On the evening of Sept. 16, 2009, I was invited to a function for Rand Paul’s U.S. Senate campaign at the headquarters of Americans for Tax Reform.

I had been invited by a friend of mine via Facebook who was a passionate supporter of Ron Paul. Within minutes of arriving, I saw Rep. Paul enter the room, followed by an entourage of several college students.

I immediately walked up to Paul and introduced myself, and Paul smiled at me and shook my hand. I told him that I had always wanted to ask him a question, and that it was a hypothetical question, but I would appreciate his answer nonetheless. Paul smiled, and welcomed the question. At this point there were about 15 people surrounding us, listening.

And so I asked Congressman Paul: if he were President of the United States during World War II, and as president he knew what we now know about the Holocaust, but the Third Reich presented no threat to the U.S., would he have sent American troops to Nazi Germany purely as a moral imperative to save the Jews?

And the Congressman answered:

“No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t risk American lives to do that. If someone wants to do that on their own because they want to do that, well, that’s fine, but I wouldn’t do that.”

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“Did a corporation end slavery, or did the government end slavery?!?!”

That’s the sort of question investment guru and radio show host Peter Schiff fielded as he debated Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters last week in New York’s Zuccotti Park.

Schiff is no ordinary observer. As the prinicipal of the financial firm Euro Pacific Capital, he’s a full-fledged and unapologetic member of “the 1 Percent.” As an outspoken radio show host (listen online here) and commentator, he not only predicted the housing crash and financial crisis, he railed bank and auto-sector bailouts as they were happening. Schiff believes that capitalism offers the only hope for young, frustrated people to have a vibrant and prosperous future (get information on his latest book, How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes, here). So he went to Occupy Wall Street to engage and debate the protesters. (more…)

Recently, I got into a big fight with my cube-mate.  After attacking him for his listening to Bill Maher during the workday, he shot back and mocked my Glenn Beck listening.  As if there was some moral equivalence between the two.

“But Beck’s predictions have been right throughout the last two years.  Why would you not at least give him a listen?” I questioned.  My Georgetown-educated cube-mate shot back: “Because most of the people that listen to Glenn Beck are uneducated mid-westerners.”  Infuriated, I protested “Do you have any idea how arrogant and elitist you sound right now?”  Leave aside the irony that I was attacking his condescension while as a colleague of ours pointed out, showing beneath my loafers were our company holiday gift socks dotted with various currencies.

As my cube-mate went on to say, though he conceded that government should not be all-encompassing, “I want smart people to make decisions for people.”  In other words, us silly hicks are incapable of governing ourselves.  This is the fatal conceit of which F.A. Hayek wrote that reflects the attitude of the intellectual class today.  Why is it fatal?

First, the “highly educated intellectual” today routinely receives a subpar education.  Believe me, I went through it at Columbia, one of the few remaining schools with any semblance of a valuable curriculum.  A real education is about teaching the pupil to think critically.  Routinely, education today is more about spending time in science classes listening to professors talk about the merits of joining the Peace Corps (yes, this happened to me), iconoclastic gender, race and political studies courses and cultural Marxist programming of the heirs apparent of the political, economic and cultural hierarchy of the country.

Of those who graduate from these institutions and matriculate to the political realm, the progressive ethic pervades.  And what is this ethic?  The elite must decide for the sheep.

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Today, 21 March 2011, marks the 150^th anniversary of Alexander Hamilton Stephens’ delivery of the Cornerstone Speech in Savannah, Georgia. On 20 December 1860, the state convention called by the legislature of South Carolina after the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency had voted for secession from the Union. By the beginning of February, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, George, Louisiana, and Texas had followed suit. And on 7 February 1861, these states joined together to form the Confederate States of America. Soon thereafter, Jefferson Davis was elected its President, and Stephens, its Vice-President.

In his Second Inaugural, looking back, Abraham Lincoln observed that, on the eve of the Civil War, “one eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern half of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”

After that conflict, southern apologists, such as the renowned classicist Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, would insist that “the cause we fought for and our brothers died for was the cause of civil liberty, and not the cause of human slavery.” But the facts support Lincoln’s claim.

At the time of secession, for example, the state convention in Mississippi announced, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” and asserted, “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union,” noting that “the hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory” and grew stronger in the succeeding decades.

No one, however, made the southern case with greater eloquence and force than Stephens, who had opposed secession in Georgia on prudential grounds and then rallied to its support once the decision had been made. When he returned to Savannah to address the George convention on 21 March 1861, this is what he said:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us; the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

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On a recent pilgrimage to Gettysburg I ventured into the Evergreen cemetery, the scene of chaotic and bloody fighting throughout the engagement. Like Abraham Lincoln on a cold November day in 1863, I pondered the meaning of it all.  With the post-Tea Party wave of libertarianism sweeping the nation, Lincoln’s reputation has received a serious pillorying. He has even been labeled a tyrant, who used the issue of slavery as a mendacious faux excuse to pummel the South into submitting to the will of the growing federal power in Washington D.C. In fact, some insist, the labeling of slavery as the casus belli of the Civil War is simply a great lie perpetrated by our educational system.

First of all, was Lincoln in fact a tyrant?  For me the root of such a characterization centers on the man’s motivations. A man of international vision that belied his homespun image, Lincoln saw the growing power of an industrialized Europe and realized that a divided America would be a vulnerable one. “The central idea of secession,” he argued, “is anarchy.” Hence, maintaining the Union was his prime motivation, not the amassing of self-serving power.

It is true that Lincoln unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus. From a Constitutional standpoint, the power of the federal government to suspend habeas corpus “in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety” is clearly spelled out in Article 1, Section IX. And an insurrection of eleven states would certainly qualify as such. Whether or not Lincoln had the authority (Article I pertains to Congress) most significant to me is that the Constitution does allow for the suspension of habeas corpus in times of severe crisis. So, doesn’t the question distill down to a more wonkish matter of legal procedure, rather than the sublime notion of denying the rights of man?

Constitutional minutia aside, the question remains whether or not Lincoln’s actions made him a tyrant. Consider the country in 1861-1862, the years in which the writ was suspended, re-instituted and then suspended again until war’s end.  The war was not going well for the North, and Southern sympathies were strong in the border states and the lower Midwestern counties. The federal city was surrounded by an openly hostile Virginia on one side and a strongly secessionist Maryland on the other. “Copperhead” politicians actively sought office and could only sow further seeds of discord if elected. Considering these factors, one wonders what other course of action Lincoln could have taken to stabilize the situation in order to successfully prosecute the war. “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts,” he asked, “while I may not touch a hair on the head of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?”

It seems that one’s appreciation for Lincoln’s place in history is largely an off-shoot of one’s position on the rebellion itself.

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She was likened to a modern day Rosa Parks or Nelson Mandela, but the former Ag official, according to the Washington Post, was not interviewed on a single major Sunday morning talk-show following a week that can only be described as a Shirley Sherrod media frenzy.  Though the conversation on Sunday morning focused on race in America, noticeably absent from the discussion was the woman behind the controversy. Earlier this week a handful of people in the blogosphere began to speculate Sherrod would pull off a “full Ginsburg,” or become only the thirteenth person to appear on all major Sunday talk-shows on the same day since the feat was first accomplished by William H. Ginsburg in 1998.  However, this was before a clip of Sherrod suggesting Andrew Breitbart wants blacks “stuck back in the times of slavery” went viral.  Sherrod also drew extensive criticism late in the week for blasting Fox News as racist.

Considering the Shirley Sherrod interview barrage that took place last Thursday, to not see Sherrod on television Sunday morning sends a clear signal the mainstream media no longer feels allowing the public to get to know the real Shirley Sherrod advances their agenda.

Last week, Charles Krauthammer pointed out that while Sgt. Crowley got a beer summit after Obama merely (and mistakenly) said he “acted stupidly,” Shirley Sherrod got just a seven-minute phone call after she was forced to resign.  The White House and the Obama Administration who hastily relieved her of her position were already keeping her at arms length, and now the mainstream media is too.

In 1854, the Democrats in control of the 33rd Congress were moving toward passage of their Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing slavery to expand into the western territories.  Championing the bill was Stephen Douglas, the senator who would be the Democratic Party’s 1860 presidential nominee.  The Democrat President at the time, Franklin Pierce, said he would sign the bill into law.  The Democratic Party had chosen to promote slavery.

Amid the intense reaction, a grassroots movement similar to today’s Tea Parties sprang up to oppose the extension of slavery.  At town meetings and demonstrations, anti-slavery activists voiced their opposition to the “Slave-ocrats” and organized the Republican Party.  A small gathering in Ripon, Wisconsin, on March 20, is credited with being the first to use the Republican label.

On July 6, 1854, the Republican Party held in Jackson, Michigan its first-ever state convention.  So many people attended – over 10,000 – that the meeting was held outdoors, Under the Oaks.

Just four months later, one of the founders of the Michigan Republican Party, anti-slavery activist Kinsley Bingham, was elected our nation’s first Republican governor.  And, another of the original Michigan Republicans, Zachariah Chandler, became one of the first Republicans in the U.S. Senate.  Senator Chandler, a former mayor of Detroit and leader of the Underground Railroad, went on to serve as Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”
Abraham Lincoln (R-IL), 1864

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Republicans should welcome a comparison of the history of the GOP with that of the Democratic Party – the party of slavery and socialism, Big Government and the Ku Klux Klan.  To quote from chapter one of Back to Basics for the Republican Party: “The more we Republicans know about the history of our party, the more the Democrats will worry about the future of theirs.”

Here, you can test your knowledge.  The answers are below.

Q. How many Democrats in Congress voted to abolish slavery?
127
95
34
0

Q. Which park was established by a future Chairman of the Republican National Committee?
Central Park
Griffith Park
Franklin Park
Lincoln Park

Q. Which former Republican presidential nominee declined a nomination for Chief Justice?
James Blaine
Wendell Willkie
Thomas Dewey
Bob Dole

Q. Who was the first Vice President to attend Cabinet meetings?
Levi Morton (R-NY)
Theodore Roosevelt (R-NY)
Calvin Coolidge (R-MA)
Charles Dawes (R-IL)

Q. Which archaeological site was discovered by a future Republican U.S. Senator?
Angkor Wat
Great Zimbabwe
Machu Picchu
Stonehenge

Click “More” for the answers.

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This past April, an undated photo of two slave children was found at a moving sale in Charlotte, North Carolina, accompanied by a document detailing the sale of  “John” for $1,150 in 1854.  (John is presumably one of the children).  The photo was purchased by collector Keya Morgan for $30,000.  As a father of a little boy, this photograph reaches out to me in a distinctly personal level for I cannot imagine ever being separated from my child and the unbearable anguish I would suffer having him literally sold out from under me and taken away never to be seen again…left always to wonder about the son I lost to the horrors that was American slavery.  The two forlorn children in this photo stare back at us through the chasm of time. They are the ghosts of an ugly national past.  The victims of a monstrous injustice that would take the violent deaths of 620,000 Americans to rectify.

Still, I am struck by the breathtakingly steep arc of moral ascendency we have seen in this great country since the horrible bloodlettings that occurred on the battlefields of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and over six thousand others to determine once and for all what kind of country we would become.

That we have gone from a nation in which three million fellow Americans were held as slaves literally in chains and shackles, with no more legal rights than a goat, to a country that elects a Black man to the highest and most powerful office in the land says much about who we are as a people.

There will be those on the left who will predictably use the upcoming Independence Day holiday to highlight the hypocrisy of the Declaration we celebrate.  They will mock the document of a slave state that had the brazenness to announce to the world our vision of a better nation founded in the conviction that such basic human rights as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come not from governments or royals, but from a higher power than ourselves: Divine Providence.

But these cynics will miss the point.

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After my article last week, Michael Steele and the Southern Strategy, now is time for some truth-telling about the Democratic Party.  The Democrats’ own southern strategy was far, far worse than even worst accusations aimed at the Republicans.

In his recent speech criticizing the GOP’s so-called southern strategy, RNC Chairman Michael Steele scored big points… for the other team.  Instead of criticizing his own party, he would do well to focus the public’s attention on the appalling heritage of the Democratic Party – the party of slavery and big government, socialism and the Ku Klux Klan.

“The Republican Party, on the contrary [to the Democrats], holds that this government was instituted to secure the blessings of freedom, and that slavery is an unqualified evil.  [Republicans] will oppose in all its length and breadth the modern Democratic idea that slavery is as good as freedom.”

In this classic speech, Abraham Lincoln condemned the pro-slavery policies of the Democratic Party.  The founders of our Grand Old Party knew to call Democrats ‘slave-ocrats.’  And another Republican, Robert Ingersoll, observed: “Every man that loved slavery more than liberty was a Democrat.”  One of Lincoln’s friends, Rep. Owen Lovejoy (R-IL), had this to say:

“The principle of enslaving human beings because they are inferior, is this: If a man is a cripple, trip him up; if he is old and weak, and bowed with the weight of years, strike him, for he cannot strike back; if idiotic, take advantage of him; and if a child, deceive him.  This, sir, this is the doctrine of Democrats and the doctrine of devils as well, and there is no place in the universe outside the five points of hell and the Democratic Party where the practice and prevalence of such doctrines would not be a disgrace.”

Very definitely, slavery was a southern strategy of the Democratic Party.

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Republicans would benefit tremendously from appreciating the heritage of our Grand Old Party, founded in 1854 to oppose the Democrats’ pro-slavery, anti-freedom agenda.

As they campaign for the mid-term elections, Republicans should ignore the lefty media spin and recognize that they hold the moral high ground.  From the first chapter of Back to Basics for the Republican Party: “How can we expect to convince voters to place their confidence in us when we lack confidence in our own heritage.”

Today, the nation’s capital celebrates Emancipation Day.  In his proclamation, the Democrat mayor, Adrian Fenty, omits something very important: the holiday commemorates the Republican Party’s abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.  That’s right, the Republican Party freed the slaves in DC.  And yes, the Democratic Party opposed freeing the slaves in DC – a fact which Democrats today dare not mention.

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Has the Democratic Party ever enacted a law as atrocious as its government takeover of the American people’s healthcare?  Has the Democratic Party ever enacted a law so unpopular?  Yes and Yes.

In 1854, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency.  Their top priority was to repeal the Missouri Compromise prohibition of slavery in the northern territories.  The author of this infamous legislation, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was Stephen Douglas, a Democrat Senator from Illinois and owner of a slave plantation in Mississippi.

Senator Douglas claimed the law would be a final solution to the slavery question, so that Congress could move on to other issues.  In fact, the Kansas-Nebraska Act sparked a political firestorm.  Opponents of slavery – and the police state and economic stagnation that went with it – understood that, if unchecked, the slave system would expand throughout the territories and then the entire nation.

As the Democrat-controlled Supreme Court would soon prove with its 7-2 Dred Scott decision (both Republicans dissenting), pro-freedom Americans feared that the judiciary would uphold the expansion of slavery.  Many Democrats were already touting slavery (not for themselves, of course) for poor whites, too.  “Free Society!” declared a prominent Democrat newspaper, “We sicken at the name!”

Every American was forced to choose sides.  One was either for the free market system or against it; there was no middle ground.

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Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear McDonald v. Chicago, in which the Court will decide whether the City of Chicago can disarm its citizens by forbidding them from owning handguns, or whether gun ownership is a “privilege” of citizenship protected by the U.S. Constitution.  In doing so, it will reconsider whether courts should play a more robust role in the protection of the basic liberties of the people.

Such a statement may seem counterintuitive.  Of course courts protect rights; it’s their job to interpret the Constitution to do just that.

But the practice of constitutional law has unfortunately long since been about more than the simple application of the plain text.  That’s because the Constitution—the point of which is to limit government power—is a rather inconvenient roadblock when government wants to do something without restraints.  Courts, in many cases, have abandoned their responsibility to apply the clear commands of the Constitution and have become extremely deferential to legislatures, especially with regard to progressive policy goals the judges themselves often share.  It seems crazy that we would let legislatures determine when laws they themselves create violate the Constitution.  But that is exactly what has happened.  We’ve let the fox guard the henhouse.

Some call this judicial “restraint,” but increasingly, a more accurate term would be judicial abdication.  And judicial abdication is every bit as dangerous as judicial activism, and arguably even more so because it allows politicians to disregard whatever constitutional limits they find inconvenient, which leads to unchecked expansion of government power.

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Today, in 1854, the Republican Party is organized in Ripon, Wisconsin. One of its central planks is the abolition of slavery.

Republicans should welcome a comparison of their party’s history with that of the Democrats – the party of slavery and socialism, Big Government and the Ku Klux Klan.

As Republicans try to repel the socialist onslaught, the way to win – and to deserve to win – is to embrace our party’s original reform agenda.   The patriots who created our Grand Old Party did so in order to preserve the vision of the Founding Fathers.   And the way they did it has valuable lessons for us today.

Let’s first look at the party currently in power.   Democrat ties to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson are negligible.   In fact, the Democratic Party was established in 1832 at a national convention organized by Cabinet secretaries and other prominent supporters of the Andrew Jackson administration.   From the start, the Democratic Party was a top-down organization.   Submission to the grand leader and astroturfing – that is, fake grassroots activity – for the Democrats it’s the same old same old.

In contrast, the Republican Party began as a truly grassroots movement very similar to the Tea Parties now sweeping the nation.   Ordinary people doing extraordinary things – that’s what created the GOP.   For example, at the famous meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin that named the party “Republican” there were no politicians at all, just fifty-three men and women who took a stand.  The first Republican state convention, in Jackson, Michigan, was attended by thousands of farmers and laborers and small businessmen.   From the grassroots upward, that’s the Republican Party at its best.

The Republican Party was born as a civil rights movement.

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Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CONVENTION:

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

Have we no tendency to the latter condition?

Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination — piece of machinery, so to speak — compounded of the Nebraska doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision. Let him consider not only what work the machinery is adapted to do, and how well adapted; but also, let him study the history of its construction, and trace, if he can, or rather fail, if he can, to trace the evidences of design, and concert of action, among its chief architects, from the beginning.

The new year of 1854 found slavery excluded from more than half the States by State Constitutions, and from most of the national territory by Congressional prohibition. Four days later, commenced the struggle which ended in repealing that Congressional prohibition. This opened all the national territory to slavery, and was the first point gained.

But, so far, Congress only had acted; and an indorsement by the people, real or apparent, was indispensable, to save the point already gained, and give chance for more. (more…)

As he prepared “Notes on Government” for publication in 1791, Congressman James Madison wrote a note to himself. “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part [of the people] instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers.” He drew a telling conclusion: “The Southern States of America,” very much including his native Virginia, “are on the same principle aristocracies.”

As an architect of the new Constitution, Madison knew that Article IV, Section 4 says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” He knew, therefore, that the American regime contained a self-contradiction. With most Americans of his generation, he hoped that the eventual removal of slavery would remove this potentially fatal flaw. In fact many states did abolish slavery in that first, founding generation. But his “Southern States” did not. It took civil war and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to continue the liberation that the founders had begun.

Lincoln came to the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg to say in public what Madison in prudence could not say some seventy years before. In declaring their independence, their self-government, in 1776, “our fathers,” the founders, “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Conceived, brought forth: this is the language of fertility, of childbirth. It is a paradoxical conception and childbirth—the work of fathers not of mothers. Somehow the signers of the Declaration of Independence were fathers and mothers, men who conceived and gave birth.

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Lots of politicians make promises they can’t keep.  Statesmen, by contrast, promise less and deliver more.  Knowing their own limitations and those of the people they serve, they act according to principles, not just promises.

As a presidential candidate Barack Obama promised the American people nothing less than a new nation.   “. . . We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he said just before he was elected president in November 2008.

Since his victory the president has made very clear his reverence for the idea of transformational leadership.  He has identified “transformative moments” that must be seized,  lauded “leaders who are able to bring about transformative change,” and heralded his administration’s steps towards “a transformation of how government works.”

The president’s efforts to make his idea of “transformational leadership” real are everywhere.  Whether in massive bailouts, sweeping health care reform legislation, an attempt to overhaul the student loan system, or a proposed revamping of financial regulations, the president has sought a transformation of huge swaths of American life with little regard to the constitutionality of these efforts.

Mr. Obama has done all of this while at the same time linking his idea of transformation to the sixteenth American president.  Asked in July 2009 who his heroes are, President Obama singled out Abraham Lincoln for the highest praise.

The president’s admiration both of Lincoln and the idea of transformational leadership is perplexing, because for Lincoln the idea of “transformational leadership” was not just foreign, but something he had to fight.

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If you are under 30, you really need to read this column and pass it on to your friends.  Your elected officials are dooming you to a new sort of bondage, a form of 21^st Century slavery, if you will.

First, some background.

On October 16, 1854, Abraham Lincoln, then a former one-term Congressman, gave a three hour speech in Peoria, Illinois in which he decried the extension of slavery into the territories.  The Republican Party was barely three months old.  Lincoln warned that slavery was a “monstrous injustice” based on the raw principle of “self-interest” at odds with the “fundamental principles of civil liberty.”

Lincoln was moved to action by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, widely seen as a check on the growth of slavery in the territories.

At Peoria, Lincoln presented the economic, legal and moral case against slavery.

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The other day  I made the assertion that Barbara Boxer (D – Tiny Town) was the stupidest member of the United States Senate.  I may have spoken too soon.  Here’s a serious challenger:

Yesterday, in his desperate attempt to win friends, influence people and reach across the aisle as he tries to bring the senate’s version of a “health care” bill to a vote, Sen. Harry Reid (D – Las Vegas) decided to go for broke.  Speaking in his trademark tremulous, reedy voice that makes that of his predecessor, the homunculus from South Dakota, Sen. Tom Daschle (D – IRS), sound like Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River,” the punch-drunk former boxer compared Republican opposition to the proponents of slavery and segregation.  “When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today…  History is repeating itself before our eyes.”

No words of mine can possibly do justice to the magisterial presentation of the Sage of Searchlight, so please have a look and listen before we continue:

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