-- Woodrow Wilson
The liberal propagandists in the press tried branding us
racists, but such blatant attacks don't work anymore, so they have adopted more
subtle tactics. EJ
Dionne is the latest to deploy a deft combination I call the non-sequitur
straw man. Follow me as I deconstruct a piece of progressive propaganda.
Unlike God, the founders left us an amendment process
Dionne's neat rhetorical trick asserts that we tea partiers
equate the US Constitution with the Holy Bible. This is a neat trick because
yes, we believe the constitution must be followed just as The Bible must be.
His unstated non-sequitur avers that since we equate the constitution with The
Bible, we must also equate the founders with God Almighty. This sets up the
straw man argument that we worship the constitution and the founders. It's a
straw man because unlike God, the founders left us an amendment process.
Dionne starts out with an innocuous statement...
I offer the Republicans two cheers for their fealty to their professed ideals. We badly need a full-scale debate over what the Constitution is, means and allows -- and how Americans have argued about these questions since the beginning of the republic. This provision should be the springboard for a discussion all of us should join.
He plants a few little seeds of doubt there, but so far so
good. Next comes the premise for the non-sequitur straw man...
From its inception, the tea party movement has treated the nation's great founding document not as the collection of shrewd political compromises that it is, but as the equivalent of sacred scripture.
Note that this statement contains two elements, the first
is plainly stated, the second one tacitly follows: 1) The constitution is a
document like The Bible that government must obey; 2) Unstated: If the
constitution is the equivalent of sacred scripture, then the founders are the
equivalent of an infallible God.
Number 2 is the strawman that does not follow from the
first statement. Since EJ cannot argue with statement #1, he invents the
non-sequitur strawman, statement #2, and then knocks it down:
Yet as Gordon Wood, the widely admired historian of the Revolutionary era has noted, we "can recognize the extraordinary character of the Founding Fathers while also knowing that those 18th-century political leaders were not outside history. ... They were as enmeshed in historical circumstances as we are, they had no special divine insight into politics, and their thinking was certainly not free of passion, ignorance, and foolishness."
See how he sets up the straw man so he can knock down those
crazy rightwingers who want to tea party like it's 1776? EJ Dionne is too smart
to really believe that we deify the founders, so all I can conclude is that he
is engaging in a deliberate propaganda smear.
Progressives are not out to destroy the tea parties;
they have bigger fish to fry:
An examination of the Constitution that views it as something other than the books of Genesis or Leviticus would be good for the country.
Yes, let's knock that dusty bit of outmoded parchment off
its pedestal. Good progressives like EJ Dionne and Ezra Klein are just
following in the footsteps of Progressivism's great grand daddy, Woodrow
Wilson. They can’t quite muster the intellectual starch of this racist scholar
and failed statesman, but it’s just the right pitch for the MSNBC crowd. It's
neo-progressivism reduced to valley girl vapidity:
"The constitution is, like, so old, and full of, like, so many old words that are, like, spelled funny. Bogus! It's like totally irrelevant, totally!"
They want a living, breathing constitution, to which Dr.
Walter E. Williams has the perfect riposte:
How many people would like to play me poker and have the rules be "living"? Depending on "evolving standards," maybe my two pair could beat your flush.
Indeed. Those who crave power and control must have
"living rules." Oh, and they also want to hold the book, because some animals
are more equal than others.
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