This pamphlet for the greater good would all but destroy Paine's American reputation, and its drafting would offer a profound insight into the author's very character. If there is any moment in his life that reveals Paine as the Enlightenment's most adamantine evangelist, it is this. For exactly what kind of man, with dozens of friends either imprisoned or dead by guillotine or by their own hand, with his own life directly imperiled, and expecting at any moment the knock at the door and the presentation of the warrant - just what kind of human being would write a book under such conditions, and call it The Age of Reason?And here's a sample of Paine's efforts to prevent the execution of Lous XVI which are what put his life in danger in France. Paine had hoped that France, in addition to banishing the monarchy, could set an example to the world by also banishing executions. These words turned out to be extremely prescient.
I have the advantage of some experience; it is near twenty years that I have been engaged in the cause of liberty, having contributed something to it in the revolution of the United States of America. My language has always been that of liberty and humanity, and I know by experience that nothing so exalts a nation as the union of these principles, under all circumstances. I know that the public mind of France, and particularly that of Paris, has been heated and irritated by the dangers to which they have been exposed; but could we carry our thoughts into the future, when the dangers are ended, and the irritations forgotten, what today seems an act of justice may then appear an act of vengeance. My anxiety for the cause of France has become for the moment concern for its honor. If, on my return to America, I should employ myself on a history of the French Revolution, I had rather record a thousand errors dictated by humanity, than one inspired by a justice too severe.
That would be Sylvester Stallone. Rolling Stone explains:...does anyone else find it incongruous that McCain, who has held Senate hearings on steroids in baseball, and just last month shamed the Rocket for his alleged Human Growth Hormone use — “I’m very disappointed with Roger Clemens” — is now locking arms with Sly Stallone?
This is the same Stallone, after all, who was convicted in Australia last May for illegally importing human growth hormone and testosterone into that country — including 48 vials of an HGH drug banned in the U.S.
Bipartisan lobbying firms serve rosters of blue-chip corporate clients. To push the Bush administration's Medicare drug benefit bill on Capitol Hill, the pharmaceutical manufacturers hired Democratic lobbyists Vic Fazio, a former Democratic congressman; David Beier, who had been a chief domestic policy adviser to Al Gore; and Joel Johnson, a former top aide to President Clinton and Senator Daschle [who also became a lobbyist after failing to get re-elected]. To push their side, the generic drug manufacturers hired Chris Jennings, who had helped devise Clinton's unlamented health plan, and former Republican Mark Isakowitz, who had helped defeat the Clinton plan. Similarly, in 1998, when tobacco companies wanted to sell Congress the settlement they had reached with state attorneys general over tobacco health claims, they turned for help to both Republican and Democratic lobbyists, including former Gore aide Peter Knight, the former Demcratic governer Ann Richards, and George Mitchell, former Democratic Senate majority leader.
While nonbusiness interests have better access to power under Democratically controlled government than under Republican, businesses have excellent access under both. Upon leaving office, more than half of the senior officials of the Clinton administration became corporate lobbyists. Clinton's first legislative director left his post after less than a year to become chairman of Hill & Knowlton Worldwide. Clinton's deputy chief of staff departed in less than a year to run the U.S Telephone Asociation. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1998 and 2004 more than 2,200 former high-ranking federal officials, from both Republican Democratic administrations, registered as federal lobbyists, as did over 200 former members of Congress. By 2003, more than half the total number of former members of Congress who were registered lobbyists had served as Democrats. Almost all were lobbying for large corpoarations.
-- Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
Here's a startling example of how more news stories about bin Laden and al Qaeda might have made a difference. Shortly after he arrived in America, Mohammed Atta, the man we now believe to have been the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, went to an unsuspecting Department of Agriculture loan officer in Florida and tried to get a loan for what he described as crop dusting. He told the loan officer, one Johnell Bryant, that he wanted to finance a twin-engine, six passenger aircraft, take out the seats, and fit it with a chemical tank that would fill every square inch except where the pilot would sit. Bryant thought the idea was impractical and rejected the application. Atta then turned his attention to an aerial photo of Washington on the wall of her office, pulled out a wad of money, and tried to buy it. He asked her to point out the White House and the Pentagon, and asked her how America would like it if another country destroyed Washington and some of the monuments in it, just as the cities in his country had been destroyed. And here's the amazing part: In the course of their conversation, Atta inquired if the loan officer had heard of an organization overseas of people dissillusioned with their governments; that group, he told her, was called al Qaeda. He also mentioned the name Osama bin Laden, and promised that bin Laden would some day be known as the "world's greatest leader."Imagine if we had a mass media that pursued stories relevant to the functioning of democracy with the tenacity that it pursues stories that do not. Imagine if the media was as interested in Cheney's dissapeared e-mails as it was the vagina of Britney Spears. Imagine if the media pursued the story of a conspiracy to fraud the nation into war with the tenacity that it stalks celebrities and their children. Imagine if the press followed a bipartisan effort to perpetuate a "constitutional crisis" as obsessively as it follows up on celebrity deaths. Imagine if the media was as interested in where the presidential candidates stand on one of the most massive (and illegal) civil liberty violation in the nation's history as they are in endlessly discussing bickering between candidates. Imagine if we had a media that devoted as much time as it does to telling us who Linsday Lohan is dating in rehab to informing us that we have a broken government.
All of this took place four months before 9/11. but none of this rang a bell with Bryant, for al Qaeda or bin Laden were going nearly unmentioned by the mass media at the time.
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.
Legally, there are no significant differences between the investor fraud perpetrated by Enron CEO Ken Lay and the prewar intelligence fraud perpetrated by George W. Bush. Both involved persons in authority who used half-truths and recklessly false statements to manipulate people who trusted them. There is, however, a practical difference: The presidential fraud is wider in scope and far graver in its consequences than the Enron fraud.
As journalist Jim Lobe has noted, it need not take an existential crisis for neoconservatives to fall back on the Munich-appeasement trope. Lobe points out that Donald Kagan, a classicist who is the father of the Weekly Standard's Robert Kagan, attributed his dissillusionment with liberalism to an episode in the late sixties when Cornell University decided to negotiate with black students who were pressuring it into starting a black studies program. As Kagan put it, "Watching administrators demonstrate all the courage of Neville Chamberlain had a great impact on me and I became much more conservative." In other words, in Kagan's Manichaean, neoconservative worldview, black students, by analogy, were Nazis, and their goal of studying black history was the equivalent of world conquest and exterminating the Jews.We've previously discussed this Manichean style, here.
Finally, someone should remind the president that we are still living with the consequences of Desert Shame, when his father and his father's advisers--most notably Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft--advised against finishing the job and liberating Iraq. And the president should show the world that he is cut from different fabric, by immediately moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and removing the pettifogging restrictions on the Iraqi Resistance, thereby taking the fight directly to Saddam on his own territory.
If he does that, he will show his antiterrorist people that the rules have changed, and we are serious. If he doesn't, they will cover their asses with legal opinions forbidding them to act effectively.
Machiavelli famously said that it's impossible to get good leaders in peacetime. We will now find out if we have leaders capable of waging war.
We are tempted to comment, in these last days before the war, on the U.N., and the French, and the Democrats. But the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime. It will produce whatever effects it will produce on neighboring countries and on the broader war on terror. We would note now that even the threat of war against Saddam seems to be encouraging stirrings toward political reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a measure of cooperation in the war against al Qaeda from other governments in the region. It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain. History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts....wouldn't that person have to be shamed into not issuing any more public pronouncements? Shouldn't the sheer magnitude of wrongness preclude that individual from being hired by the New York Times?
The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every man has a right to one vote, and no more in the choice of representatives. The rich have no more right to exclude the poor from the right of voting, or of electing and being elected, than the poor have to exclude the rich; and wherever it is attempted, or proposed, on either side, it is a question of force and not of right. Who is he that would exclude another? That other has a right to exclude him.And regarding granting voting rights on the basis of wealth:
In any view of the case it is dangerous and impolitic, sometimes ridiculous, and always unjust to make property the criterion of the right of voting. If the sum or value of the property upon which the right is to take place be considerable it will exclude a majority of the people and unite them in a common interest against the government and against those who support it; and as the power is always with the majority, they can overturn such a government and its supporters whenever they please.Are the any circumstances in which someone should lose their right to vote?
If, in order to avoid this danger, a small quantity of property be fixed, as the criterion of the right, it exhibits liberty in disgrace, by putting it in competition with accident and insignificance. When a broodmare shall fortunately produce a foal or a mule that, by being worth the sum in question, shall convey to its owner the right of voting, or by its death take it from him, in whom does the origin of such a right exist? Is it in the man, or in the mule? When we consider how many ways property may be acquired without merit, and lost without crime, we ought to spurn the idea of making it a criterion of rights.
But the offensive part of the case is that this exclusion from the right of voting implies a stigma on the moral character of the persons excluded; and this is what no part of the community has a right to pronounce upon another part. No external circumstance can justify it: wealth is no proof of moral character; nor poverty of the want of it.
On the contrary, wealth is often the presumptive evidence of dishonesty; and poverty the negative evidence of innocence. If therefore property, whether little or much, be made a criterion, the means by which that property has been acquired ought to be made a criterion also.
The only ground upon which exclusion from the right of voting is consistent with justice would be to inflict it as a punishment for a certain time upon those who should propose to take away that right from others. The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected.Why?
To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. The proposal therefore to disfranchise any class of men is as criminal as the proposal to take away property.*Paine sacrificed personal profit in order to ensure his work would reach a wide audience at the lowest cost possible.
When we speak of right we ought always to unite with it the idea of duties; rights become duties by reciprocity. The right which I enjoy becomes my duty to guarantee it to another, and he to me; and those who violate the duty justly incur a forfeiture of the right.
In a political view of the case, the strength and permanent security of government is in proportion to the number of people interested in supporting it. The true policy therefore is to interest the whole by an equality of rights, for the danger arises from exclusions. It is possible to exclude men from the right of voting, but it is impossible to exclude them from the right of rebelling against that exclusion; and when all other rights are taken away the right of rebellion is made perfect.
Re: racism as a form of collectivismThe Kirchik article seems to confirm that suspicion about Duke (or at least indicate that it was highly probable):
That's Paul rationalizing his racism through the prism of his libertarian ideology. It reminds me of "philosemitic" antisemites in the 19th century who believed that Jews would lose their "jewness" and become German if they were granted full citzenship. But that didn't happen and the "philosemites" became flat out antisemites. Paul is saying something similar, that once his libertarian dream-world comes into being "the market" will magically transform blacks from "collectivists" (read: communists) into humans with "sensible" opinions. This is the kind of typical "non racist" racism that you can find littered at a site like Stormfront.
I frequently surf Stormfront, and I frequently read threads started by white supremacists. That letter by Paul after the riots is white supremacy 101 ... which is of course why a neo-nazi holocaust denier liked it so much that he posted it to his website.In the Political Letter that was archived at Nizkor Paul asserts that it is rational to be afraid of black men because 95% of black males in major cities are criminal or semi-criminal and that only 5% of blacks hold "sensible" opinions.
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Oh, and David Duke has endorsed Paul for president, and I suspect that Duke has probably read the rest of Paul's political letters. Letters which Paul refuses to release to the press.
While bashing [Martin Luther] King, the newsletters had kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. In a passage titled "The Duke's Victory," a newsletter celebrated Duke's 44 percent showing in the 1990 Louisiana Republican Senate primary. "Duke lost the election," it said, "but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment." In 1991, a newsletter asked, "Is David Duke's new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?" The conclusion was that "our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom." Duke is now returning the favor, telling me that, while he will not formally endorse any candidate, he has made information about Ron Paul available on his website.Given that the diarist Phenry at Daily Kos had already pointed out that the Ron Paul newsletter had been included by a neo-Nazi front group in a list of racialist organizations, it wasn't much of a stretch to guess that this sort of stuff was probably in the other letters. One point that I would correct from my comment is that it's not certain whether Paul or a ghostwriter wrote the particular letter I was alluding to, but given that racialist propaganda was going out in Paul's name for several decades it hardly makes much of a difference who wrote what.
I am now and have been for years a firm advocate of developing a system to limit the people who can vote in this country. We need to find a way to restrict the number of people who can vote. If we don't weed out the chaff soon it may well be too late.Just to be clear: the "chaff" is comprised of poor people, women, and minorities mostly. Although to be fair, given that in 2004 Boortz said that he was having a hard time deciding if al Qaeda or John Kerry voters were more dangerous, one suspects he'd be ok with just stripping the vote from anyone who doesn't vote for his candidate(s).
Don't give me that democracy nonsense.
An election is coming in 11 months and millions of parasites, led by single females, are getting ready to accelerate the destruction of the concepts of individuality, private property rights, self-reliance, and this very country by putting a hideous, power-hungry, big-government socialist* into the White House.Ok, I lied. Here's a comment ... that's the dumbest f'ing thing - wait, second dumbest f'ing thing -I've heard in a while. Germany helped build the Nazi warmachine with approval and help from socialist Henry Ford and other communist entities like GM and the Nazi death catalogue was automated with help from the Leninists at IBM. And the left-wing Maoists at The Economist (part of the mainstream media that Boortz so brilliantly serves as a "balance" to) consider Hillary Clinton to be conservative.
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And a word for you welfare brood mares out there. That's right .. welfare brood mares .. it's time for someone to call you out for what you are. Perhaps one of the greatest social wrongs a person can commit in this country is to have a child that you cannot afford to care for. Do you really think that it's perfectly OK for you to get yourself knocked up, download your baby, and then tell the taxpayers "Hey, look what I did! Now you folks cough up the money I need to take care of this child." Yeah .. that's what America is all about .. and you're going to be right there in November to vote for Hillary, aren't you. In fact all of you are: the uneducated and unmotivated, the "I'm not responsible for my own health care" crowd, and the single moms. All of you want someone else to step in and take care of you after you've screwed up your own lives, and who better than Hillary, a woman more than ready to use the police power of government to reward you for your votes.
You do know, don't you, that you have absolutely no constitutional right to cast a vote in this presidential election. No .. you probably don't know that. That would mean you are educated, but you're not. You were educated by the government ... and the government sure isn't going to disclose that inconvenient little fact to you. Somehow the media in this country has bought the politician's about this "right to vote." It's not there. Doesn't exist. And to save this country we need to figure out a way to get tens of millions the parasite class off the voter roles. Welfare? No vote. Illiterate? Stay home on election day. Begging for the government to be your lifetime nanny? Let the doers, the achievers cast the votes. Just stay away.
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*About that asterisk. Current language usage compels me to use the term "socialist" when describing Hillary Clinton. The actual word we need to use is "fascist." The left, however, has managed to take the "fascist" word and turn it into an epithet against right-wingers. Nazis were fascists, right? Perhaps you might be one of the few to learn that "Nazi," in German, is "Nationalsozialismus." The true name of the Nazi Party in Germany was the National Socialist German Worker's Party." German Nazis weren't at all fond of capitalism .. and neither is Hillary Clinton. When it comes to the free market Hillary has quite a lot in common with these folks ... not that you'll ever read that in the mainstream media.
