Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women." The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.Several times in those passages, Gore dipped into that B.B. King-like growl thing he does in order to really store the faithful. Personally, I think he goes to the soulful tones to make people forget his father voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but that's just a whim on my part.
Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.
It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.
Perhaps on MLK Day, Gore might have passed on the vocal flair and instead settled for some 4th-grade accuracy, because, you know, General Cornwallis and the British surrendered in October of 1781, and the Bill of Rights was passed in December of 1791, but, hey, what's a decade here and there when you're in the demagogue business.
Who writes his crap? Not only was Gore repeating half-assed detatched rhetoric, the self-purported ground-layer of the of the internet still has not discovered Wikipedia.
3 comments:
Oh my god!!! Look at the detail he got wrong! Look over here!! Pay no attention to the focus of his argument, there's a DETAIL that is possibly INCORRECT over hear!!!
Or, maybe you are unable to understand the focus of my argument because I mispelled "here."
Or maybe because my dad killed chickens for a living.
I am forever hung with that burden....
If it was merely a typo, or Gore misspoke, I wouldn't care.
Here, the whole (intended) point of the speech was that civil liberties trump executive power, a point with which I agree. The point was driven home by the actions of the founding fathers, whom Gore would today have us emulate. The problem is in the inconvenient fact that the founding fathers were not risking the British gallows for flaunting support of a Bill of Rights; the two did not overlap, not by 10 years.
If President Bush says Japan surrendered because they were afraid of our triad of MIRV delivery vehicles, I'll mock him.
"This is a Soviet MIRV-Six, from an SS-22N launch vehicle. The warhead contains 14.5 kilos of enriched uranium, with a plutonium trigger. The nominal yield is 10 kilotons....
What can I say... I'm a spy."
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