Hey, Tomorrow is President's day. Now I may be tempted to go to Reagan's library and take a massive piss on, but for some reason everyone keeps on saying that we should not only respect our presidents, but we should look to our founding father's for their wise words..
Hendrick Hertzberg, New Yorker - [Alexander] Hamilton hated—hated—the compromise under which the Constitutional Convention was blackmailed into giving every state the same number of senators regardless of population. . .
But it wasn’t just the future Federalist party stalwart Hamilton who hated the two-senators-per-state provision. The future Democratic-Republican party boss Madison hated it, too. At the time, the infant nation’s most populous state had around twelve times as many people as its least populous. To Madison and Hamilton, the idea that one citizen should have twelve times as much representation in the Senate as another citizen, simply because they lived in different places, was self-evidently offensive and absurd. (Two hundred and twenty years later, the absurdity is five and a half times worse: a Wyoming voter gets sixty-eight times more representation in the Senate than a Californian.)
Hamilton and Madison (Washington, too, by the way; I’m not sure about Jay) strongly favored what was then called “proportional representation.“ (Modern P.R., under which legislative seats are distributed roughly in line with aggregate party shares of the vote, hadn’t been invented yet.) Obama-like, they forced themselves to pay what they knew was a corrupt and immoral price in order to get a barely acceptable deal—which deal they sold, Obama-like, as a fine, public-spirited solution.. .
You know what, I'll be there with my boot on their face. I mean, the filibuster is the dumbest goddamn thing and it's glorification in Mr. Smith goes to Washington has distorted everyone's thinking about it.
The republicans skipped over the bit about slaves being 3/5 of a person when reading the constitution in congress a bit back.
Though I have heard rumors that if you read the first amendment out loud in front of a mirror thirteen times, uncle Sam comes out of the mirror and demands you join the army. Historians hurt themselves laughing because the political ideology of the founders was more or less incomprehensible and confused as shit when seen in a modern frame and people constantly try to anachronism them into shit like this.
Jefferson: Why yes, Government ought do nothing but essential tasks like defense and education, except when I need to buy Louisiana. Why yes, let's disband the Army and Navy. Both politicians and the press are evil. Murder all Tories. Let us have a democratic political culture that dismays the elites. Dismantle the Congregational Church of New England. Physiocracy is the only way to wealth. Pay no attention to the slave quarters. Death to bankers and capitalists.
Modern Republicans: It's morning again in America -Thomas Jefferson
You know, the founders got to live in an awesome time when anybody seemed cool as long as they weren't a monarchist. Even if basing an ideology on the writings and actions of American politics in 1787 is as good of an idea as basing one on American politicians in 2011.
Jefferson obviously bought Louisiana because the whole "nation of independent yeoman farmers" held precedent to him over "Small government" An actual Jeffersonian society would be a relatively just one, too bad in reality it was built on the mass graves of Indians by millions of black slaves, and them rapidly co-opted by the industrial revolution and capitalism.
The US Congress, an institution full of the scum that floats to the top in American politics, did not faithfully discuss the blacks were considered subhuman by Our Founding Fathers.
The South is generally awful for having owned slaves, though it's sort of ironic or at least comical if you ever see me put on a cotton sweater. In fact, it's sort of comical that we're approaching St. Patty's day, which should be a reminder that at one point black slaves were considered more valuable than the Irish. And yet everyone wants to be Irish on a day in March.
They may not have been in fields, but the Irish had to crawl around down in mines in spaces about as big as a sock drawer. While the slaves simply had to work in the fields. I guess the Irish didn't have it the worse because they weren't bred like Cattle.
But anyway, moving on to a founding father who wasn't all about owning slaves, Hamilton was correct about just about everything and was the best founding father. The central bank owned, proportional representation is pretty cool, the south sucks, Aaron Burr was a dipshit. If you're going to make a bourgeois republic you might as well do it right and Hamilton should have been the first president.
Hamilton Fucking Owned, Federalism Forever. Of any of our founding father's, Hamilton is the most responsible for modern American capitalism. So maybe I can't love him too much. Jefferson was probably the greatest enemy to capitalism in American history. I mean, we already went over the whole slave thing. He was one of those. Capitalism is revolutionary compared to Jefferson's economic vision. Especially with Agrarian Justice.
On a final note, realize that the other founders kept Paine away from any political power after the revolution and didn't lift a finger to help him after he was arrested in revolutionary France. Well, I guess that's not entirely true. Jefferson did probably pay to have Paine taken out of prison before he was to be executed, and put him on a ship back to the US, letting him stay in a tiny non-completed white house until a political lynch mob was at the door demanding that the "atheistic Paine be divorced from the American state.
Yeah.. god bless America.
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