One of the
lasting demonstrations of the idiocy that was the VietNam war:
“One of the famous
quotes of the Vietnamese 1968 Tet Offensive:
“We Had To Destroy Ben Tre In Order To Save It”
Everywhere
the GOP/teavangelists campaign for office, it is certain that someone will
claim that the Constitution must be preserved from “liberals who want to
eliminate “our freedoms.” This usually
centers on the 1st, 2nd, 14th, and 10th
amendments of the Bill of Rights.
One of the
highlights of our foundation is the separate and equal tri-partite construction
of our national government. No branch can over-rule the others to become the
center of power. The ability of our
courts to assure the constitutionality of laws and other actions by the
legislative and executive branches without the courts’ functions being
overturned is among our greatest contributions to the “rule of law.”
Gingrich,
hoping to keep the teavangelist base, is willing to destroy the tri-partite
nature of our government by destroying the intent and reality of our
Constitution.
This lust to
re-write the document that made us unique at our inception is highly akin to
the destruction of Ben Tre. If the ideological
crazies are allowed to preserve by destroying we will lose that which we will
never be able to recover. As a professed
“historian”, Gingrich should be fully aware of this. But Gingrich is a child of the teavangelist
south, sucked into the Reagan mythology and unable to see the gaping black hole
at the innermost core of teavangelism.
Not only is he unable to see it, if he should ever discover it he will
find its tenets of segregation, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and protection
of only the wealthiest of our citizens at the expense of the poor and middle
classes, to dove-tail easily into his lust for power and greed.
Ruth Marcus wrote of the danger posed by Gingrich beliefs in
today’s Washington Post.
“As
precedent for the supposed mainstream nature of his proposals, Gingrich likes
to point to Jefferson’s signing of the 1802 Repeal Act, abolishing a set of
judgeships that the rival Federalists had pushed through on the eve of leaving
power.
This history lesson is not as dispositive as Gingrich
would have you believe. As Ed Whelan and Matthew J. Franck have argued on
National Review’s Bench Memos blog, it’s not clear that the Repeal Act was
constitutional and, even if it was, “what was done then is not a precedent for what he is
considering doing now” — “an unconstitutional end run around the permanent tenure of federal
judges,” as Franck put it.
Gingrich acts as if the Repeal Act was uncontroversial
in its day. But here is Federalist Alexander Hamilton, inveighing against the
measure at an emergency meeting of the New York City Bar: “The independence of
the judges, once destroyed, the constitution is gone; it is a dead letter; it
is a vapor which the breath of faction in a moment may dissipate.”
In this age of endless faction, Hamilton’s warning is
timely — and chilling.
Who am I to argue with Hamilton, at
least today!
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