant past, as well. Among those means employed for re-working societies left to us from just the past century alone there are more than enough example from which he might choose.
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Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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Rep. Thaddeus G. McCotter (R-MI)
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Big Time Thad McCotter fan here.