Posted on 01/11/2016 1:17:23 PM PST by Rummyfan
George Jonas and David Bowie died yesterday. They both wrote lyrics, Jonas somewhat less profitably than Bowie. Other than that, they didn't have much in common. I will miss George very much. He was Canada's greatest public intellectual, and I was honored to share the pages of The National Post with him. I'll have more to say later, but there's a modest tribute from me as part of Joseph Brean's story in today's Post:
His columns were memorable in many cases for a single aphorism. Politicians who seek high office, for example, should be disqualified for being stupid enough to think they can do it. Crime is not wrong because it is illegal, it is illegal because it is wrong. Cold War Communists "could cope with bankruptcy; they had never been anything but bankrupt, beginning with Karl Marx himself." Freedom is too fragile to put into words, so "if you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them."
"He was a wit, which is a higher art than being a jokester," said Mark Steyn, a longtime friend and colleague. "His elegance had a magnificent compression to it, which I think comes in part from writing poetry or writing opera libretti, in both disciplines of which you have to say it in a very short space of time."
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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Thank God the Founding Fathers wrote them down. England lost all their "common law or common man" rights that were not written down.
I would agree, but I think the idea was that, if you wrote them down, then eventually the only rights and freedoms you would have would be those that were written down. All others that were not written down would be stripped away. Which pretty much sums up the situation we have today, as you say.
The 10th Amendment was an attempt to address this issue, by stating that the states and the people retain rights not specified in the Constitution.
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