So Who Is Right: The Democrats Who Deny The GOP Just Won A Wave Election Or The Republicans Who Say America Just Rejected Liberalism?

It’s hard to look at the election results and not conclude that somebody turned the light to the American mind on and the Democrats didn’t make it under the oven or the refrigerator in time to avoid getting stomped on.

Let’s look at the Senate.  Now, I know that if you are a liberal, you would die before you watched Fox News.  But I watch it quite often.  And even on that channel which liberals decry as rightwing propaganda, I never heard a prognosticator predict a bigger possible gain for Republicans than eight seats at most.  We’ve got seven pick ups in the bag, no one seriously questions that Mary Landrieu’s days as a Senator in Louisiana will end when they hold their runoff and she has to face just ONE rather than two Republicans, and in Alaska the Republican Dan Sullivan holds a 4.6 point lead over Democrat Mark Begich with 100% of the precinct’s having reported.  There’s only the mail-in-ballots outstanding.  And mail-ins usually favor Republicans.  That’s eight and nine.  And we might even have ten pickups in the US Senate by the time we’re done.

If Democrats predicted that Republicans would win 10 of the 11 contested races, they didn’t get their asses kicked.

But as it is, the DNC chair Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz predicted that “We’re going to hold the Senate” along with her fool friend Vice President Joe Biden.

Um, newsflash, reality-challenged people: no, you’re not.  You’re going to get your asses kicked and be laying on the floor in a daze wondering what just happened.

It was not just a wave, it was a BIG wave.  And it washed that demon-possessed little twerp Harry Reid right out of the Senate Majority Leader’s office.  To date, 387 bills passed by Republicans sit on Harry Reid’s desk.  While Democrats scream that the party that passed those 387 bills are the obstructionists and the party that has sat on those 387 bills are somehow anything but obstructionist.

Harry Reid and the Democrat Party completely shut down the United States Congress.  And dishonestly blamed the other side for what they and ONLY they did.

The Democrat-controlled Senate illegally refused to even bother to pass a damn budget for four entire years.  And given the fact that that is the first order of business of governing, it is quite clear that the Democrats radically refused to govern.  For the record, the Republican House never failed to pass a budget every single year while Democrats recklessly and dishonestly refused to perform even their most basic duties.

Harry Reid as Senate Majority leader usurped more fascist power to block amendments than all the previous Senate Majority Leaders COMBINED TIMES TWO.  That’s how fascist and how dishonest and yes, how obstructionist, Democrats truly are.

And yet, as I write this Senator Majority Leader to be Mitch McConnell is answering questions at a press conference that NO Democrat has ever had to face: “Why should we trust you?”  “Are you going to shut down the government?”  “Are you going to abandon your principles and compromise your values and split the difference with the Democrats [whose asses Republicans just kicked]???”

Again, let me state this fact: Harry Reid blocked more amendments than ANY Senate Majority Leader in the entire history of the republic.  But that’s not enough: Harry Reid blocked more amendments than ANY Senate Majority Leader in the entire history of the republic COMBINED.  But that’s STILL not enough: because Harry Reid blocked more amendments to more legislation than every Senate Majority Leader combined TIMES TWO.

And the same media that allowed this dishonest hypocrite fascist to represent the Republican Party as “the party of obstructionism” when it was HIS DEMOCRAT PARTY that was the party of obstructionism will be around to dishonestly and viciously hound the Republicans at every turn.

You’ve got two fascist powers: the Democrat Party and their media allies, the tools of the propaganda press.

And you can’t vote out the rat bastards in the press.

Let’s look at the governor’s races.  Democrats – at least those honest enough to admit that the GOP would likely win the Senate – predicted they would have a very good night in the gubernatorial races.  They had a nightmare instead:

Washington (CNN) — President Barack Obama’s home state of Illinois elected a Republican governor on Tuesday night. Massachusetts will have its first Republican governor since Mitt Romney.

Stunning Republican gubernatorial victories came in reliably Democratic states, including those won overwhelmingly by Obama in 2012. Illinois ousted Democrat Pat Quinn in favor of Republican Bruce Rauner, while Maryland voters opted for Republican Larry Hogan over Democrat Anthony Brown. Republican Charlie Baker won a Massachusetts match-up against Martha Coakley, the state attorney general who lost a special Senate election to Scott Brown in 2010.

Republicans also continued their dominance of governors’ mansions when a number of GOP leaders fought off stiff challenges from Democrats.

As for the House of Representatives, well, the last time they had this much control was 68 years ago.  In fact, the GOP hasn’t held more seats since 1929.

Obama just incurred a 100-year-asskicking.

As for Obama, being a mentally-ill malignant narcissist, he doesn’t feel that he was repudiated in spite of the fact that he had boasted that his policies would be on the ballot in the election.

You see, humility and shame are virtues that only decent human beings are capable of possessing.  and Obama is NOT a decent human being.

When Obama started, he had a filibuster-proof majority in Congress with total control of the House and sixty Democrats in the Senate.  Until his lies and his incompetence and his fascism caught up with him.

USA Today puts it this way in an editorial written by a liberal:

While a president’s party typically losses ground in midterm elections, Obama and the Democrats Tuesday reached an unwanted record: the biggest losses in the House and Senate for any two-term president in modern times.

Democrats claim that even Reagan lost seats in midterms.  And, yeah, he did.  But there’s a chart in that piece that documents that Obama lost about twice as many seats in just his first term than Reagan lost in both terms.  And it doesn’t even add how many seats Obama just got through losing last night.

But you might be reading the above words – in contemplation of the question that I ask in my headline – and conclude that Michael Eden is saying the Democrats are just wrong in saying it wasn’t a wave election and the Republicans are right in saying it was.

I actually would point out they’re both wrong – with the Democrats AS ALWAYS being considerably MORE wrong.

Yeah, this election was an ass-kicking for Democrats.  You’re just not capable of intellectual honesty if you don’t see that – as incredibly many of the Democrat talking heads cannot see.

Democrats are trying to re-write history now and tell America, Republicans didn’t really win that much, they don’t have a mandate, they don’t have a right to govern.  Because Democrats are at their cores fascists who believe that no matter how badly they lose an election that reflects the will of the people, they have an INSTITUTIONAL RIGHT as the party of institutional government to govern.  And that no election can change that.

Of course, when Democrats were the ones winning the majority in 2006, THAT was a landslide and THAT gave them the mandate to ram dictatorial government down the people’s throats.  But hypocrisy goes with fascism as being ontological to Democrats; and if you aren’t a fascist hypocrite, you didn’t vote Democrat.

But here’s the thing: we had a sea change in 2006 and another wave from that sea change in 2008 as Democrats promised Utopia.  The abject failure of that sea change led to a huge sea change to the other side in 2010.  Then we had a sea change back to the other side in 2012.  Because Obama put his “signature achievement” on hold so the American people could not feel the pain and made the campaign about falsely demonizing the Republicans.  And now we’ve had another wild swinging sea change back to the other side again as the people experience that Obama and his policies are ugly things that hurt them rather than help them.

Do you get the idea that the American people are pretty much a bunch of clueless idiots who have lost any capacity for integrity or consistency???  We’re no longer a people capable of building or sustaining anything; we just massively sway without compass or resolve to hold us steady on any course.

The poison of Democrat institutional government just seems to tasty and hard to resist.  And the fire of Democrat fascism seems so warm and bright.  But poison always kills and fire always burns in the end.  But we’re like animals who just can’t learn.  And so we just keep getting drawn right back to what kills us.

Why is that?  What have we lost?

George Washington, the father of our country, declared – and predicted:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness–these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”

John Adams, the second president of the United States following Washington, declared – and predicted:

“[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

And:

[I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.

In his first Inaugural Address, in his very first words as president to the American people, Washington declared:

We ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained; and since the preservation of sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps finally, staked of the experiment

The Democrat Party’s “separation of church and state” is NOT found in the Constitution and is a doctrine that had never existed in America until 1947 when a Supreme Court largely comprised by judges picked by a fascist president who tried to illegally pack the court invented the doctrine by pulling one small phrase out of a private letter from Thomas Jefferson out of context.

In fact, “separation of church and state” is “separation of God from America.”

We are now no longer either religious or moral people.  And as a result, we are pathetically incapable of sustaining ANY virtue.  We no longer have either the courage or the resolve to do any great thing and sustain it long enough to achieve it.

We don’t have the courage or the integrity to actually win a war.  We haven’t had the courage or the integrity to even DECLARE a war since our Supreme Court under the control of Democrats used their fascist power as our black-robed masters to force America to abandon God.

And anything this fickle, wavering, waffling people sets out to do they will surely not have the heart to see through to the end.  Because we are a weak, pathetic nation under government and under socialism and under welfare and radically NOT under God.

The left has repeatedly tried to expunge the words, “One nation under God” from our currency.  But they have already expunged the idea in every other way it can be expunged.

We’ll bounce in one direction and then we’ll rebound in the opposite direction.  Because we don’t have any more faith or courage or resolve than a rubber ball.

That’s the cancer.  That’s why the American people WILL fail and WILL fall.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the faithless and depraved American people – who lack both the virtue to chose right and the integrity to commit to whatever choice they end up making at any moment – will waver and sway back to the party that represents 60 million murdered babies and counting, the destruction of marriage and a middle finger raised at the face of God.

And our destruction as a nation and as a people is thus guaranteed.

So take heart, Democrat, your time will come again.  And I know that because I know the beast, the Antichrist, is coming, who will impose tyrant government on ALL the people of the world just as you dream.

America has proven that it has degenerated into a nation that will gladly worship him and take his mark on their right hands or on their foreheads as they allow him to take over every aspect of their economy and their lives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSNBC Adds Bigoted To Its Bias: ‘You’re Ignorant Because You’re White’

This is just absolutely stunning.

MSNBC‘s Lawrence O’Donnell shows us how totally over the top rabid liberal non-Fox News networks truly are.

Here is a transcript of what this fool passes off as “journalism” today:

O’DONNELL: Perhaps all of Michele Bachmann’s staff come from her district, which may be the most ignorant Congressional district in America. In 2010, 52 percent of that district voted for Michele Bachmann to represent them in Congress. Now, she had already proven time and time again to her district and to America that she is unworthy of representing any Congressional district in America. But 52 percent, the same percentage in that district who voted for John McCain for president, voted for Michele Bachmann in 2010.

What makes those voters so ignorant? Well, for starters, they are whiter than the average district. 92 percent white in fact.

Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters continues to take the “sane” out of O’Donnell’s insanity:

What? They’re ignorant because they’re white? Are you kidding? O’Donnell continued:

O’DONNELL: But that explains nothing. Missouri’s 8th Congressional district is 91 percent white and has been represented by Jo Ann Emerson since 1997. We do not have a litany of imbecilic comments by Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson. In fact, we have none. If we’ve missed any, please submit them to our website, thelastword.msnbc.com, and we’ll see if they compare to Michele Bachmann’s.

Well, if that “explains nothing,” why bring it up? It’s almost like O’Donnell and his staff knew they were going too far with the 92 percent white remark, and felt they needed to soften it a little by bringing up Emerson’s district.

But the damage was already done. After all, imagine for a moment Bachmann was black, Emerson was black, these were black districts, and the commentator was a conservative:

What makes those voters so ignorant? Well, for starters, they are blacker than the average district. 92 percent black in fact. But that explains nothing. Missouri’s 8th Congressional district is 91 percent black and has been represented by Jo Ann Emerson since 1997. We do not have a litany of imbecilic comments by Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson. In fact, we have none. If we’ve missed any, please submit them to our website, thelastword.msnbc.com, and we’ll see if they compare to Michele Bachmann’s.

You think that would have gone over well in the black community, or would there be calls Tuesday for said conservative commentator’s immediate termination?

I guess along with feeling comfortable attacking white women as long as they’re conservative, O’Donnell now feels it’s acceptable to go after all white people.

I am so sick and disgusted with liberals.  They are completely depraved people with a completely warped view of the world.

Liberals like Lawrence O’Donnell are totally committed to postmodernism, multiculturalism and pluralism.  It’s not that they are intellecutally brainless idiots as much as it is that they have totally committed themselves to totally false theories about the world.  Like the whole “Emperor’s New Clothes” story, these “intellectuals” have convinced themselves that their theories are the stuff of genius.  Only the more they try to explain their genius theories, the more utterly idiotic they start sounding.

Let’s talk about liberals and God; more specifically about MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell, and God.  Said O’Donnell on his MSNBC soapbox:

The book of Revelation is a work of fiction describing how a truly vicious God would bring about the end of the world. No half-smart religious person actually believes the book of Revelation. They are certain that their God would never turn into a malicious torturer and mass murderer beyond Hitler’s wildest dreams. Glenn Beck, of course, does believe the book of Revelation.

There is a reason why the Bible says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God'” (Psalm 14:1).  And that is because any worldview which does not begin with a divine worldview is already wrong, and can only go more and more wrong as it continues to postulate bad answers to fundamental questions.

Our founding fathers understood this, and their understanding enabled them to found the world’s oldest democratic republic.  They realized that democracy – a limited government of the people – demanded that people be able to govern themselves.  And that only a moral and religious people could pull that off. 

They fought a war over this principle encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Declaration of Independence

And so we have the words of Adams:

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

And Washington:

“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.  In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington

But liberalism fundamentally denies this principle, and constantly seeks for the results of the French Revolution rather than the American Revolution.   They refuse to realize that the atheism-based French Revolution inevitably resulted in first chaos and madness, and then a dictator (Napolean seized power within a decade); and that France has had 11 separate Constitutions since 1793, and at least fifteen different governments.  Thomas Jefferson rightly said that, “With all the defects in our Constitution, whether general or particular, the comparison of our government with those of Europe, is like a comparison of Heaven with Hell.”

But multiculturalist, pluralist, postmodernist secular humanists that dominate liberalism like Lawrence O’Donnell literally seek hell.

Can a white man be an anti-white male-bashing bigot?  You’d assume not, until you realize that people like Lawrence O’Donnell are so damn arrogant that they view themselves as transcending their own race and gender even as they claim that everyone else beneath them is a slave to their own.  But the fact of the matter is – to quote Barack Obama – “yes, we can.”  We can believe a theory that necessarily makes us hate ourselves.

Take Karl Marx.  The man was profoundly anti-Semitic.  He was also a Jew.

Here are some quotes from the VERY Jewish “intellectual” Karl Marx:

“The Jews of Poland are the smeariest of all races.” (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, April 29, 1849)

“Ramsgate is full of Jews and fleas.” (MEKOR IV, 490, August 25, 1879)

“What is the Jew’s foundation in our world? Material necessity, private advantage.

“What is the object of the Jew’s worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money.

“Very well then; emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time.” (“A World Without Jews,” p. 37)

“What was the essential foundation of the Jewish religion? Practical needs, egotism.” (Ibid, p. 40)

“Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value set upon all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and man, of its original value. Money is the essence of man’s life and work, which have become alienated from him. This alien monster rules him and he worships it.

“The God of the Jews has become secularized and is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew’s real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange.” (“A World Without Jews,” p. 41)

And what about the most rabid anti-Semite of all time?

Hitler ‘had Jewish and African roots’, DNA tests show
Adolf Hitler is likely to have had Jewish and African roots, DNA tests have shown.
By Heidi Blake 6:25AM BST 24 Aug 2010
 
Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust.

Jean-Paul Mulders, a Belgian journalist, and Marc Vermeeren, a historian, tracked down the Fuhrer’s relatives, including an Austrian farmer who was his cousin, earlier this year.

A chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in their samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

“One can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised,” Mr Mulders wrote in the Belgian magazine, Knack.

Just as Caucasian and male “journalist” Lawrence O’Donnell is clearly related to people he despises.

Can you be of a certain race and yet actively despise that race?  I think we’ve established that you most certainly can, if you’re vile enough.

So yes, we’ve got Lawrence O’Donnell, anti-white bigoted man-despising white male.

Lawrence O’Donnell is a pathological liberal ideologue.  Progressive liberal pseudo-intellectualism is rabidly anti-white and anti-man.  And so O’Donnell is those things, too.  And the fact that O’Donnell is the very things he despises is at best a minor detail to him.  Because liberals NEVER worry about inconvenient things like facts.

I would add one other element to the mix: the ingredient of self-hatred which is so necessary to liberalism.

Understand: liberals constantly agitate for policies that will bring about their nation’s certain destruction.  You don’t do that sort of thing unless you hate yourself, hate the next generation, hate your country, and literally embrace your own extinction.

At some deep subconscious level, liberals like Lawrence O’Donnell recognize that they are swine, that they are nasty, nasty people.  And from that point forward everything else just sort of oozes out of them like toxic slime from a poorly-designed container.

MSNBC has the right to broadcast.  Unlike the fascist liberals who constantly agitate to force Rush Limbaugh and Fox News off the air with oxymoronic legislations such as “the fairness doctrine,” I accept that right.  But that doesn’t mean anyone but fools need to watch it.

ObamaCare Declared Unconstitutional – Not That Democrats Give A Damn About The Constitution

ObamaCare is unconstitutional.  But Democrats could frankly care less what that meaningless moldy old document says.

Twenty-six states demanded that ObamaCare be declared unconstitutional in this decision, not counting Virginia which previously got its own successful decision against ObamaCare.

Federal District Judge Roger Vinson’s incredibly well-reasoned Constitution-based decision is available here.

A good article on this story was written by David Whelan for Forbes:

Justice Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court in Pensacola ruled today that the primary mechanism used by the health reform legislation to achieve universal insurance coverage–the individual mandate–is illegal. If his ruling stands it would void the 2,700 page, $938 billion health reform bill passed last year.

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications,” Vinson writes.

With this ruling, and a similar one in December by Judge Henry Hudson in Virginia, it’s likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will be the final arbiter of whether ObamaCare stands. Two other lawsuits–one in Michigan and one in Virginia–were thrown out by other federal district judges last year who ruled the constitutional challenge lacked merit.

Most analysts were expecting a ruling in favor of the 26 states hoping to overturn the bill. Vinson, in an earlier ruling, suggested that the federal fine for not buying insurance is more of a penalty than a tax. If it’s a penalty, the legislation relies on a broad interpretation of federal regulatory powers. If it’s a tax, as the Department of Justice’s lawyers argued, it’s much more difficult to make a constitutional objection.

In today’s ruling Vinson considered two arguments made by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, the lead plaintiff on the lawsuit. The first was the legislation forces states to expand Medicaid in a way that’s unaffordable. Vinson quickly dispatches that legal theory, pointing out that Medicaid is and always has been a voluntary program.

The second argument revolves around the individual mandate. The health reform legislation makes it illegal for insurers to discriminate against patients regardless of their health. With that change there’s a risk that only sick people would buy insurance and healthy people would wait or be priced out of the market. To address that problem, the bill forces everyone who does not have insurance to buy it. The combination of “guaranteed issue” and the “individual mandate” is the beating heart of the health bill.

While the new rules banning medical underwriting are popular, the individual mandate has bred resentment. The bill’s authors never anticipated the mandate would become a ripe target for legal challenges.

The argument that’s had the most traction is based on the limitations of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The Commerce Clause explicitly allows the federal government regulate interstate commerce. But it also has been used to justify federal laws that affect other kinds of economic activity. The question raised by the lawsuit against the health reform bill is whether refusing to buy insurance constitutes interstate commerce. In his ruling Vinson says that in the past the Commerce Clause has been used to regulate activities like growing marijuana or navigating a waterway, but not used to force someone to do something they weren’t already doing. “It would be a radical departure from existing case law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause,” he writes.

Vinson rejects the administration’s argument that the health care market is unique since nobody can truly opt out–and that not buying insurance is in itself an economic activity since the cost of care then falls on others. Vinson mocks this argument, writing: “Everyone must participate in the food market… under this logic, Congress could [mandate] that every adult purchase and consume wheat bread daily.” If they didn’t buy wheat bread they might have a bad diet which would put a strain on the health care system, he writes.

Later he offers another analogy: “Congress could require that everyone above a certain income threshold buy a General Motors automobile — now partially government-owned — because those who do not buy GM cars (or those who buy foreign cars) are adversely impacting commerce and a taxpayer-subsidized business.” Vinson concludes: “The individual mandate exceeds Congress’ commerce power, as it is understood, defined, and applied in the existing Supreme Court case law.”

Judge Vinson marshalled quite a few opinions against ObamaCare.  Interestingly, one of them was Obama’s himself.

From the Washington Times:

In ruling against President Obama‘s health care law, federal Judge Roger Vinson used Mr. Obama‘s own position from the 2008 campaign against him, arguing that there are other ways to tackle health care short of requiring every American to purchase insurance.

“I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that ‘if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,’” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of the 78-page ruling Monday.

Democrats have established quite a recent history in thumbing their noses at the Constitution.

Charles Krauthammer had this to say on Fox News Special Report on January 5th about Democrats literally boycotting the reading of the Constitution on the House floor:

KRAUTHAMMER:  “It is truly astonishing. One member of Congress called it a long, dull document.  The New York Times editorial reading of the Constitution in the House is presumptuous.  Liberals got in trouble in the 60s and 70s for being on the wrong side of the flag and the anti-war demonstrations and now three decades later, they want to be on the wrong side of the Constitution.

The Constitution, after all – when these members were sworn in today, that they did not swear to defend the country or the army or the people; it was to defend the Constitution. That is the essence of America, and it is what makes us unique and why we are a country not of blood or race but ideas.  For liberals to think that there is actually an advantage in dismissing reading the Constitution and the requirement of having a constitutional reason to introduce a bill is real bad politics.”

It wasn’t just “bad politics.”  Krauthammer underscored that better than anyone.  It was contemptible citizenship.  It was the act of unAmerican people.

One Democrat actually called the reading of the U.S. Constitution “propaganda,” adding that a reading of the Constitution amounted to “total nonsense.”  He added that Republicans were reading it “like a sacred text.”  When, of course, so many Democrats treat it more like toilet paper.  Liberal Ezra Klein added historical ignorance to his moral ignorance by saying that the Constitution is confusing, having been written “a hundred years ago,” and that it is no longer binding.  Obviously, liberal Ezra Klein is an ignorant fool.

It is beyond official at this point.  We can separate the population of the United States of America into two groups: the American people and the unAmerican people.  And the Democrat Party has become the party of the unAmericans.

UnAmericans don’t give a damn about America.  They want to change it, pervert it, warp it, distort it.  They want to make it into something that it never was and never should have been.  And they call their effort “hope and change.”

Mind you, that’s “hope and change” in the direction set by Karl Marx; never the one set by George Washington.

A Muslim extremist named Tayyip Erdogan had this to say about democracy, comparing democracy to a bus: “You ride it to your destination, and then you step off.”  Democrats were elected democratically; and then they started imposing their 2,700 pages of fascism using every procedural gimmick in the book.  Nancy Pelosi actually said:

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Let’s take another bus tour to how we got ObamaCare shoved down our throat:

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rep. Nancy Pelosi:

(CNSNews.com) – When CNSNews.com asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance–a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill–Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Youtube audio of Nancy Pelosi dismissing constitutionality:

Yeah, people who actually care about the Constitution, and care about the fact that our lawmakers – who take an oath to uphold the Constitution – actually consider it.

Rep. Pete Stark, responding to a question on health care:

Questioner: “If this legislation is constitutional, what limitations are there on the federal government’s ability to tell us how to run our private lives?”

Rep. Stark: “I think that there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life.  now the basis for that would be how does that affect other people.”

Questioner: “The constitution specially enumerates certain powers to the federal government, and leaves all other authority to the states.  The constitution is very limited as to what it can do…. if they can do this, what can’t they do?”

Rep. Stark: “The federal government, yes, can do almost anything in this country.”

Watch the Youtube video of this question and answer:

Liberal Supreme Court justices imposed abortion on the grounds of a fundamental right to privacy – which is actually nowhere to be found in the Constitution – based on nothing more than “penumbras and emanations” discerned from gazing into the Constitution like a crystal ball rather than like a historical document.  Now they are saying there IS no right to privacy of any kind, whatsoever in order to impose government health care and all the violations of rights and liberties that go hand-in-hand with that imposition.  Because it never was about the Constitution or even about any right to privacy; it was always about using whatever rhetorical argument they wanted to get the result they wanted.  So they said we had a right to privacy until the right to privacy got in their way.

If the federal government can do almost anything in this country, how then do you stop the next dictatorship?  How do you stop tyranny?  How do you stop totalitarian big government?

And let’s consider a corresponding Democrat’s statement on the same subject of government health care:

Democrat Rep. John Dingell:

“The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re passing legislation that will cover 300 million American people in different ways, it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”

And, of course, Dingell is right: it takes time and effort to abandon the Constitution – which places limits on federal power – and then impose controls on the people that utterly abandon any scintilla of any meaningful form of constitutional government.

Democrat Robin Carnahan, Missouri Secretary of State and candidate for the United States Senate:

Carnahan: “We’re going to also have a libertarian and a Constitution Party candidate running.  And I will tell you no one’s going to know who they are, but it’s not going to matter, because Glenn Beck says you’re supposed to be for the Constitution, and there is some percentage of people who will go vote for them.  And in our internal polling about six or seven percent goes like that to the Libertarian and Constitution Party.  So I’m quite sure that whoever wins is going to do it with less than fifty percent of the vote.” […]

Donor: “You just don’t sound like those Constitution Party votes are going to come out of your account.”

Carnahan: “What do you think?” (Audience laughter)

Donor: “I think you’re right.” (Audience laughter)

Here’s the Youtube audio of that exchange:

Stop and think about that: it is a matter of mocking derision that no one who actually cares about the integrity of the Constitution is going to vote for the Democrats.  And in fact Robin Carnahan – who is serving as a Democrat in the office of Secretary of State – cynically intends to exploit the fact that she can divide those who care about the Constitution and win by attrition.

And they mock the fact that no one who votes Democrat gives a leaping damn about the Constitution.

Take Democrat Rep. Jan Schakowsky on “The Stephanie Miller Show” on 9/30/2010:

“Actually, I think really what it was was an effort to get the Tea Partiers to think that they really have some sort of revolutionary plan, because at the beginning they quote a lot from the Constitution, the idea that free people can govern themselves, that the government powers are derived from the consent of the governed.

All that stuff that I think that, that that’s an effort to try to appeal to those people, the Tea Party.

They embrace the Tenth Amendment – ‘tenthers,’ you know?”

The audio of the interview is available here.

That Tenth Amendment is a real load of crap, right?

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Let’s just go ahead and abolish it so we can have the kind of totalitarian big government that Democrats yearn for.  Because Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, and all these other leftist dictators were just such groovy people, and we need their ilk here in red, white and blue America.

Yeah, that’s right.  Ridicule me, Rep. Schakowsky.  Call me a “tenther” like I’m a “birther” or a “truther” or some sort of nutjob because – unlike Democrats – I actually honor our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

Jan Schakowsky calls Tea Party people “extreme” because they actually take their Constitution seriously.  But this is a woman who was perfectly willing to abandon principles to turn ObamaCare into a Trojan horse for a socialist single payer system (and see also here).  This is a woman who said:

“A public option will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer” – Rep. Jan Schakowsky (to wild applause).

Marxism and communism is not extreme.  Nope.  It’s not extreme to use ObamaCare as a vehicle to put the private sector out of business so you can sneak in a government-planned economy.  What’s “extreme” is believing in the Constitution that Democrats such as Jan Schakowsky once deceitfully swore an oath to uphold.

Democrats spent over a year imposing 2,700 pages of unconstitutional “laws” upon a people who never wanted it.  And now, amazingly, they’re demanding that Republicans merely recognize that it’s done and over with, and move on.

Fortunately, Republicans DO care about the Constitution.  And they’re going to fight Democrats for the soul of this country.

If Democrats give a damn about the American people, they will join Republicans in demanding that this verdict go immediately to the U.S. Supreme Court for a final judgment.  Rule 11 of the Supreme Court allows particularly important cases that are of imperative public importance to gain such an emergency hearing.  But only if both sides agree.  If Democrats don’t demand this, they will continue to do even more harm in keeping the American people in the dark about how to plan.  Businesses will continue to hold off on hiring, and the economy will continue to suffer until this decision is finalized.

Bill Maher Dumps More Hate On Tea Party, Repeats Tired Liberal Lies

I dare say that “liberal media personalities” (an oxymoron in virtually all cases for these prototypically moronic morons) such as Bill Maher and Rosie O’Donnell only have any following at all because they faithfully keep playing the game “Jump the Shark” they started with themselves.  Every episode they have to be more hateful and more deceitful than they were last time – and every episode they manage to succeed.

Bill Maher had this to say recently:

“Now that they’ve finished reading the Constitution out loud,” Maher said to chuckles from the audience, “the tea baggers must call out that group of elitist liberals whose values are so antithetical to theirs. I’m talking of course about the founding fathers.”

Maher:

“Now, I want you teabaggers out there to understand one thing: while you idolize the Founding Fathers and dress up like them, and smell like them, I think it’s pretty clear that the Founding Fathers would have hated your guts. And what’s more, you would’ve hated them. They were everything you despise. They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris, and thought the Bible was mostly b—s—.”

Maher went on to claim that the Founding Fathers had a moral code, but it didn’t come from the Bible – ”except for the part about, ‘it’s cool to own slaves.’”

I mean, on a surface examination, I’m sure you’re right, Maher.  They’d hate the people who actually care about what they wrote and what they thought; they’d love liberals like you, who demonize them as evil slaveholding bastards.

Clearly Obama’s speech wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, when his own side didn’t bother to pay attention to him about his “let’s make Christina proud of us” calls for restraint for even five minutes.

But let’s go beyond the surface, where the founding fathers love Bill Mahr – even though Bill Maher clearly despises them – and hates the tea party.  Because maybe it’s not the way Maher thinks it is.

Bill Maher reminds me of Homer Simpson; both men think their incredibly stupid and buffoonish ideas are clever.  The only difference between the two cartoon characters is that Homer Simpson usually discovers that he’s an idiot by the end of the episode, whereas Bill Maher is pathologically immune from reality or truth.

And, of course, unlike Maher, at least Homer is smart enough to believe in – as he calls him – “Jeebus.”

I’ve had to respond to these atheist versions of Homer Simpsons before.  Here’s a response to one such that basically confronts Bill Maher with the facts he so despises:

Whose Country Do We Want: Our Founding Fathers’ Or Our Secular Contemporaries’?
By Michael Eden, 07/26/2009

This article consists as part of a much longer discussion with a self-described “Democratic socialist” found here (with much of the rest consisting over an argument as to what is or isn’t socialism and the supposed benefits of socialism to societies).  An argument over the significance of the founding fathers relative to “current Americans” provides for what I believed to be an informative article.

Poster: I profoundly disagree that Christianity has been the wellspring of America’s greatness. Christianity in American history has too often been the source of narrow-mindedness, intolerance and reaction.

I too love and revere the Constitution, and would risk my neck to defend it and the USA. But the Constitution is a living, organic document that evolves and pulsates. I agree with the late Justice Brennan that the only correct way to interpret it is as modern Americans. I don’t care about the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers.

Michael Eden: Let me start with the words and meaning of George Washington in his Farewell Address given on September 17, 1796:

What are the foundations of America? After 45 years of public service, George Washington, our greatest patriot and the father of our country, gives his farewell address. He says, ‘We need to remember what brought us here. We need to remember what made us different from all the other nations across Europe and the rest of the world. We have to remember what our foundations are.’ It was the road map, showing us how we’d become what we were, and how to preserve it. It has long been considered the most important address ever given by any US president. President Lincoln set aside an entire day for the entire Union Army and had them read and understand it. Woodrow Wilson did the same during WWI. But we haven’t studied it in schools for over 45 years, so your lack of understanding is understandable. Washington said:

“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” — George Washington, Farewell Address

If you want your politics to prosper, the two things you will not separate will be religion and morality. If you want your government to work well, if you want American exceptionalism, if you want the government to do right, if you want all this, then you won’t separate religion and morality from political life. And America’s greatest patriot gave a litmus test for patriotism. He says in the very next sentence (immediately continuing from the quote above):

“In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington

Washington says, Anyone who would try to remove religion and morality from public life, I won’t allow them to call themselves a patriot. Because they are trying to destroy the country.

And he wasn’t alone. I can well understand why you would throw out the wisest and most brilliant political geniuses who ever lived. I can understand because George Washington wouldn’t have even have allowed you to call yourself “a patriot” in his presence. What they wrote, what they thought, what they believed, utterly refute you. But it was THESE men, and not Marx, or Mao, or any other socialist, who devised the greatest political system the world has ever seen.

Statements by our founding fathers (who presumably understood what the Constitution that they themselves wrote and ratified meant better than Justice Brennan) announcing their religious beliefs, and stating the profound impact those beliefs had in their founding of the United States of America:

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

“…And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” –- George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

“Religion and good morals are the only solid foundations of public liberty and happiness.” –- Samuel Adams, Letter to John Trumbull, October 16, 1778

“The great pillars of all government and of social life [are] virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor…and this alone, that renders us invincible.” –- Patrick Henry, Letter to Archibald Blair, January 8, 1789

“Without morals, a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion…are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.” —- Charles Carroll (signer of the Constitution), Letter to James McHenry,November 4, 1800

“Religion is the only solid basis of good morals; therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man towards God.” –- Life of Gouverneur Morris, Vol III

“Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age, by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, of inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity…in short of leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system.“ –- Samuel Adams, Letter to John Adams, October 4, 1790

“In contemplating the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government. That is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by the means of the Bible.” —- Benjamin Rush, “A Defense of the Use of the Bible as a School Book”, 1798

“In my view, the Christian Religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed…no truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian Religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.” –  Noah Webster, Reply to David McClure, Oct. 25, 1836

“Information to those who would remove (or move) to America”: “To this may be truly added, that serious Religion under its various Denominations, is not only tolerated, but respected and practiced. Atheism is unknown there, Infidelity rare & secret, so that Persons may live to a great Age in that Country without having their Piety shock’d by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel. And the Divine Being seems to have manifested his Approbation of the mutual Forbearance and Kindness with which the different Sects treat each other, by the remarkable Prosperity with which he has been pleased to favour the whole Country.” —- Ben Franklin, 1787 pamphlet to Europeans

“Independent of its connection with human destiny hereafter, the fate of republican government is indissolubly bound up with the fate of the Christian religion, and a people who reject its holy faith will find themselves the slaves of their own evil passions and of arbitrary power.” —- Lewis Cass, A Brigadier-General in the War of 1812, Governor of the Michigan Territory, a Secretary of War, a Senator, a Secretary of State. The State of Michigan placed his statue in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall.

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift of God? That they are not to violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.” –- “Yes, we did produce a near perfect Republic. But will they keep it, or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.” —- Thomas Jefferson

“So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have exited thro’ all the time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.” —- Thomas Jefferson

“I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with His providence and our riper years with His wisdom and power, and to whose goodness I ask you to join in supplications with me that He will so enlighten the minds of your servants, guide their councils, and prosper their measures that whatsoever they do shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship, and approbation of all nations.” – Thomas Jefferson

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens…” — George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

“Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.” — John Adams, Letter of June 21, 1776

“It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being.” —- George Washington

“So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have exited thro’ all the time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.” —- Thomas Jefferson

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.” —- Abraham Lincoln

“History will also afford the frequent opportunities of showing the necessity of a public religion, from its usefulness to the public; the advantage of a religious character among private persons; the mischiefs of superstition, and the excellency of the Christian religion above all others, ancient or modern.” —- Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1749), p. 2

“I know, sir, how well it becomes a liberal man and a Christian to forget and forgive. As individuals professing a holy religion, it is our bounden duty to forgive injuries done us as individuals. But when the character of Christian you add the character of patriot, you are in a different situation. Our mild and holy system of religion inculcates an admirable maxim of forbearance. If your enemy smite one cheek, turn the other to him. But you must stop there. You cannot apply this to your country. As members of a social community, this maxim does not apply to you. When you consider injuries done to your country your political duty tells you of vengeance. Forgive as a private man, but never forgive public injuries. Observations of this nature are exceedingly unpleasant, but it is my duty to use them.” —- Patrick Henry, from a courtroom speech, Wirt Henry’s, Life, vol. III, pp. 606-607.

“Amongst other strange things said of me, I hear it is said by the deists that I am one of their number; and, indeed, that some good people think I am no Christian. This thought gives me much more pain than the appellation of Tory; because I think religion of infinitely higher importance than politics; and I find much cause to reproach myself that I have lived so long and have given no decided and public proofs of my being a Christian. But, indeed, my dear child, this is a character which I prize far above all this world has, or can boast.” —- Patrick Henry, 1796 letter to daughter, S. G. Arnold, The Life of Patrick Henry (Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854), p. 250.

“This is all the inheritance I can give my dear family. The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them rich indeed.” — Patrick Henry, From a copy of Henry’s Last Will and Testament obtained from Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation, Red Hill, Brookneal, VA.

“It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being. It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being.” —- George Washington, James K. Paulding, A Life of Washington (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), Vol. II, p. 209.

“While we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe, the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to them whose minds have not yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” —- James Madison, James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance (Massachusetts: Isaiah Thomas, 1786). This can be found in numerous documentary histories and other resources.

“Waiving the rights of conscience, not included in the surrender implied by the social state, & more or less invaded by all Religious establishments, the simple question to be decided, is whether a support of the best & purest religion, the Christian religion itself ought not, so far at least as pecuniary means are involved, to be provided for by the Government, rather than be left to the voluntary provisions of those who profess it.” —- James Madison, Religion and Politics in the Early Republic: Jasper Adams and the Church-State Debate, Daniel L. Dreisbach, ed. (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), p. 117.

“The hand of Providence has been so conspicuous in all this that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked, that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations.” —- George Washington, 1778, upon seeing the divine hand in the Revolution against the greatest military in the world.

“Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. In this sense and to this extent, our civilizations and our institutions are emphatically Christian.” — U.S. Supreme Court in Holy Trinity v. U. S. — Richmond v. Moore, Illinois Supreme Court, 1883)

“A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.” —- Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren dated February 12, 1779

“Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulties.” —- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

“I entreat you in the most earnest manner to believe in Jesus Christ, for ‘there is no salvation in any other’ (Acts 4:12). If you are not reconciled to God through Jesus Christ – if you are not clothed with the spotless robe of His righteousness – you must perish forever.” —- John Witherspoon, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

“I am a Christian. I believe only in the Scriptures, and in Jesus Christ my Savior.” — Charles Thomson, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence

“My only hope of salvation is in the infinite transcendent love of God manifested to the world by the death of His Son upon the cross. Nothing but His blood will wash away my sins. I rely exclusively upon it. Come Lord Jesus! Come quickly!” — Dr. Benjamin Rush, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Dr. Benjamin Rush, John Adams said, was one of the three most notable founding fathers along with George Washington and Ben Franklin. Benjamin Rush was the founder of five universities (three of which are still active today); he was the father of public schools under the American Constitution; he was also the leader of the civil rights movement, the founder of the first abolitionist society in America, the founder of the first black denomination in America, served in 3 presidential administrations, is called the father of American medicine, and 3,000 American physicians bore his signature on their diplomas, started the American College of Physicians, founded the first prison ministry, and started the Sunday School movement in America, started the very first Bible Society in America, etc.

“I rely upon the merits of Jesus Christ for a pardon of all my sins.” —- Samuel Adams

“An eloquent preacher of your religious society, Richard Motte, in a discourse of much emotion and pathos, is said to have exclaimed aloud to his congregation, that he did not believe there was a Quaker, Presbyterian, Methodist or Baptist in heaven, having paused to give his hearers time to stare and to wonder. He added, that in heaven, God knew no distinctions, but considered all good men as his children, and as brethren of the same family. I believe, with the Quaker preacher, that he who steadily observes those moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven, as to the dogmas in which they all differ. That on entering there, all these are left behind us, and the Aristides and Catos, the Penns and Tillotsons, Presbyterians and Baptists, will find themselves united in all principles which are in concert with the reason of the supreme mind. Of all the systems of morality, ancient and modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus.” — Thomas Jefferson, “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,” Albert Ellery Bergh, ed. (Washington, D. C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), Vol. XIII, pp.377-78, letter to William Canby on September 18, 1813.

“To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others.” — Thomas Jefferson, Albert Bergh, “Writings of Jefferson,” Vol. X, p.380, letter to Benjamin Rush on April 21, 1803.

“But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of His own country, was Jesus of Nazareth.” — Thomas Jefferson, Albert Bergh, “Writings of Jefferson,” Vol. XIV, p.220, letter to William Short on October 31, 1819.

“The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.” —- John Quincy Adams, 1837 speech

“Why is it that, next to the birth day of the Saviour of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day [July 4th]? . . . Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birth-day of the Saviour? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth? That it laid the corner stone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity. . ?” — John Quincy Adams, John Quincy Adams, “An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport, at Their Request,” on the Sixty-first Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1837 (Newburyport: Charles Whipple, 1837), p. 5.

“We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better that the builders of Babel.” —- Benjamin Franklin, appeal for prayer at Constitutional Convention, as cited by James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, Henry D. Gilpin, ed. (Washington: Langtree & O’Sullivan, 1840), Vol. II, p. 985.

“God commands all men everywhere to repent. He also commands them to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and has assured us that all who do repent and believe shall be saved.” —- Roger Sherman.

“God has promised to bestow eternal blessings on all those who are willing to accept Him on the terms of the Gospel – that is, in a way of free grace through the atonement. — Roger Sherman. Sherman was the ONLY founding father who signed all four founding documents (the Declaration, the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and the Articles of Association). He is called “the master builder of the Constitution.” He came up with the bi-cabinal system with the House and Senate. He was a framer of the Bill of Rights. And he was also a theologian who got George Washington to announce the first federal Day of Thanksgiving proclamation, going through the Scriptures to show why we should do so. He was also a long-term member of Congress. A newspaper article on him (the Globe) dated 1837 quotes, “The volume which he consulted more than any other was the Bible. It was his custom, at the commencement of every session of Congress, to purchase a copy of the Scriptures to puruse it daily, and to present it to one of his children on his return.” He had 15 children.

“The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in His truth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a sacrament can be administered but by the Ghost.” —- John Adams

“There is no authority, civil or religious – there can be no legitimate government – but what is administered by the Holy Ghost.” —- John Adams

“There can be no salvation without it. All without it is rebellion and perdition, or, in more orthodox words, damnation.” — John Adams (And Abigail Adams was the REAL Bible thumper in the family, telling son John Quincy Adams, ‘You know how I’ve raised you. You know how you’ve been raised in church, how you’ve been taught the Scriptures, how you’ve been taught morality.’  She tells him that if he’s going to go to France and give up his faith, that the Lord seek him out and drown him to prevent that from happening).

“I am grateful to Almighty God for the blessings which, through Jesus Christ our Lord, He has conferred on my beloved country.” —- Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration and framer of the Bill of Rights. He was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, dying at the age of 95 years.

At the age of 89 (in 1825), he wrote, “On the mercy of my Redeemer, I rely for salvation, and on His merits; not on the works I have done in obedience to His precepts.” —- Charles Carroll

“Almost all the civil liberty now enjoyed in the world owes its origin to the principles of the Christian religion…. [T]he religion which has introduced civil liberty, is the religion of Christ and his apostles…. This is genuine Christianity, and to this we owe our free constitutions of government.” — Noah Webster, History of the United States (New Haven: Durrie & Peck, 1832), p. 300, Sec. 578.

And, of course, there is the assessment of the great political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville:

“Moreover, almost all the sects of the United States are comprised within the great unity of Christianity, and Christian morality is everywhere the same.

In the United States the sovereign authority is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but there is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

There are certain populations in Europe whose unbelief is only equaled by their ignorance and their debasement, while in America one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world fulfills all the outward duties of religion with fervor.

Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1851), pp. 331, 332, 335, 336-7, 337, respectively.

As to your socialism, de Tocquevelle wrote:

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”

Poster: Whatever outstanding Americans said or believed in the 1700’s or 1800’s is no refutation of whatever I said. Big deal, so George Washington said that morality is not possible without religion. Just because I appreciate that he spearheaded the military efforts against the redcoats doesn’t mean I care for his views on religion.

Many of the Founding Fathers you constantly bring up were not even Christians. Men like Jefferson, Franklin and Tom Paine were Deists. Forget the Founding Fathers when dealing with today’s issues. The Constitution that they gave us has evolved into something quite different since then.

I care what Americans today think. I am not interested in what men who died when even my grandfather was not yet born believed.

Michael Eden: Actually, one of the quotes that you probably didn’t bother to read has Thomas Jefferson specifically declaring his Christianity. And I have numerous quotes from Thomas Jefferson on display. Quotes by Benjamin Franklin abound – clearly attesting to his FERVENT commitment to the need for not only religious but specifically Christian religion as a necessary and fundamental support for the country being founded. I would further point out to you that Thomas Paine was NOT a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and he was also not a delegate to the Constitutional convention. So that kind of blows a gigantic hole in your thesis.

You show the portrait of the Declaration of Independence signing, and it’s funny that people have been trained to be able to pick out the two least religious founding fathers (Franklin and Jefferson – notwithstanding Jefferson’s profession of Christianity he was not as devoutly Christian as the rest). And then we’re assured that the rest of them are just as irreligious. But of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 54 were confessed Christians and members of Christian churches. 29 of them had seminary degrees and were ordained ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Not bad for a bunch of atheists and deists.

No one would ever have thought this was a secular nation in the past because Americans knew their history.  An 1848 book used in public school for generations entitled, “Lives of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.” And in public schools for years children learned the faith and character of their founding fathers.

And again, everything they believed was an anathema to what you believe.

And that says something. Because what you say, what you think, what you believe, fundamentally doesn’t work – and never HAS worked. And what they said, what they thought, and what they believed, has stood in irrefutable proof of their wisdom.

Your argument is this: the Constitution has “evolved” into whatever the hell anybody wants it to mean. It is intrinsically meaningless. If the Constitution truly is a living, organic document that evolves and pulsates, it “evolves” into whatever you want it to become and “pulsates” into whatever form you want it to take. We might as well have a telephone directory as our Constitution, so that scholars in voodoo-fashion could discern “penumbras and emanations” wherever they wished.

Let’s take a look at the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Your atheistic socialism has never worked and never will work because you fundamentally deny the SOURCE of the rights you claim: an objective, transcendent Creator God who created man with these fundamental rights. You have never had, and never will have, anything concrete or objective by which to secure the rights that our founding fathers’ secured. Furthermore, you would do to any such transcendent/objective rights exactly what you want to do to the Constitution itself: make them mean whatever the hell you – or the next dictator/tyrant on the block – WANT them to mean. And that is why your God-denying socialism has produced one despot and one nightmare after another, and why it always WILL.

What socialists ultimately pursue is power over people’s lives.  And so long as leftists hold such power, principles will not matter.  And frankly, even if there WERE any “binding” principles they would invariably be blurred into meaninglessness by a succession of “penumbras and emanations” to suit the will of the next dictator.  That ultimately becomes tyranny every single time.

And that is why George Washington would be kicking your butt across the floor as he shouted, “YOU ARE NO PATRIOT!”

You instead argue for a system of government that has NEVER worked and never will. I will tilt at the government handed down by my religious founding fathers and leave you to tilt at your godless socialist windmills.

Obama Government Like Red Giant Sun About To Explode

Obama is a grandiose narcissist, so in a way I’m doing him a favor by comparing the government which he has recreated in his own image to the sun.

But let me assure you, I’m not being complimentary.

Like the U.S. government, the sun is the largest thing in our world by a whole bunch.  It’s huge and it’s powerful.  And it will go on and on, as long as things work the way they’re supposed to work.

But toward the end of a sun’s life, things start to go very wrong.  And it’s that “very wrong” direction that Obama has hugely accelerated us in.

As long as a sun is burning its legitimate source of hydrogen fuel, it is incredibly stable.  But then there comes that point where the hydrogen is burned up, and it starts to feed on itself.  It grows bigger – more than 200 times its previous stable size – and to an ignorant eye, it would appear that the sun was much more powerful than it had been before.  But in reality it is dying; it is burning the wrong kind of fuel; in reality it is about to explode.

That’s where Obama has taken us.  We’re burning through debt-spending at an astonishing and frankly astronomical rate.  For the last six decades we’ve grown huge with deficit spending; but never anything like what we’re seeing now.  Like the red giant sun, we’ve massively expanded beyond what is healthy or sustainable.  And it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to see that we’re nearing our end.

FDR massively expanded our federal government in his day; and it has been growing and growing and growing ever since.  But now Barack Obama has entered the scene and:

There’s little question that the anvil will fall on the US economy due to the near doubling of the national debt as Obama adds a projected $9.7 trillion to the $11.7 trillion black hole of debt we’re already in.  Obama is borrowing 50 cents on the dollar as he explodes the federal deficit by spending four times more than Bush spent in 2008 and in the process “adding more to the debt than all presidents — from George Washington to George Bush — combined.” And most terrifying of all, Obama’s spending will cause debt to double from 41% of GDP in 2008 to a crushing 82% of GDP in 2019.

What will be the result of all this insane spending, and not very far off? A quote from a CNS News story should awaken anyone who thinks the future will be rosy:

By 2019, the CBO said, a whopping 82 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) will go to pay down the national debt. This means that in future years, the government could owe its creditors more than the goods and services that the entire economy can produce.

and:

By comparison, from the day Mr. Obama took office last year to the end of the current fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the debt held by the public will grow by $3.3 trillion. In 20 months, Mr. Obama will add as much debt as Mr. Bush ran up in eight years.

and:

In the first 19 months of the Obama administration, the federal debt held by the public increased by $2.5260 trillion, which is more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by the public that was amassed by all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan.

and:

Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said. Interest payments on the debt would also skyrocket by $800 billion over the same period.

As in “$800 billion a year.”  Every year from then on.

But it will likely be even more frightening than that:

The Obama administration is desperate to minimize the size of the budget deficit, which has become a huge political liability. It is gambling that interest rates will stay low. But, as I argue in “Boomergeddon,” the 30-year era of declining interest rates on sovereign debt is coming to a close. Interest rates will rise sharply in the decade ahead. And thanks to Treasury’s short-term actions, there will be very little to buffer the country from massive increases in interest on the debt. Between the mounting size of the debt itself, rising interest rates and short maturities, the interest burden could quadruple — perhaps even quintuple — by the end of the decade. By 2020, the U.S. could well be paying $1 trillion a year in interest.

$1 trillion a year in interest, only ten years away.  That amounts to paying for 1.16 Obama stimulus programs every single year, until we go the way of the Dodo bird.

Only we won’t just go away.  We’ll implode as an economic system and as a society, and then we’ll explode.

Near the end of a sun’s life cycle it turns into a red giant.  When our sun does this, it will grow so large that it will expand a minimum of 200 times its present size, and the planet Mercury and probably even Venus will be completely swallowed up.

To the uninformed, it would probably look as though the sun has become bigger and stronger than ever.  But to those who know, they will recognize that the red giant sun will be living on its last gaps before its collapse.  When it explodes, it will take most of the solar system – and very definitely planet earth – with it.

That’s the way our government is now, I believe.  Our government – especially under Barack Obama – has grown so huge beyond its legitimate or sustainable capacity it is simply unreal.  Someone who doesn’t understand the reality might think that we’re too big and powerful to explode.  But as our sun itself proves, the bigger we are, the harder we’ll fall.  We have either got to cut back the size of our government, or it’s expansion will consume itself and it will collapse before not very much longer.

‘You Better Not Be Praying Over There, Grandma,’ Big Brother Obama Says

God damn America.  God damn America.  God damn America.  God damn America.  GOD DAMN AMERICA:

Via Publius Forum:

Big Brother says elderly visitors to federally funded meals at a Georgia senior citizen’s center aren’t allowed to pray to that absurd, dangerous Christian God of theirs. Obama’s Big Brother government contends that since it has paid for their meals the government has the right to slam its iron boot heel down on the necks of those seasoned citizens that dare to engage in such an apostasy toward the state.  Seem absurd? Well it is but that is what happens when the feds roll into town and begin to hand out money. They feel the right to dictate what everyone is allowed or not allowed to do and in the case of Port Wentworth’s Ed Young Senior Citizens Center near Savannah that is to tell these old folks that they are not allowed to pray before a meal.

There are federal “guidelines” to observe, after all and the federal government’s rules say none of that ridiculous Christian stuff will go on if the feds supply even a penny of funding. Old folks that want to pray are banned from doing so and if they don’t like it, why they can go hungry because the new Uncle Sam is a crusader against religion.

Well, at least one religion, anyway.

You see, while Obama’s federal government is ever ready to get tough with Georgia’s elderly and to put a stop to all that praying nonsense, it is also the same government that at federal expense is installing ritual footbaths in airports and universities to mollify Muslims. Not only that but the same federal government sees no reason to stop bombers from easily boarding planes so that they can make an escape to a foreign nation after a failed attempt to kill untold hundreds of Americans. But damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead to prevent those dangerous old folks in the middle of Georgia from daring to pray to that subversive Christian God!

The nerve of those elderly Americans daring to observe their Christian cultural heritage, a heritage that helped build this country. It’s an outrage, don’t you think? So, it’s freedom from religion as far as Obama’s government is concerned. I mean these old folks are probably as dangerous to the state as can be! Thank Gaia that Obama is quashing their subversive activities.

Praise be it to the state, thanks be to The One, and pass the potatoes. The Obammessiah shall provide all our wants. But, remind me… has he walked on water yet?

How did it come to this?

It wasn’t always this way.  Look how we got our start toward greatness from the most desperate of beginnings:

What is this painting about?

The picture you see here was painted to recall that winter of 1777-78, at the lowest, most hopeless and discouraging time in our revolutionary war. For the struggling Americans had been defeated by the mighty British army in battle after battle, and were fast losing all hope. It was at such a time that General Washington humbly beseeched his God for the strength and the resolution to endure…  The Prayer at Valley Forge” was painted to serve the cause of liberty, to remind Americans of the deep spiritual roots of our beloved country, to recall a place of cold, and pain and sacrifice, to pay tribute to the tall and lonely man who alone held the struggling nation together, General Washington, driven to his knees there in the bitter snows of Valley Forge.

And now the president of God damn America won’t even allow senior citizens to thank their God for their meal.

I wrote an article the night Obama took the election.  I wouldn’t change a word of it: “Obama Wins!  God Damn America!”

Obama said he’d transform America.  And he has.  Now it’s a country where American high school boys can’t wear the colors of the American flag in a public high school even as hundreds of Latinos wear the colors of the Mexican flag all around them.  Now it’s a country where senior citizens can’t pray in the name of Jesus while public money is used to erect Muslim footbaths.  Now it’s a country that seeks a “regime change” in Israel, a country that seeks to strip nuclear weapons from Israel, even as Obama praised the “robust debate” that led to the sham Ahmadinejad victory and meekly allows Iran to develop nuclear weapons.  Now it’s a country in which Barack Obama pisses away $862 billion dollars and only 6% of the American people think it did any good.  Now it’s a country in which an increase in unemployment to 9.9% and an increase in the broader U-6 Unemployment rate is “very encouraging.”

God damn America is a place where wrong is right, and right is wrong.

It certainly isn’t a place where a defeated and desperate general – driven to his knees in the midst of a losing war against an empire so powerful that the sun never set on it – would be able to pray a prayer that would rock the world.  That’s not the kind of “change” that would be tolerated today.

Note To Democrats From Founding Fathers: ‘Please Stop Making Us Spin In Our Graves’

(CNSNews.com) – When CNSNews.com asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance–a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill–Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandated that individual Americans buy health insurance as not a “serious question.”

“You can put this on the record,” said Elshami. “That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.”

I can’t help but be reminded by something Thomas Jefferson said:

“The Tenth Amendment is the foundation of the Constitution.”

And what does the 10th Amendment say?  Only this:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”

You can understand why Nancy Pelosi couldn’t care less about the Constitution, or its limitations on the exercise of government power.  Thomas Jefferson also said, “Let’s hear no more about the confidence in men but to bind them down by the chains of the Constitution.”  That phrase was intended to underscore the role of the Constitution as chains to any who would try to impose more government on the people.  But Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Party have thrown off the “chains of the Constitution.”  They believe that confidence in men is just fine – as long as those men are liberals and socialists who impose massive government and massive bureaucracies through which they seek to empower themselves and control the people.  And everything they are trying to do makes a mockery of the Constitution.

And, after all, Nancy Pelosi’s president — a man liberals believe is greater than Jesus — has pronounced that the Constitution is deeply flawed.

“I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”

One wonders how Barack Obama could swear to uphold and defend a document that he himself has publicly held to have deep flaws and reflect an enormous blind spot.  It would seem that his oath amounted to “just words.”

Under Barack Obama and the Democrat-dominated Congress, we are seeing government spending, government debts, and government deficits soar beyond anything ever before seen in the history of the human race.

The excellent work on the Constitution and its history by W. Cleon Skousen entitled The 5000 Year Leap has an amazing thesis in light of what we are seeing from our government today:

Since the genius of the American system is maintaining the eagle in the balanced center of the spectrum, the Founders warned against a number of temptations which might lure subsequent generations to abandon their freedoms and their rights by subjecting themselves to a strong federal administration operating on the collectivist Left.

They warned against the “welfare state” where the government endeavors to take care of everyone from the cradle to the grave.  Jefferson wrote:

“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.”

They warned against confiscatory taxation and deficit spending.  Jefferson said it was immoral for one generation to pass on the results of its extravagance in the form of debts to the next generation.  He wrote:  “…we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves;  and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life [expectancy] of the majority.”

Every generation of Americans struggled to pay off the national debt up until the present one.

Let us see what the founding fathers who wrote our Constitution said that liberals so eagerly and so cavalierly wish to dismiss from the people’s attention:

“I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt, and not for a multiplication of officers and salaries merely to make partisans, and for increasing, by every device, the public debt on the principle of its being a public blessing.” — Thomas Jefferson letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799

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“To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.” — Thomas Jefferson

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“As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible.” — George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796

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“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.” — Thomas Jefferson, to Thomas Cooper, January 29, 1802

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“[W]ith all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?

Still one thing more, fellow citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.” — Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

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“He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing.”  Benjamin Franklin, from his writings, 1758

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“We are endeavoring, too, to reduce the government to the practice of a rigorous economy, to avoid burdening the people, and arming the magistrate with a patronage of money, which might be used to corrupt and undermine the principles of our government.”– Thomas Jefferson, letter to Mr. Pictet, February 5, 1803

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“With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.” — James Madison

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“My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.” –Thomas Jefferson

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“To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” –Thomas Jefferson

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“I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse.” — James Madison letter to Henry Lee, April 13, 1790

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“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” — Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23

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“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” — Benjamin Franklin

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“Experience has proved to us that a dollar of silver disappears for every dollar of paper emitted.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1791. ME 8:208

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“If the debt which the banking companies owe be a blessing to anybody, it is to themselves alone, who are realizing a solid interest of eight or ten per cent on it. As to the public, these companies have banished all our gold and silver medium, which, before their institution, we had without interest, which never could have perished in our hands, and would have been our salvation now in the hour of war; instead of which they have given us two hundred million of froth and bubble, on which we are to pay them heavy interest, until it shall vanish into air… We are warranted, then, in affirming that this parody on the principle of ‘a public debt being a public blessing,’ and its mutation into the blessing of private instead of public debts, is as ridiculous as the original principle itself. In both cases, the truth is, that capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper.” –Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:423

—————

“It is a [disputed] question, whether the circulation of paper, rather than of specie [gold,silver], is a good or an evil… I believe it to be one of those cases where mercantile clamor will bear down reason, until it is corrected by ruin.” –Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:409

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“To contract new debts is not the way to pay for old ones.”– George Washington letter to James Welch, April 7, 1799

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“The maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pockets to pay for it would make of our country one of the happiest on earth.” — Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, 1787. ME 6:192

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The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. — Thomas Jefferson

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“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.” — Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766

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“Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. St. Monday and St. Tuesday, will soon cease to be holidays. Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them.” — Benjamin Franklin letter to Collinson, May 9, 1753

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“I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.” — Thomas Jefferson

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“I hope a tax will be preferred [to a loan which threatens to saddle us with a perpetual debt], because it will awaken the attention of the people and make reformation and economy the principle of the next election. The frequent recurrence of this chastening operation can alone restrain the propensity of governments to enlarge expense beyond income.” — Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1820.

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“If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare… they may appoint teachers in every state… The powers of Congress would subvert the very foundation, the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America.” — James Madison

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“I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.” –Thomas Jefferson

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“The same prudence, which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of the public monies.” — Thomas Jefferson letter to Shelton Giliam, June 19, 1808

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“It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. … They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.” — Adam Smith, “Wealth of Nations,” Book II, Chapter II

“Every discouragement should be thrown in the way of men who undertake to trade without capital.” — Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Tracy, 1785. Papers 8:399

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“It is a miserable arithmetic which makes any single privation whatever so painful as a total privation of everything which must necessarily follow the living so far beyond our income.” –Thomas Jefferson to William Hay, 1787. ME 6:223

Barack Obama and the Democrats have been offering a disingenuous and dishonest thesis: that they are spending insane amounts of money to save money.  They touted their massive $787 billion (and really $3.27 trillion!!!) stimulus as an “investment” in jobs.  Jobs that never came.  And now a solid plurality of Americans agree that massive stimulus pork bill HURT the economy.  That realization is coming even as the facts are increasingly emerging that the Democrats have been using the stimulus to reward themselves in pork-style politics EXACTLY AS THOMAS JEFFERSON WARNED.

And now they are touting their health care bill – and the gimmickry they have played to make it appear “deficit neutral” over the long haul – and their cap-and-trade legislation, to say that their massive spending is really an “investment” in the future as well.

Don’t buy their spin.

Stop the madness.  Stop the depraved and insane spending.  Stop the Democrats from imposing a socialist agenda that will take away our freedoms and tax us into oblivion all in the name of helping us.

Stop the founding fathers from having to spin in their graves.

It has often occurred to me these past months that the founding fathers were willing to fight in order to throw off tyranny that were virtually nothing compared to the onerous ones we are being fitted with today.

LA Times And NY Times: Be Less Like Founding Fathers, More Like Nazis

There’s a debate going on in this country that is far wider than health care.  Health care is the current battle; but the war is over the size, scope, and power of government over our lives.

Years prior to World War II, in 1931, Pope Pius XI denounced Benito Mussolini’s socialism as “Statolatry,” the idolatry of a worship of and dependence upon the state rather than God.  And less than a decade later it would be socialism – both fascist and Marxist – which would bring hell on earth rather than the utopias the socialists had so falsely promised. Today, the American left wants more government, and then more, and ever more.  Government as God, the State as Savior, meeting every need and demanding that it be the sole arbiter for determining what is right and what is wrong. And the American people are increasingly being compelled to abandon the free market system in exchange for one featuring increasing government control over every sphere of our lives.

The first of our two articles, from the Los Angeles Times, suggests that the vision of the founding fathers, particularly in the ideas of Thomas Jefferson for a small, limited federal government, should be cast aside as outmoded and anachronistic.

Them versus us

By Joseph J. Ellis, August 9, 2009

From the very beginning of our national history, Americans have been arguing about the proper role of government. Put succinctly, the dispute is between those who regard government as “them” and those who see it as “us.”

Our two founding documents embody the tension in its classical form. The Declaration of Independence locates sovereignty in the individual citizen, who possesses the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson so lyrically put it, and the power of government is described as an alien force that must be put on the permanent defensive. The Constitution enshrines “the people” as the sovereign agent, with a Bill of Rights that defines a protected region where government cannot intrude, but otherwise identifies a collective interest best managed by a federal government empowered to make decisions for the society as a whole.

All of United States political history can be understood as a perpetual debate between these two competing perspectives, symbolized at the start in the clash between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The Jeffersonian position, with its emphasis on a minimalist government, prevailed throughout the 19th century and imprinted itself on the DNA of American culture as a quasi-sacred political creed.

By the start of the 20th century, as the United States became a more densely populated, ethnically diverse society, with an industrial economy dominated by large corporations, the Jeffersonian perspective grew increasingly anachronistic. It became abundantly clear that government power was necessary to regulate the swoonish swings of the marketplace, provide a safety net for poor and elderly citizens and protect the environment. Thus the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, Medicare and the Environmental Protection Agency.

But despite these projections of the Hamiltonian ethos, which presumes that there is a collective public interest that only government can serve, the Jeffersonian ethos remains a potent force, and not just in the right wing of the Republican Party. It colors the conversation about all the major domestic problems facing the Obama administration in ways that stigmatize as socialistic what we might ironically describe as the self-evident solutions.

In the healthcare debate, for example, there is a national consensus that we have a broken and bloated system. But instead of replacing it with the kind of single-payer government-run system adopted by most of the developed countries on the planet, that option is ruled out of order at the start of the debate. As a result, the best we can hope for is modest reform of an inherently flawed and expensive system. […]

It should be realized that Joseph Ellis is hardly the only liberal who thinks in terms of moving away from the government or the ideas of our founding fathers.  Allow me to quote Barack Obama:

Obama: “I think that we can say that the Constitution reflected the enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day and that the framers had that same blind spot.”

Obama talked about “the fundamental flaw of this country…”

Obama: “But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution…”

Hardly an affirmation of the wisdom of our founding fathers, who created the greatest system of government the world has ever seen.

I would submit, first of all, that Alexander Hamilton would be just as appalled at the gigantic colossus our government has become as would Jefferson.  I would suggest that neither man, seeing the enormous and unresponsive federal bureaucracy, would view the gargantuan federal bureaucracy as “us.”  They would see it as an alien power running amok over the people’s lives.  They would see it as a far greater tyranny than the one imposed by the British king whom they had defeated.

To quote Mark Levin, from Liberty and Tyranny:

“The founders understood that the greatest threat to liberty is an all-powerful central government, where the few dictate to the many.  They also knew that the rule of the mob would lead to anarchy and, in the end, despotism” (4).

They understood government as a necessary evil, rather than as a desired goal.  In the words of James Madison, the most influential of the authors of the Constitution, in Federalist 51:

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?  If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.  In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

And I would ask, what evidence is there that the federal government is in any way “controlling itself?”

First of all, we have growing by leaps and bounds what Alexis de Tocqueville described as a “soft tyranny“:

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”

Secondly, the federal government has immersed itself – and the American people – into levels of debt that boggle the limits of human comprehension.  We now have a national debt of well over $100 trillion, if we count (which we should) our “unfunded liabilities” such as the Social Security and the Medicare which Joseph Ellis so praises.  And as for Barack Obama – the president whose policies Ellis is writing to defend:

“Mr. Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents — from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined.  It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP).  And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.”

And that is before the huge costs of ObamaCare; it is before Cap-and-trade; it is before anything Obama wants to do for the remaining 3 1/2 years of his presidency. This is no government that is “controlling itself.”  Anything but.

Incredibly, Ellis ends his article with this:

No less an American hero than George Washington put it rather defiantly in 1785: “We are either a united people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation. … If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending it.” And even Jefferson acknowledged that his anti-government vision would become irrelevant once we ceased being an agricultural society and that future generations — meaning us — would at some point need to throw off what he called “the dead hand of the past.”

Joseph Ellis doesn’t want us to think about what it was that Washington actually intended to provide us with “unity.”  Rather, he wants to import his own meaning of “unity” as one being imposed via a massive octopus of federal power.  But George Washington had a very different idea of national unity than does Ellis.  In his Farewell Address – considered one of the most important political addresses in American history – George Washington said:

“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.  In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington, Farewell Address

Think of the implications of that statement.  Our greatest founding father essentially said, ‘If you want your politics to prosper, the two things you will not separate will be religion and morality.  If you want your government to work well, if you want American exceptionalism, if you want the government to do right, if you want all of the benefits and none of the curses of government, then you won’t separate religion and morality from political life.’  And America’s greatest patriot gave a litmus test for patriotism, arguing, ‘Anyone who would try to remove religion and morality from public life, I will not allow them to call themselves a patriot.  Because they are trying to destroy the country.’

Think of George Washington when you contemplate that the liberal legal arm, the ACLU, is literally trying to put a high school principal and an athletic director for praying over a meal at an employees’ lunch.

So liberals do not want the limited government fought for and instituted by our founding fathers.  The founding fathers – Alexander Hamilton included – simply do not permit the Statism that the modern American left want.  What kind of government do they want in its place?

Now turn to the New York Times.

Stimulus Thinking, and Nuance

By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: March 31, 2009

Every so often, history serves up an analogy that’s uncomfortable, a little distracting and yet still very relevant.

In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.

More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.

The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.

No sane person enjoys mixing nuance and Nazis, but this bit of economic history has a particular importance this week. In the run-up to the G-20 meeting, European leaders have resisted calls for more government spending. Last week, the European Union president, Mirek Topolanek, echoed a line from AC/DC — whom he had just heard in concert — and described the Obama administration’s stimulus plan as “a road to hell.”

Here in the United States, many people are understandably wondering whether the $800 billion stimulus program will make much of a difference. They want to know: Does stimulus work? Fortunately, this is one economic question that’s been answered pretty clearly in the last century.

Yes, stimulus works. […]

Incredibly, when you put the liberal Los Angeles Times together with the liberal New York Times, the message is: “Be a lot less like Thomas Jefferson, and a lot more like Adolf Hitler”.

David Leonhardt certainly did not want his readers to think of Barack Obama as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.  He tried to provide all the necessary caveats.  Nevertheless, this reminds us of a core truth of the Nazis that liberals generally don’t want you to think about; that the word ‘Nazi’ is an acronym for the “National Socialist German Workers Party.”  And the fact that both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the National Socialist German Workers Party stand as grim reminders that socialism is ever an experiment that can go terribly, terribly wrong.

Socialism derives from a diametrically different philosophical and moral system than the profoundly Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment-oriented worldview from which our founding fathers established the United States of America.  Gene Edward Veith describes this fundamental incompatibility/hostility in his great work, “Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview.”  Linda Kimball addresses this dichotomy in shorter form in her article, “The Materialist Faith of Communism, Socialism, and Liberalism.”  Then there is the profoundly powerful Harvard address given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn entitled “A World Split Apart.”

Jonah Goldberg addresses how this massive demarcation between the intellectual traditions of the American right and left continues to this very day:

“No top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger.  All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.  Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition.  And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents.  The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments” (Liberal Fascism, 175-6).

American intellectuals might indignantly snort, “I’m not a fascist; I’m a neo-Marxist!”  But regardless, they share the same underlying moral, philosophical, and economic assumptions.  And either way, they are still socialists.  To quote Richard Pipes, both “Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism.”

Joe the Plumber heard Barack Obama talk about “spreading the wealth around” and responded, “That sounds like socialism.”  The mainstream media went ballistic in its denial that Barack Obama had anything whatsoever to do with socialism.  And then he won, and the liberal publication Newseek proudly trumpeted on it’s February 16th cover, “WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW.”

The “kind of single-payer government-run system adopted by most of the developed countries on the planet” LA Times writer Joseph Ellis describes is simply “socialized medicine” by another name.  Ellis complains about conversations that “stigmatize as socialistic”; the problem with that characterization is that they ARE socialistic.

There’s been this movement by the elitists among us to be more like sophisticated Europe dating all the way back to our founding.  Some say today, “What Europeans do with government is pretty good.  And what they do with civil rights is pretty good.  And what they do with health care is pretty good.”  And there’s this move to be more like Europe.  In our Supreme Court liberal justices routinely cite what Europe does in their law in order to replace what we do in ours.  Thomas Jefferson made a statement against the “Let’s be like Europe” that is every bit as valid today as it was the day he made it:

“The comparisons of our government with those of Europe are like a comparison of heaven and hell.” — Thomas Jefferson

Whether health care, cap-and-trade, or anything else our modern Europe-envying elitists want to do, it falls in the face of the fact that America has dwarfed Europe in economic output, productivity, and wealth.  We’re constantly told that we need to be more like Europe and offer socialized medicine in order to be more “competitive.”  If that is so, than why is it Europe – which has socialized medicine – that has long struggled to be competitive?

In the health care debate Ronald Reagan had a warning for us.  Way back in 1961 he said:

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”

It was a speech that could have easily popped out of a time capsule labeled, “Open in event of future threat from socialized medicine.”

Mark Levin said:

“The Statist veils his pursuits in moral indignation, intoning in high dudgeon the injustices and inequities of liberty and life itself, for which only he can provide justice and bring a righteous resolution.  And when the resolution proves elusive, as it undoubtedly does – whether the Marxist promise of “the workers’ paradise” or the Great Society’s “war on poverty” – the Statist demands ever more authority to wring out the imperfections of mankind’s existence.  Unconstrained by constitutional prohibitions, what is left to limit the Statist’s ambitions but his own moral compass, which has already led him astray!  He is never circumspect about his own shortcomings.  Failure is not a product of his beliefs but merely want of power and resources.  Thus are born endless rationalizations for seizing ever more governmental authority” (Liberty and Tyranny, 10).

It is time to end the advance of the good-intentioned-paved road to hell.  We have a government that is spending too much, taxing too much, and intruding too much into the lives of Americans.  It is time to be a lot less like Hitler and the socialists and a lot more like the founding fathers and the recognition of the fixed and non-violable constitutional limits they created.

Whose Country Do We Want: Our Founding Fathers’ Or Our Secular Contemporaries’?

This article consists as part of a much longer discussion with a self-described “Democratic socialist” found here (with much of the rest consisting over an argument as to what is or isn’t socialism and the supposed benefits of socialism to societies).  An argument over the significance of the founding fathers relative to “current Americans” provides for what I believed to be an informative article.

Poster: I profoundly disagree that Christianity has been the wellspring of America’s greatness. Christianity in American history has too often been the source of narrow-mindedness, intolerance and reaction.

I too love and revere the Constitution, and would risk my neck to defend it and the USA. But the Constitution is a living, organic document that evolves and pulsates. I agree with the late Justice Brennan that the only correct way to interpret it is as modern Americans. I don’t care about the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers.

Michael Eden: I could begin by simply stating that the Constitution has just “evolved and pulsated” to represent “the source of narrow-mindedness, intolerance and reaction.”  And now what the hell are you going to do – support the Constitution or rebel against it?  What you are REALLY saying with all your self-serving hyperbole aside is that you support your secular humanist worldview and are perfectly happy to twist and distort the Constitution – regardless of what the words actually say or what they historically were clearly intended to mean – until it “evolves” or “pulsates” into whatever you want it to mean.  And then you of course demand that the very “evolution” or “pulsation” you first demanded STOP so it can’t “evolve or pulsate” any further.  Which is precisely the reasoning you used to “evolve and pulsate” to Roe v. Wade only to then claim that now that we have so “evolved and pulsated” it is a matter of “settled law” and therefore cannot ever be altered.

That philosophical point made, let me begin with the historical words and clear historical meaning of George Washington in his Farewell Address given on September 17, 1796:

What are the foundations of America? After 45 years of public service, George Washington, our greatest patriot and the father of our country, gives his farewell address. He says, ‘We need to remember what brought us here. We need to remember what made us different from all the other nations across Europe and the rest of the world. We have to remember what our foundations are.’ It was the road map, showing us how we’d become what we were, and how to preserve it. It has long been considered the most important address ever given by any US president. President Lincoln set aside an entire day for the entire Union Army and had them read and understand it. Woodrow Wilson did the same during WWI. But we haven’t studied it in schools for over 45 years, so your lack of understanding is understandable. Washington said:

“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” — George Washington, Farewell Address

If you want your politics to prosper, the two things you will not separate will be religion and morality. If you want your government to work well, if you want American exceptionalism, if you want the government to do right, if you want all this, then you won’t separate religion and morality from political life. And America’s greatest patriot gave a litmus test for patriotism. He says in the very next sentence (immediately continuing from the quote above):

“In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington

Washington says, Anyone who would try to remove religion and morality from public life, I won’t allow them to call themselves a patriot. Because they are trying to destroy the country.

And he wasn’t alone. I can well understand why you would throw out the wisest and most brilliant political geniuses who ever lived. I can understand because George Washington wouldn’t have even have allowed you to call yourself “a patriot” in his presence. What they wrote, what they thought, what they believed, utterly refute you. But it was THESE men, and not Marx, or Mao, or any other socialist, who devised the greatest political system the world has ever seen.

Statements by our founding fathers (who presumably understood what the Constitution that they themselves wrote and ratified meant better than Justice Brennan) announcing their religious beliefs, and stating the profound impact those beliefs had in their founding of the United States of America:

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

“…And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” –- George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

“Religion and good morals are the only solid foundations of public liberty and happiness.” –- Samuel Adams, Letter to John Trumbull, October 16, 1778

“The great pillars of all government and of social life [are] virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor…and this alone, that renders us invincible.” –- Patrick Henry, Letter to Archibald Blair, January 8, 1789

“Without morals, a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion…are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.” —- Charles Carroll (signer of the Constitution), Letter to James McHenry,November 4, 1800

“Religion is the only solid basis of good morals; therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man towards God.” –- Life of Gouverneur Morris, Vol III

“Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age, by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, of inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity…in short of leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system.“ –- Samuel Adams, Letter to John Adams, October 4, 1790

“In contemplating the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government. That is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by the means of the Bible.” —- Benjamin Rush, “A Defense of the Use of the Bible as a School Book”, 1798

“In my view, the Christian Religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed…no truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian Religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.” —  Noah Webster, Reply to David McClure, Oct. 25, 1836

“Information to those who would remove (or move) to America”: “To this may be truly added, that serious Religion under its various Denominations, is not only tolerated, but respected and practiced. Atheism is unknown there, Infidelity rare & secret, so that Persons may live to a great Age in that Country without having their Piety shock’d by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel. And the Divine Being seems to have manifested his Approbation of the mutual Forbearance and Kindness with which the different Sects treat each other, by the remarkable Prosperity with which he has been pleased to favour the whole Country.” —- Ben Franklin, 1787 pamphlet to Europeans

“Independent of its connection with human destiny hereafter, the fate of republican government is indissolubly bound up with the fate of the Christian religion, and a people who reject its holy faith will find themselves the slaves of their own evil passions and of arbitrary power.” —- Lewis Cass, A Brigadier-General in the War of 1812, Governor of the Michigan Territory, a Secretary of War, a Senator, a Secretary of State. The State of Michigan placed his statue in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall.

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift of God? That they are not to violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.” –- “Yes, we did produce a near perfect Republic. But will they keep it, or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.” —- Thomas Jefferson

“So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have exited thro’ all the time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.” —- Thomas Jefferson

“I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with His providence and our riper years with His wisdom and power, and to whose goodness I ask you to join in supplications with me that He will so enlighten the minds of your servants, guide their councils, and prosper their measures that whatsoever they do shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship, and approbation of all nations.” — Thomas Jefferson

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens…” — George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

“Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.” — John Adams, Letter of June 21, 1776

“It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being.” —- George Washington

“So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have exited thro’ all the time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe.” —- Thomas Jefferson

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.” —- Abraham Lincoln

“History will also afford the frequent opportunities of showing the necessity of a public religion, from its usefulness to the public; the advantage of a religious character among private persons; the mischiefs of superstition, and the excellency of the Christian religion above all others, ancient or modern.” —- Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1749), p. 2

“I know, sir, how well it becomes a liberal man and a Christian to forget and forgive. As individuals professing a holy religion, it is our bounden duty to forgive injuries done us as individuals. But when the character of Christian you add the character of patriot, you are in a different situation. Our mild and holy system of religion inculcates an admirable maxim of forbearance. If your enemy smite one cheek, turn the other to him. But you must stop there. You cannot apply this to your country. As members of a social community, this maxim does not apply to you. When you consider injuries done to your country your political duty tells you of vengeance. Forgive as a private man, but never forgive public injuries. Observations of this nature are exceedingly unpleasant, but it is my duty to use them.” —- Patrick Henry, from a courtroom speech, Wirt Henry’s, Life, vol. III, pp. 606-607.

“Amongst other strange things said of me, I hear it is said by the deists that I am one of their number; and, indeed, that some good people think I am no Christian. This thought gives me much more pain than the appellation of Tory; because I think religion of infinitely higher importance than politics; and I find much cause to reproach myself that I have lived so long and have given no decided and public proofs of my being a Christian. But, indeed, my dear child, this is a character which I prize far above all this world has, or can boast.” —- Patrick Henry, 1796 letter to daughter, S. G. Arnold, The Life of Patrick Henry (Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854), p. 250.

“This is all the inheritance I can give my dear family. The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them rich indeed.” — Patrick Henry, From a copy of Henry’s Last Will and Testament obtained from Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation, Red Hill, Brookneal, VA.

“It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being. It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being.” —- George Washington, James K. Paulding, A Life of Washington (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), Vol. II, p. 209.

“While we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe, the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to them whose minds have not yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” —- James Madison, James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance (Massachusetts: Isaiah Thomas, 1786). This can be found in numerous documentary histories and other resources.

“Waiving the rights of conscience, not included in the surrender implied by the social state, & more or less invaded by all Religious establishments, the simple question to be decided, is whether a support of the best & purest religion, the Christian religion itself ought not, so far at least as pecuniary means are involved, to be provided for by the Government, rather than be left to the voluntary provisions of those who profess it.” —- James Madison, Religion and Politics in the Early Republic: Jasper Adams and the Church-State Debate, Daniel L. Dreisbach, ed. (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), p. 117.

“The hand of Providence has been so conspicuous in all this that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked, that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations.” —- George Washington, 1778, upon seeing the divine hand in the Revolution against the greatest military in the world.

“Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. In this sense and to this extent, our civilizations and our institutions are emphatically Christian.” — U.S. Supreme Court in Holy Trinity v. U. S. — Richmond v. Moore, Illinois Supreme Court, 1883)

“A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.” —- Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren dated February 12, 1779

“Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulties.” —- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

“I entreat you in the most earnest manner to believe in Jesus Christ, for ‘there is no salvation in any other’ (Acts 4:12). If you are not reconciled to God through Jesus Christ – if you are not clothed with the spotless robe of His righteousness – you must perish forever.” —- John Witherspoon, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence.

“I am a Christian. I believe only in the Scriptures, and in Jesus Christ my Savior.” — Charles Thomson, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence

“My only hope of salvation is in the infinite transcendent love of God manifested to the world by the death of His Son upon the cross. Nothing but His blood will wash away my sins. I rely exclusively upon it. Come Lord Jesus! Come quickly!” — Dr. Benjamin Rush, founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Dr. Benjamin Rush, John Adams said, was one of the three most notable founding fathers along with George Washington and Ben Franklin. Benjamin Rush was the founder of five universities (three of which are still active today); he was the father of public schools under the American Constitution; he was also the leader of the civil rights movement, the founder of the first abolitionist society in America, the founder of the first black denomination in America, served in 3 presidential administrations, is called the father of American medicine, and 3,000 American physicians bore his signature on their diplomas, started the American College of Physicians, founded the first prison ministry, and started the Sunday School movement in America, started the very first Bible Society in America, etc.

“I rely upon the merits of Jesus Christ for a pardon of all my sins.” —- Samuel Adams

“An eloquent preacher of your religious society, Richard Motte, in a discourse of much emotion and pathos, is said to have exclaimed aloud to his congregation, that he did not believe there was a Quaker, Presbyterian, Methodist or Baptist in heaven, having paused to give his hearers time to stare and to wonder. He added, that in heaven, God knew no distinctions, but considered all good men as his children, and as brethren of the same family. I believe, with the Quaker preacher, that he who steadily observes those moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven, as to the dogmas in which they all differ. That on entering there, all these are left behind us, and the Aristides and Catos, the Penns and Tillotsons, Presbyterians and Baptists, will find themselves united in all principles which are in concert with the reason of the supreme mind. Of all the systems of morality, ancient and modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus.” — Thomas Jefferson, “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,” Albert Ellery Bergh, ed. (Washington, D. C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), Vol. XIII, pp.377-78, letter to William Canby on September 18, 1813.

“To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others.” — Thomas Jefferson, Albert Bergh, “Writings of Jefferson,” Vol. X, p.380, letter to Benjamin Rush on April 21, 1803.

“But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of His own country, was Jesus of Nazareth.” — Thomas Jefferson, Albert Bergh, “Writings of Jefferson,” Vol. XIV, p.220, letter to William Short on October 31, 1819.

“The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.” —- John Quincy Adams, 1837 speech

“Why is it that, next to the birth day of the Saviour of the World, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day [July 4th]? . . . Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birth-day of the Saviour? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth? That it laid the corner stone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity. . ?” — John Quincy Adams, John Quincy Adams, “An Oration Delivered Before the Inhabitants of the Town of Newburyport, at Their Request,” on the Sixty-first Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1837 (Newburyport: Charles Whipple, 1837), p. 5.

“We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better that the builders of Babel.” —- Benjamin Franklin, appeal for prayer at Constitutional Convention, as cited by James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, Henry D. Gilpin, ed. (Washington: Langtree & O’Sullivan, 1840), Vol. II, p. 985.

“God commands all men everywhere to repent. He also commands them to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and has assured us that all who do repent and believe shall be saved.” —- Roger Sherman.

“God has promised to bestow eternal blessings on all those who are willing to accept Him on the terms of the Gospel – that is, in a way of free grace through the atonement. — Roger Sherman. Sherman was the ONLY founding father who signed all four founding documents (the Declaration, the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and the Articles of Association). He is called “the master builder of the Constitution.” He came up with the bi-cabinal system with the House and Senate. He was a framer of the Bill of Rights. And he was also a theologian who got George Washington to announce the first federal Day of Thanksgiving proclamation, going through the Scriptures to show why we should do so. He was also a long-term member of Congress. A newspaper article on him (the Globe) dated 1837 quotes, “The volume which he consulted more than any other was the Bible. It was his custom, at the commencement of every session of Congress, to purchase a copy of the Scriptures to puruse it daily, and to present it to one of his children on his return.” He had 15 children.

“The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in His truth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a sacrament can be administered but by the Ghost.” —- John Adams

“There is no authority, civil or religious – there can be no legitimate government – but what is administered by the Holy Ghost.” —- John Adams

“There can be no salvation without it. All without it is rebellion and perdition, or, in more orthodox words, damnation.” — John Adams (And Abigail Adams was the REAL Bible thumper in the family, telling son John Quincy Adams, ‘You know how I’ve raised you. You know how you’ve been raised in church, how you’ve been taught the Scriptures, how you’ve been taught morality.’  She tells him that if he’s going to go to France and give up his faith, that the Lord seek him out and drown him to prevent that from happening).

“I am grateful to Almighty God for the blessings which, through Jesus Christ our Lord, He has conferred on my beloved country.” —- Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration and framer of the Bill of Rights. He was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, dying at the age of 95 years.

At the age of 89 (in 1825), he wrote, “On the mercy of my Redeemer, I rely for salvation, and on His merits; not on the works I have done in obedience to His precepts.” —- Charles Carroll

“Almost all the civil liberty now enjoyed in the world owes its origin to the principles of the Christian religion…. [T]he religion which has introduced civil liberty, is the religion of Christ and his apostles…. This is genuine Christianity, and to this we owe our free constitutions of government.” — Noah Webster, History of the United States (New Haven: Durrie & Peck, 1832), p. 300, Sec. 578.

And, of course, there is the assessment of the great political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville:

“Moreover, almost all the sects of the United States are comprised within the great unity of Christianity, and Christian morality is everywhere the same.

In the United States the sovereign authority is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but there is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

There are certain populations in Europe whose unbelief is only equaled by their ignorance and their debasement, while in America one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world fulfills all the outward duties of religion with fervor.

Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1851), pp. 331, 332, 335, 336-7, 337, respectively.

As to your socialism, de Tocquevelle wrote:

“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”

Poster: Whatever outstanding Americans said or believed in the 1700’s or 1800’s is no refutation of whatever I said. Big deal, so George Washington said that morality is not possible without religion. Just because I appreciate that he spearheaded the military efforts against the redcoats doesn’t mean I care for his views on religion.

Many of the Founding Fathers you constantly bring up were not even Christians. Men like Jefferson, Franklin and Tom Paine were Deists. Forget the Founding Fathers when dealing with today’s issues. The Constitution that they gave us has evolved into something quite different since then.

I care what Americans today think. I am not interested in what men who died when even my grandfather was not yet born believed.

Michael Eden: Actually, one of the quotes that you probably didn’t bother to read has Thomas Jefferson specifically declaring his Christianity. And I have numerous quotes from Thomas Jefferson on display. Quotes by Benjamin Franklin abound – clearly attesting to his FERVENT commitment to the need for not only religious but specifically Christian religion as a necessary and fundamental support for the country being founded. I would further point out to you that Thomas Paine was NOT a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and he was also not a delegate to the Constitutional convention. So that kind of blows a gigantic hole in your thesis.

You show the portrait of the Declaration of Independence signing, and it’s funny that people have been trained to be able to pick out the two least religious founding fathers (Franklin and Jefferson – notwithstanding Jefferson’s profession of Christianity he was not as devoutly Christian as the rest). And then we’re assured that the rest of them are just as irreligious. But of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 54 were confessed Christians and members of Christian churches. 29 of them had seminary degrees and were ordained ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Not bad for a bunch of atheists and deists.

No one would ever have thought this was a secular nation in the past because Americans knew their history.  An 1848 book used in public school for generations entitled, “Lives of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.” And in public schools for years children learned the faith and character of their founding fathers.

And again, everything they believed was an anathema to what you believe.

And that says something. Because what you say, what you think, what you believe, fundamentally doesn’t work – and never HAS worked. And what they said, what they thought, and what they believed, has stood in irrefutable proof of their wisdom.

Your argument is this: the Constitution has “evolved” into whatever the hell anybody wants it to mean. It is intrinsically meaningless. If the Constitution truly is a living, organic document that evolves and pulsates, it “evolves” into whatever you want it to become and “pulsates” into whatever form you want it to take. We might as well have a telephone directory as our Constitution, so that scholars in voodoo-fashion could discern “penumbras and emanations” wherever they wished.

Let’s take a look at the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Your atheistic socialism has never worked and never will work because you fundamentally deny the SOURCE of the rights you claim: an objective, transcendent Creator God who created man with these fundamental rights. You have never had, and never will have, anything concrete or objective by which to secure the rights that our founding fathers’ secured. Furthermore, you would do to any such transcendent/objective rights exactly what you want to do to the Constitution itself: make them mean whatever the hell you – or the next dictator/tyrant on the block – WANT them to mean. And that is why your God-denying socialism has produced one despot and one nightmare after another, and why it always WILL.

What socialists ultimately pursue is power over people’s lives.  And so long as leftists hold such power, principles will not matter.  And frankly, even if there WERE any “binding” principles they would invariably be blurred into meaninglessness by a succession of “penumbras and emanations” to suit the will of the next dictator.  That ultimately becomes tyranny every single time.

And that is why George Washington would be kicking your butt across the floor as he shouted, “YOU ARE NO PATRIOT!”

You instead argue for a system of government that has NEVER worked and never will. I will tilt at the government handed down by my religious founding fathers and leave you to tilt at your godless socialist windmills.

The REAL Cause of the Housing Finance Meltdown

What’s the biggest problem today in our financial market?  What caused this disaster?  Was it mismanagement?  Was it lack of regulations?  Was it the “other” political party?

Let me just state it for the record: the problem was greed, pure and simple.

We can see a level of shocking greed in our elite business and investment circles merely by looking at the disparity between worker salary and CEO compensation.  In the “better days” of the 1960s, the average CEO earned around 40 times what the average worker earned.  Today the average CEO makes over 500 times what the average worker earns.  And the gap is widening, year by year.

Why has this happened?  The pro-business side argue that this more than twelve-fold increase of CEO pay relative to the average worker can be attributed to proportionately similar increases in market capitalization of large US companies over the years.  The pro-labor side argues that the decline of unionization has been the primary cause of skyrocketing executive pay.  But again, you can’t just play with numbers and justify this massive disparity in compensation; nor can you claim that unionization would be our savior (particularly in a global economy, where increased unionization of labor would merely result in the increased “outsourcing” of jobs).

And the problem has persisted – and continued to dramatically increase – through periods of dominance of both political parties.

Let me say it again: the problem is rampant, cancerous greed.

And this greed does not merely exist at the top of the corporate and financial food chains.  It is in the masses of Americans who wanted more than their means could provide for, who took out loans they could never hope to repay.

And why has greed become such an enormous problem in American life?

Because our ruling elites have actively discouraged religion for decades, and we are eating the bitter fruit of cultural relativism and practical atheism.

What happens when we discourage belief in a Creator God – who created man in His own image, and holds us morally accountable as His image bearers, and begin to inculcate Darwinism in its place?  We get social Darwinism.  And in social Darwinism, the strong eat the weak, and the rich most assuredly devour the poor.  And why shouldn’t they?  Are they not merely living by the obvious standards of the law of the jungle?  Why not be predatory carnivores?  Isn’t that what we ultimately are?

In the early 1960s, during the Warren era of the Supreme Court, we began to see the Establishment Clause interpreted in a more and more secular humanist and blatantly anti-religious manner.  In the case of the Ten Commandments, it was decided that, “If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments.”  And we couldn’t have any of that, could we?

What happens when you divorce religion and morality from society and from public life?  The thought of our founding fathers, the thought of the men who framed and wrote our laws, and the thought of the men who contemplated what made our culture great, continues to teach us if we will but listen:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens…”
– George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

“…And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
– George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

“No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts in the affairs of men more than the people of the United States. Every step, by which they have been advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.”
– George Washington“Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.”
– John Adams, Letter to Zabdiel Adams, Philadelphia, June 21, 1776

“We have no government armed in power capable of contending in human passions unbridled by morality and religion…  Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
– John Adams, Address to the Officers of the Massachusetts Militia, 1798

“Religion and good morals are the only solid foundations of public liberty and happiness.”
– Samuel Adams, Letter to John Trumbull, October 16, 1778

“The great pillars of all government and of social life [are] virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor…and this alone, that renders us invincible.”
– Patrick Henry, Letter to Archibald Blair, January 8, 1789

“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” -Thomas Jefferson in “Notes on Virginia”

“Yes, we did produce a near perfect Republic. But will they keep it, or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.”
– Thomas Jefferson

“Yes, we did produce a near perfect Republic. But will they keep it, or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.”
– Thomas Jefferson”Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age, by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, of inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity…in short of leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system.”  – Samuel Adams, 1790

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the
happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever by encouraged.
– Northwest Ordinance, Article III, July 13, 1787

“…[O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom.  As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
– Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Messrs. The Abbes Chalut and Arnaud, April 17, 1787

“The only foundation for…a republic is to be laid in Religion.”
– Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence and member of the Continental Congress

“The only foundation for…a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”
– Benjamin Rush, “Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical,” 1798

“In contemplating the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste
so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government. That is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by the means of the Bible.”
– Benjamin Rush, 1798

…I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings, that ‘except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel…
– Benjamin Franklin

We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages…I therefore beg leave to move—that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business…”
– Benjamin Franklin, Constitutional Convention, June 28, 1787

“…how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly appealing to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible to danger, we had daily prayers in this room for Divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard and they were graciously answered… And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance?…
– Benjamin Franklin, Constitutional Convention

“Human law must rest its authority ultimately upon the authority of that law which is Divine…Far from being rivals or enemies, religion and law are twin sisters, friends, and mutual assistants.” Foundations Reappear
– James Wilson, “Of the General Principles of Law and Obligation,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Signed U.S. Constitution

“Without morals, a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion…are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.”
– Charles Carroll Letter to James McHenry, November 4, 1800.  Signer of the Declaration of Independence and member of the Continental Congress

“To preserve the government we must also preserve morals. Morality rests on religion; if you
destroy the foundation, the superstructure must fall. When the public mind becomes vitiated
and corrupt, laws are a nullity and constitutions are waste paper.”
– Daniel Webster, 4th of July, 1800, Oration at Hanover, N.H.

“In my view, the Christian Religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed…no truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian Religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.”
– Noah Webster, Reply to David McClure, Oct. 25, 1836

“Religion is the only solid basis of good morals; therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man towards God.”
– Gouverneur Morris, 1832

“…as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should,
in all points, conform to his Maker’s will. This will of his Maker is called the law of nature…This law of nature…dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority…from this original.”
– William Blackstone, “Commentaries on the Law,” 1723-1780

“Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these.”
– William Blackstone 1723-1780, “Commentaries on the Law,” 1723-1780

“…the moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws…  All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising
or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”
– Noah Webster, “History of the United States,” 1833

“It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political stations.  But the Scriptures teach a different doctrine. They direct that rulers should be men who rule in the fear of God, able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness…”
– Noah Webster, “Value of the Bible,” 1834, #302

“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive one without the other.”
– Alexis de Toqueville, “Democracy in America”

“The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me upon my arrival in the U.S. In France, I had seen the spirits of religion and freedom almost always marching in opposite directions, in America, I found them intimately linked together and joined and reigned over the same land…
– Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”

Religion should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions. From the start, politics and religion have agreed and have not since ceased to do so.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God…
– Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation for a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation & Prayer, April 30, 1863

…We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us…and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own…
– Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation for a National Day of Fasting, 1863

…Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us, then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”
– Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation for a National Day of Fasting, 1863

… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

Our founding fathers knew full well that religion and morality were inseparable to good governance and to the well-being of a democratic society.  If you throw out God and religion, eventually morality and ethics will likewise go down the drain.  And then you will see more and more greed, worse and worse behavior, more and more crime, which in turn will necessitate more and more regulations and laws and more and more oppressive government in order to restrain an increasingly amoral and frankly bad people.

It should come as no surprise that our society, and frankly our country, began to unravel beginning in the early 1960s, as a series of sweeping policies from unelected secular humanistic judges and liberal politicians began to dramatically alter society.

We’re paying dearly for the amorality that has been increasingly encroaching upon our society.  And we will continue to reap the whirlwind until – like Lincoln – we realize that we have forgotten God.

It’s not yet too late to remember Him.  But I fear that we are on the verge of reaching a tipping point, where the culture just begins to spiral inexorably downward, as though driven by some giant reciprocating engine whose every stroke takes us farther and farther downward into a chaos from which we can never emerge.