Oman whatt grate news!! Thay has impeetched Donold Trump, he “is” gone and “he” Is Dunn For!!! and iff he “Stil” woont go awhay thay will Impeetch him Twyce!! And thenn Hillery she will “Be” Pressadint,, and that whil Give “us” time so that Pressadint Obomma he “can” “be” Pressadint aggen!!!!!! Oar we cood jist has Two 2 Pressadints himn And Hillery!!!
Hear at Collidge wee “are” Alll so Hapy we are Jumppin Upanddown it is so Grate!!!! and thiss Time we “can” chainge the Law so the rihght perssin thay whin The Elecksion evry Time and thare no Moar bad precidints like Trumpt!! And Hillery it is Her Tern so “she” auhght to “be” Precidant foar Fitfy 50 Yeers and Precidunt Obomma he “can” “be” Pressadont four Evver!!!
My Prefesser he sayed nhow Donoldt Trump he “wil” has to go To Jale and probbly shood auhght to be Extacuttid for Abstraction of Congrass!!!! and affter that he shood be shott! Like fromb nhow On evry Boddy whoo dont voat Forr a Progestive thay shood be shooted tooo!!!! Thatt is How “we” can “insure” Demmocratsy!!!!!
Me I cannt weit foar Hillerey to Take Over and make the hole Countrie Trans Ginder!!!! And aslo thare whil be a hole Lott “of” Free Stuff!!!!
This strikes me as about the level of comprehension I seen in many of today’s youth.
It may not be merely young people who no longer understand how a republic works — unless by “youth” you mean anyone under the age of, say, 75. 🙁
Whoops, that’d be me.
No, no, Lee! Unknowable said “many” of the youth (i.e., under 75 in my redefinition), not all of them! 🙂
I find myself in the unexpected position of having to speak as a representative of the youth. Ah, well, you’re as young as you feel. I often feel like I’m about ten years old.
Interesting that you should mention that. Just yesterday I was at a nearby Wally World store picking up some last minute supplies before the Christmas rush makes everyday shopping impossible and I noticed that a lot of the people I saw there, including people older than myself, appeared to be quite dumbed down. More than once, in the last few months, I’ve spoken to someone during the everyday business of life and came away wondering if they were mentally disabled from youth, or had just slipped into some sort of a fog as the world plunged into mental darkness.
I’m favoring the latter explanation, because I haven’t seen this phenomenon very often, until fairly recently. The source of this mental fog, IMHO, would be the never ending onslaught of misinformation, propaganda and mind-control coming from virtually every branch of the media. I’ve seen people so preoccupied by trying to be politically correct that they never reach the point of using common sense.
This brings us back to Joe Collidge’s post for the week. What these people don’t realize is that they are destabilizing government, not only for Sonald Trump, but for every elected official. I’ve heard quotes of Democratic leaders that stated they can’t rely upon the next election to oust Trump. In other words, they have no intention of accepting the will of the voters if the vote isn’t to their liking. Simply stated, they are willing to accept the operation of a Representative Republic, or even a Direct Democracy.
This is not a problem in the US only. Brexit was passed several years ago, yet many of the pols in Britain refuse to execute the will of the voters. Hopefully the strong conservative majority from Britain’s recent election will finally get the job done. I don’t track Australian politics, but I’ve heard that they have impeached a number of PMs and, once again, the will of the voters is not being taken seriously. Israel faces a third election, having been unable to form a coalition after the last two elections.
My interpretation is that Western Civilization itself is in big trouble; but simply defining Western Civilization can be problematic. I am of the opinion that Western Civilization has been sustained, to a large extent, by the Judeo-Christian ethic, and sadly, much of the populace has walked away from these principles, preferring moral freedom over a way of life with a proven track record of success. When people lose their moral compass, they bob like a cork in the ocean and follow whatever current happens to flow at the moment.
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. Many of the keystone developments which made our modern world possible were made by devout Christians. Newton, Galileo, Faraday, just to name a few, were men of great faith. A lot of people haven’t heard much, if anything, about Faraday, but if you use electricity in any form you are using something that couldn’t exist without his insights into the relationship between electricity and magnetism and and least some of his insights were based upon a belief system that God created all things and therefore, there was an interrelationship between all things. This led directly to one of the greatest keystone discoveries; that of electromagnetism. His faith impacted his worldview and abetted his scientific work.
I don’t see this sort of insight as being possible in a world devoid of faith. Many people are more than happy to think about whatever their TV set tells them is important and don’t really care about anything which requires deeper thought. They watch TV news and assume that they are informed, or they just zone out and watch some inane, phony, reality show. With no real compass, beyond the currents of political correctness, it doesn’t matter. They do as they see fit. Hence Joe Collidge, hence the Hoi Polloi of Wal-Mart, going about their day, oblivious to reality.
It would be foolish of me to try to add anything to this. Well said!
Nicely said! I couldn’t agree more.
Thanks. I relish the compliment.
What???
Don’t forget, Joe is an interllectural.
Yes, he is far above the rest of us. 🙂
I just read the part in Ron Chernow’s “Grant” where Andrew Johnson was impeached, and if anyone deserved to be impeached it was him. But because it had never been done before he survived the Senate trial by one vote. Now the Dems just see impeachment as another way to resist a Republican President – no big deal.
I don’t know–to me it always looked like Johnson was railroaded for wanting to follow Lincoln’s policy of reconciliation with the South. The major grounds for impeachment had to deal with a Tenure of Office Act which the Supreme Court later found to be unconstitutional.
That was my understanding as well. Reconstruction was underway and working. Former slaves were getting assistance and the Dems pulled a fast one to leverage a deal, where Johnson would remain in office, but Reconstruction had to go.
Lincoln had his heart set on reconciliation. The hard-line Republicans in Congress wanted the South punished. This was why Confederate General Ewell, when he heard the news of Lincoln’s assassination, sat down and cried. He knew what would follow.
Lincoln was a fine man with appreciation for his fellow man. He saw the horror of slavery for what it was. Keep in mind, he didn’t start the Civil War, the South attacked Sumpter. But he tried to keep the US together.
The greatest issue at the time was the spread of slavery as more states joined the union. If new states became slave states, eventually these would be in the majority and could solidify their political position, seeing to it that abolitionists never took control. Of course, it could never work. Most Americans, including many in the South, detested slavery. The abominable practice was heading for its doom no matter what, but the leadership of the Confederacy chose to fight when Lincoln took power.
Just to illustrate how polarized matters were, Booth expected to be heralded as a hero for killing Lincoln. He never even imagined that he would go down in history as a villain.
Reconstruction went down in flames, because it was inconvenient to the politics of a few. Ever since, the entire nation has paid a price.
They were fighting for much more than slavery. Robt. E. Lee freed his slaves so that no one could say he was fighting to keep them. Stonewall Jackson never owned slaves. Most of the men in the Confederate armies never owned slaves. They fought, as they saw it, to defend their homes from Northern aggression.
Two more points:
Lincoln said, at the beginning of his presidency, that he would do whatever it took to preserve the union. If he could do it by freeing the slaves, he would free the slaves. If he had to do it without freeing the slaves, he’d do it without freeing the slaves. For Lincoln, slavery was not the issue–not until after the war had gone on for a while.
Defending slavery at all was folly, but the leaders of the Confederacy didn’t realize that until it was way too late. It wasn’t their only folly: the war itself was a tragic miscalculation on their part: really, there was no way they could win. But certainly they would have done much better to have voluntarily freed their slaves at the start of the war–although whether they had enough money to compensate the slave owners, I doubt.
History shows us that slavery became The Issue of the war, swamping all the other serious issues that led up to it. The South’s grievances against the North–the ones that had nothing to do with slavery–were not trivial. And to many Southerners it was as simple as this: why should they be forced to remain in a union into which their states had entered voluntarily? I don’t know how to answer that question.
On that last point, I can’t really argue. I guess it all comes back to the fact that this is a fallen world and that nothing will work as well as it should. The US was a vast improvement upon pretty much everything that had come before, but we certainly had our share of baggage.
Slavery was, at the very least, a smoldering issue since the first days of independence. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was quite contentious and nothing had been settled by 1860. When Kansas was about to become a state, a series of killings and various acts of retribution erupted over the matter of slavery. It was not simply about the morality of slavery, but also the economic impact of having wealthy slave holders dominating the economy.
Keep in mind that all states were “slave states” when the Republic was founded. Starting in Massachusetts, slavery began to be made illegal state by state, but the South had a much different economic system. It was virtually impossible for someone to compete effectively with slaveholders. It was the Free Market System run amok and operating on the backs of slaves. The North has built itself upon a completely different business model, where free markets gave the average person more opportunity than they would have had under any other system which had existed in the past.these two systems were completely incompatible.