What Greatness Really Is

Think Progress tries to point out that George Washington,  a founder I think the Palin/Beck community would certainly get behind, no? would be embarrassed at their whole "Ground Zero" nonsense.

For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens.

But of course, pointing this out does nothing for these people. Number one, they're not reading Think Progress. People like me, who already know the shit they're saying, read Think Progress.

And if there's a choice between actual George Washington texts and Newt Gingrich going on tv saying what he thinks Washington would have said when it comes to saying Obama loves communism, do you think for one moment these people are going to want to read George Washington? OF COURSE NOT!

I've been reading Jefferson's Summary on the Rights of British America for a week now, and guess what? The shit's hard to understand! It's not "oh, coming up after the break, we'll see if Obama tried to eat a baby!!" The shit means that I have to re-read Locke and Bacon etc to even understand what the fuck Jefferson was talking about.

Washington, Jefferson...my point is that the things we fight about today were not brought about by the least common denominator amongst us shouting the loudest. And the next time you hear somebody try to play the "our founding fathers were but simple, common sense farmers" onto some sort of aw, shucks! contest with a political candidate today whose sole criterion for running the country seems to be that he's okay to have a beer with and can drive a pickup truck, remember this:

Jefferson was typical, like all of them - and, it was assumed, their readers - well versed in the writings of the political philosophers Harrington, Hume, Locke, Halifax, Montisquieue, Sidney, and Bolingbroke, as well as moral philosophers such as Grotius, Francis Hutcheson, Pufendorf, and Vattel. Moreover, all could recite Thucydides, Tacitus and the Earl of Clarendon. All were familar with the system of checks and balances, of laws and traditions that made up English law. Every literate freeholder was expected to understand what made up the constitutional rights of Englishmen, and what were the natural laws. and what were their natural rights, their belief that, from a state of nature, man had entered into a society by a contract and therefore possessed rights that neither he himself nor his posterity could lose or dispose of;

Does that sound like the people you're supporting? Yes, no? Maybe? These weren't fucking idiots that would have a beer with you, these were men who studied The Enlightenment. They wouldn't cross the street to piss on you. THAT'S the country you love today, of which you know nothing about.