IVY
LEAGUERS MAKE BAD PRESIDENTS
PART 1 of 3
By
Jon Christian Ryter
May 30, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
Last November the Huffington Post commented that Texas Gov. Rick Perry was "hostile" towards the existing college system because he didn't do well scholastically. It seems Perry's transcripts from his years at Texas A&M reveal that Perry seldom earned anything higher than a "C" in the courses he took. He earned a C in US History, a D in Shakespeare and a D in economics.
This is the 21st century. Who cares about Shakespeare? When was the last time you heard Fox Business News quote some Ivy League loser in a Financial Times or Wall Street Journal piece who, when asked if he thought the US currency would remain solvent, reply with a quote from Hamlet: "To be or not to be—that is the question." Or, have a reporter ask Gov. Rick Perry when he was still a candidate, how he thought he would fare in the primaries in March and April, only to have the governor quote Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by saying: "Beware of the Ides of March." Or finally, when a reporter asks Barack Obama about his paternity and have Obama quote Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet by answering: "What's in a name?"
My personal view is that Shakespeare is dead literature. Only an intellectual moron would speak such dribble in polite conversation. The verbiage is corrupt, and it doesn't make sense. If you put me on the racks, I would be forced to confess that while it makes me want to vomit the Old English vocabulary one vowel at a time, my wife loves Shakespeare. I find it not only boring but inane. Literature? Give me Edgar Allan Poe or, better yet, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain for those who don't know)—and fewer still will since Mark Twain has now been branded as a racist, and his words are unfit for your children because Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are now politically incorrect. Fret not, fair soul. You can still find Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn at your local flea market—or at a rare book store where first editions of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn can sell for as much a $7,000.
So, to me a "D" in Shakespeare is a badge of honor. It means you survived Dread & Duress. I could never, in good conscious every vote for a political candidate who scored an "A" in Shakespeare because that person is so removed from common American thought that he would never represent me—or the conservative, constitutional ideals I stand for. The fact that he, or she, would waste his or her education on such worthless liberal tomfoolery tells me that he or she believe they are, or wants to be, part of an elite group of the most refined Americans who have been bred to believe their destiny is to rule the rest of us.
But, let's get back to Gov. Perry for a minute—and to what's important to the average Jane Doe and Joe Doaks who pays the taxes and does all the backbreaking work, all the fighting and all the dying to keep this country strong. No one outside this country likes us. But everyone wants to live here. They just want to change the greatest democracy in history into something else. They don't seem to get it. Once you change who we are, we aren't it anymore. We become what they are trying to escape.
Believe me when I say this: what's important to America's children is not learning about Shakespeare (although a lot of teachers and a whole big bunch of mothers might disagree with me). Me, I never earned a plugged penny in my life from quoting Shakespeare, but I have earned a good living through my knowledge of both American and world history and, even more, how the US government is mismanaged by thieves and opportunists. That's why what our kids need to learn is everything they can about the history of this nation and its government. How are they going to know that politicians are stealing the taxpayers blind if they don't know what politician can and cannot do under the law? But, most important they need to understand their rights under the rule of law through the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And they need to understand what makes the Bill of Rights different from the European Union Convention on Human Rights, or its UN clone, the UN Covenant on Human Rights. Under the United States Bill of Rights, liberty is inherent. Under both the UN or EU Convention on Human Rights, freedom is a retractable right given, limited or withdrawn on the whims of politicians because "citizens" are not equals, they are human chattel.
Learning the history of this great nation is what's important. Because to appreciate liberty and profit from it, you have to understand why so many Americans shed their blood to preserve it. Take that away from America's children and they will grow up with a corrupted and distorted view of what America is, who our forefathers were, and how—and why—they very deliberately created the greatest model of liberty in the history of the world. But even more important is the question of why—and how—powerful, greedy rich men were allowed to slowly erase the rights our ancestors fought and died for in places like Lexington and Concord, Ticonderoga, Bunker Hill, Norfolk, Long Island, Mount Holly, Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, and scores of other names on a map blurred by the erasers of revisionist political correctness in the hands of those who decided Americans are to blame for all of the unrest in the world.
Let's look at America's first president. It's important to study how Gen. George Washington structured the government of the United States because if John Adams or Alexander Hamilton had been our first president, liberty would have vanished before there was a second presidential election. The government of the United States would have quickly morphed into something much more closely resembling the parliamentary governments of Europe in which Lords ruled. Our Presidents would have remained President, but our Vice Presidents would have become Prime Ministers.
We would not have had to wait for Woodrow Wilson and John Pierpont Morgan to convert the Republic into a democracy, or for Franklin Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and JP Morgan to complete the task by converting that democracy into a form of parliamentarian socialism. Our God-breathed inherent rights would have morphed into "mother-may-I" rights conditioned on our obedience to whatever administration was in power. Our rights should be as secure under a liberal as they are under a conservative. Sad. They aren't. But, they would be if bribing politicians, or politicians providing financially lucrative quid pro quos for those bribes was made illegal—and everyone doing the buying and selling of political favors received a mandatory 20 year vacation as guests of the taxpayers of the United States.
Our written Constitution and Bill of Rights under Federalists who believed the States should not have superior authority over the central government, was doomed to morph into something that read more like the UN Covenant on Human Rights than the Bill of Rights even if we had a few more presidents like George Washington and a few less John Adamses, Abe Lincolns, Woodrow Wilsons, Franklin D. Roosevelts, Jimmy Carters and Barack Obamas. Greedy, power hungry men would have still sold their souls to the princes of industry and the barons of banking and business who needed a central government that unilaterally controlled both the States and the people. Money buys what money wants. The Constitution gave the States the superior role of governance—jointly with the people, the human capital of the rich. Yet the princes of industry, who wanted a dictatorship in America controlled by them, successfully marginalized liberty by buying its caretakers with bribes the politicians call political contributions.
As a youth John Adams was taught by private tutors although his father was a man of modest means. At an early age, Adams' parents decided their son would go to Harvard College in Cambridge. They wanted him to become a clergyman. A brilliant intellectual with a superior IQ, Adams became a delegate in the Continental Congress and a diplomat the courts of Europe during the Revolutionary War. Nicknamed the "Atlas of Independence," the second President of the United States, Adams became the first president to actually erase the Bill of Rights with the signing of the very unconstitutional Aliens and Sedition Act of 1798 that was designed to abridge free speech by stifling criticism of his oppressive political tactics. John Adams saw himself as an elected king.
Men who fought the British to win liberty and with it, the right of free men to speak their mind, were arrested for speaking out against the tyrannical edicts of John Adams. Adams believed the central government had the right through implied authority to overrule the States, when the Constitution specifically said the opposite. Adams relied on the five Federalist appointed Supreme Court justices to enforce the unconstitutional edits of the 5th Congress with respect to the Aliens and Sedition Act of 1797. The first victim of the Sedition Act was a Vermont Representative in the US Congress, Matthew Lyon, who published a letter in a local newspaper complaining that with the federal executive "...every consideration of the public welfare is swallowed up in a continual grasp for power and unbound thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation and self avarice." (Adams wanted the presidency to be treated like the "crown heads" of Europe—as royalty. Lyon was arrested and brought before Supreme Court Justice William Tyler Paterson. After a brief trial reminiscent of the Salem Witch Trials, a jury found Lyon guilty. The trial only took a few minutes because Justice Paterson refused to allow Lyon's attorney, Anthony Haswell, to present a defense. Paterson then ordered the jury to find Lyon guilty. They did.
Associate Justice Samuel Chase, who addressed Congress and urged them to pass the Aliens & Sedition Act, was more zealous in his persecutions of Republican-Democrat than Paterson. He was impeached and removed from the high court for the Sedition Act persecutions. Ten US citizens were convicted under an unconstitutional law that violated the Bill of Rights by limiting freedom of the press and restricting the right of free speech. (Does any of this have a right of familiarity today?) Thomas Jefferson and James Madison authored the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves, nullifying the Alien and Sedition Act, and stressing that Congress created a central government as an agent of the States, and that it was very deliberately created subservient to those States.
To punish the Federalist Supreme Court Justices who abused their authority by prosecuting US citizens for exercising their first amendment right to free speech, Congress reduced the number of Supreme Court Justices from six to five. Then they impeached New Hampshire US District Court Judge John Pickering. Following Pickering's removal, the House of Representatives impeached Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase—one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence—for acting as Adams' judicial henchman. The Senate, however, refused to remove him from the bench and Chase continued to serve on the high court until his death in 1811.
The Federalists, who controlled both Houses of Congress, passed what became known as the Midnight Judges Act, (the Judiciary Act of 1801). They reduced the size of the Supreme Court and reorganized the federal court system doubling the number of circuit-riding judgeships in every federal circuit (except the 6th, which had only one circuit court judge). The circuit judgeships were abolished in 1802 even though the judges continued to ride circuit until 1869.. But in 1801, in the 19 days between the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1801 and the end of his presidency, John Adams filled as many of these new judgeships as he could to guarantee that federalist philosophy would dominate the opinions of the federal judiciary for years to come. The judges became known as "Midnight Judges" because their appointments were made official only hours before Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as the third president of the United States. Long before Franklin D. Roosevelt politicized the federal judiciary, John Adams initiated the practice.
Compare Adams' political philosophy with another Harvard alumni—Barack Obama—and you are at least privately forced to acknowledge that not much has changed with the political pedigrees of social progressives in 210 years. Patriotic rhetoric is just that—electioneering rhetoric. We, as a People, need to come to grips with a simple reality: the tongue-in-cheek pun: "How do you know when a politician is lying? When his lips are moving," is not a joke. It's fact. Politicians—from both sides of the aisle—say whatever they think the audience they are addressing will buy. It's a sales pitch, plain and simple. When they say you can't judge a book by its covers, they're wrong. You can. What's between the covers is the sales pitch. The cover tells you the pedigree of the candidate.
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One good example of the proverbial sales pitch was Newt Gingrich campaigning in the 2012 GOP primaries. He promising the citizens of every state something from the taxpayers. In fairness to Gingrich, while what he did was disingenuous, that's how political party leaders enact legislation that the constituency of the legislators do not favor—they promise the politicians whose votes they need some grand gratuity they cannot resist in exchange for that vote. Since that's how Speaker Gingrich got votes for legislation the leadership wanted enacted, it's reasonable to assume that Candidate Gingrich would use the same tactics to get the votes he needed to prevail in the presidential primaries. In 2008, Candidate Obama did the same thing. He promised everything to everyone and delivered nothing. For part two click below.
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