Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
I wonder how many people are aware that there is a special day that has been set aside by Congress to commemorate the signing of the Constitution each year.
From the Library of Congress:
Constitution Day and Citizenship Day is observed each year on September 17 to commemorate the signing of the Constitution on September 17, 1787, and “recognize all who, by coming of age or by naturalization, have become citizens.”
This commemoration had its origin in 1940, when Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing and requesting the President to issue annually a proclamation setting aside the third Sunday in May for the public recognition of all who had attained the status of American citizenship. The designation for this day was “I Am An American Day.”
In 1952 Congress repealed this joint resolution and passed a new law moving the date to September 17 to commemorate “the formation and signing, on September 17, 1787, of the Constitution of the United States” but the day was designated “Citizenship Day” and also retained its original purpose of recognizing all those who had attained the status of American citizenship. This law urged civil and educational authorities of states, counties, cities and towns to make plans for the proper observance of the day and “for the complete instruction of citizens in their responsibilities and opportunities as citizens of the United States and of the State and locality in which they reside.”
In 2004 under Senator Byrd’s urging, Congress changed the designation of this day to “Constitution Day and Citizenship Day” and added two new requirements in the commemoration of this Day. The first is that the head of every federal agency provide each employee with educational and training materials concerning the Constitution on September 17th. The second is that each education institution that receives federal funds hold an educational program on the Constitution for students on September 17 of each year.
It appears that few Americans know about this educational requirement. It also appears that few schools have complied with the Congressional mandate to hold an educational program about the Constitution on the designated date.
As a former teacher, I’m not one to argue that we shouldn’t be teaching our students about the Constitution. I think our educational institutions should provide our children with in-depth knowledge of the Constitution of the United States—as well as with a wealth of information about the organization and responsibilities of the three branches of our Federal Government.
A new project sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots aims to pressure public schools to teach students about the Constitution this coming September. That sounds like a good idea on the surface—but here’s what has some legal advocates concerned: The Tea Party Patriots are advocating for the use of their favored “Constitutional” curriculum in the public schools.
Doug Kendall, the Founder and President of the Constitutional Accountability Center, recently penned an article on the subject of the Tea Party Patriots and their favored Constitutional curriculum for the Huffington Post. In his article titled Parents: This Fall, Beware Tea Partiers Dressed Up as James Madison, Kendall wrote:
“When I was growing up, my mom warned me each fall about Halloween candy with a hidden razor blade. As a parent, the thing I’ll be most scared about this fall is the prospect of Tea Partiers coming to my child’s school dressed up like James Madison to ‘teach’ the U.S. Constitution.
“It is undoubtedly the case that all our kids could use a good civics lesson, but these modern day Madisons are peddling snake oil, not real history. Mother Jones reported yesterday that, during Constitution Week in September this year, the so-called ‘Tea Party Patriots’ are planning to pressure school boards across America to allow them into our schools to teach our children about the Constitution using materials from the National Center for Constitutional Studies, an organization founded by a genuinely scary individual named W. Cleon Skousen, a far-right conspiracy theorist with links to the John Birch Society who passed away in 2006.”
Kendall claims the curriculum developed by the National Center for Constitutional Studies uses highly inaccurate source material and issued the following challenge:
“I defy the Tea Party Patriots to find one credible historian willing to support their view of the Constitution’s history. Before the Tea Party gets to go into school and teach our children about the Constitution, they need to find a tenured professor on the history faculty on one of any of the 50 highest-rated universities in the United States who will vouch for the accuracy of their teachings. To qualify to teach America’s children about the Constitution you need to do more than dress up like James Madison.”
In Radical Constitutionalism, an article that appeared in the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen called W. Cleon Skousen “the constitutional guru of the Tea Party movement.” Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, says Skousen “argued that the founding fathers rejected collectivist ‘European’ philosophies and instead derived their divinely inspired principles of limited government from fifth-century Anglo-Saxon chieftains, who in turn modeled themselves on the Biblical tribes of ancient Israel” in his 1981 book The 5,000 Year Leap.
Skousen believed our Constitution was “divinely inspired.” Rosen says Skousen “saw limited government as not only an ethnic idea, rooted in the Anglo-Saxons, but also as a Christian one, embodied in the idea of unalienable rights and duties that derive from God, and he insisted that the founders’ ‘religious precepts turned out to be the heart and soul of the entire American political philosophy.’”
Rosen reports that Skousen was dismissed by mainstream conservatives for many years as “a conspiracy-mongering extremist.” In an article that appeared in Mother Jones last week, Stephanie Mencimer wrote: “Skousen’s views on the Constitution are considered well outside the mainstream, and they include ideas drawn from white supremacist dogma and other shady sources. One of his textbooks on constitutional history contained blatantly racist material suggesting that slaves were actually a happy bunch of folks.”
So how did Skousen’s views on our Constitution, which had been considered outside the mainstream by most conservatives for years, become popular with the Tea Party Patriots? Why, Glenn Beck…of course! Beck helped give a boost to Skousen’s book The 5000 Year Leap when he endoresed it. The book then became both a bestseller and a Tea Party favorite.
In December of 2008, Beck recommended the book to his followers as a way to become informed about “socialism and communism and fascism, and the free market, Americanism.”
Beck wrote of Skousen’s book:
“The first thing you could do, please, is get the 5,000 Year Leap. Over my book or anything else, get the 5,000 Year Leap. You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. It is so easy to read. It’s the book Ronald Reagan wanted taught in high schools and Ted Kennedy stopped it from happening. That should tell you all you need to know. It is so easy to understand. When you read these principles, your mouth will fall open. You’ll read it and you’ll be – the scales will fall off your eyes on who we are. Please, number one thing: Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. 5,000 Year Leap is the first part of that. Because it will help you understand American free enterprise. You’ll be able to defend it. You’ll be able to know what makes it possible for 6% of humanity living under our free economy to produce 1/2 of the Earth’s developed wealth every single year. That’s staggering! What is it? It’s the virtues and the principles that our founders believed in, that took us and pushed us and made us – allowed us to take a 5,000 year leap from the dark into the sunshine. We should know why collectivism is wrong. We should know why federal supervision is going to hold our standard of living down. It will reduce our productivity, just as it has in every single country where it has ever been tried. We should know why communist leaders of the past considered socialism the high road to communism. We should know the words of the old communist leaders that said ‘We don’t need to fight a war. We can push them into socialism and once we have them into socialism, communism is next.’ We should see and read the actual words of the early 20th century American Progressives and see the roots.”
Who wouldn’t trust the Constitutional views of a man who wrote a book that Glenn Beck thinks is the most important book for Americans to read??? Who wouldn’t want their children learning about our Constitution from educational materials provided by an organization founded by that same individual?
If, on the other hand, you’re as concerned about Tea Party Patriots pressuring your local school board to adopt the curriculum materials developed by the National Center for Constitutional Studies to teach your children about the Constitution as Doug Kendall is, you might want to check with your local school system to see what plans it may have for Constitution Day on September 17th.
SOURCES
The Tea Party Wants to Teach Your Kids About the Constitution (Mother Jones)
Legal Advocates Slam Tea Party Constitution Classes (Mother Jones)
Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life:Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him (Salon)
Parents: This Fall, Beware Tea Partiers Dressed Up as James Madison (Huffington Post)
Radical Constitutionalism (New York Times)
Glenn Beck: Are you a Sept. 12th person? (Glenn Beck)
Wearing Dunce Cap, Tea Party Tries To Indoctrinate Children With Bad Constitutional History (Constitutional Accountability Center)
stephenwv,
I guess spinmeistering and mudslinging is in the eye of the beholder.
Have a lovely weekend!
So you tell me what am I spinning??? NOTHING the truth is what I have spoken. You continue to sling mud by unjustly calling me a spinmeister. I do NOT need to spin. I have the truth on my side. When you lose on the the issues you resort to deceptive spin and name calling and mud slinging instead of discussing the truth of the issues… to avoid the issues you lose on.
People, solve the dilemma and actually read the book. Determine for yourself what the truth is… don’t be a sheep to be led by deceit.
Mmmmm. Foamy.
stephenwv,
It looks like you’re a pretty good “spinmeister.”
Why not take your own advice and move along…since–according to you–there “is nothing to see here.”
On Elaine’s second copy and paste from a well known liberal progressive educator, who does not attempt to hide his bias with his mudslinging and proclamations of what Tea Partiers do and think. Thank you for you for your biased presentation of a biased presenter of his political agenda.
He lumps quotes about Skousen and his works to deceive you into thinking all his works are the same. The 5000 Year Leap stands out as a true account of our Founders. Quoting their writings at length.
Skousen has done and said all that is stated BUT NOT IN THE 5000 YEAR LEAP as the deceitful spin would try to convince you to not read the book.
To move the subject slightly to :The Making of America”…
“The Making of America is about the world’s greatest political success formula. In a little over a century, this formula allowed a small segment of the human family — less than 6 percent — to become the richest nation on earth. It allowed them to originate more than half of the world’s total production and enjoy the highest standard of living in the history of the world.”
“But Americans have more to share than their wealth. They have the world’s greatest political success formula to share. In this respect they have been at fault. They have been too self-conscious about their system and its accomplishments. At times they have been almost apologetic that they have had such a remarkable system when the rest of the world did not. The world needs to know this formula.” – From the introduction to the Making of America
In this book you will learn the Founding Fathers’ story. Much of it is told in the words of the Founders themselves. You will feel the power of their minds sweeping away centuries of bad government and bad laws to formulate a whole new society based on human freedom.
Read what others have said about The Making of America .
“There is no other contemporary source that offers such a thorough compilation of statements by the Framers relating to constitutional interpretation. Furthermore, there are few works that actually attempt to find the Founders’ purpose for each phrase of the Constitution. This well-organized approach toward finding the Constitutions substance and meaning has great merit and provides a wealth of material on the Founding Fathers’ intentions when drafting the American Constitution.”
Leonard Anthony Leo
A former member of the
U.S. Senate Subcommittee
On the Constitution.
“The Making of America will serve as a great aid to all of us who serve as members of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution. It belongs in every library throughout the land as must reading, particularly for our youth.”
Edward P. Morgan
A member of the National
Bicentennial Commission.
“I have just completed the reading of the book, “The Making of America”, and have now placed it in an important position in my law library. When applying the framers’ intent to the resolution of constitutional issues, “The Making of America” is indispensable. The quotations of the writers of the document go to the heart of the problem and make this solution exceedingly clear. It is a book long overdue.”
William C. Goodlow Justice
“The text was recommended to the resource material by the Social Studies Curriculum Advisory Committee. This committee works under the jurisdiction of the State Textbook Commission. The recommendation of the committee was then acted on by the Commission on November 13, 1986. The Commission at the time voted unanimously to accept the recommendation of the committee. Therefore, it will be suggested to Utah schools that the book be used as resource material for teachers and student use.”
James R. Moss
State Superintendent
Of Public Instruction
“I wanted to thank you for … giving me your book on the Constitution (“The Making of America”). I read a good deal of it during my flight back to Washington and I found your thoughts interesting, insightful, and enlightening. I cannot tell you how much admiration I have for your work educating Americans on our most important document. I have said many times that your earlier works provided incentive for me to enter public service. For that I will always be truly grateful.”
Senator Jack Kemp
But hay.. I’m sure Elaine and the other spinmeisters here will try to convince you how radical, biased, and blindly following the John Birchers and the guru Glen Beck the above people are… so don’t pay attention to them… move along… there is nothing to see here.
On Elaine’s first copy and paste above:
Elaine CONTINUES to deceive with her spin to avoid the truth.
All this SPIN about Moses and Anglo Saxons refuses to address the TRUTH. This is NOT about religion as your spin would attempt to disparage. No where in the book does it say that God wrote the Constitution. The 5000 Year Leap QUOTES the feuding Fathers who themselves have said the they believe the Constitution is inspired by God. Elaine prefers to LIE about it. Why does she resort to such despicable behavior to convince you to not read the book?
The book explains that these cultures were a bottom up culture of responsibility. When people had a problem that they themselves could not solve… they looked to their family. If the problem was too insurmountable, they looked to their friends and neighbors in the community who all cared for each other and helped those in need who could not do for themselves. If the community found something that was insurmountable like an invasion or regional famine, they would look to their national leaders for help. This is referred to as “THE PEOPLE”S LAW” and has NOTHING to do with religion as your DECEPTIVE LIBERAL SPINMEISTERS would have you believe.
With lies like this bombarding all of you by the liberal media, the liberal bloggers, and the liberal Washingtonian spinmeisters, you trust them??? Weird. When I find a questionable situation I become skeptical and do my own research to find the truth for myself. I just refuse to be mindless and be deceived.
Read the book for yourself to find the truth because you are not getting it from those that do not want you to understand the thoughts of the Founders that were behind the creation of the greatest document ever.
Why do they try SO hard to convince you not to read The 5000 Year Leap?
Even those that admit they have NERVER read the book yet they tell you they know all about it. If that is not trying to deceive you, nothing is. If my telling the truth is trying to deceive you… well… Years ago George Orwell wrote: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT AND THE PERILS OF POPULAR ORIGINALISM
Jared A. Goldstein
Arizona Law Review
VOL. 53:827
http://www.arizonalawreview.org/pdf/53-3/53arizlrev827.pdf
Excerpt:
a. The Tea Party’s Mythological History
Professor Jack Balkin asserts that constitutional rhetoric in American
politics comes in two popular flavors, redemption and restoration. The Tea Party movement falls sharply on the side of restoration. A typical Tea Party group characterizes its mission as seeking “to promote the principles of our founding fathers—individual liberty and responsibility, limited government and moral leadership.” Tea Party supporters believe that Americans have turned their backs on the “the Founders,”—an amalgamation of the leaders of the American independence movement of 1776 and the Framers of the Constitution of 1789—and the movement is devoted to restoring their vision of the Constitution.
The Tea Party movement invokes Founders that are more mythological
than historical. The establishment of the United States and the creation of the Constitution were nothing less than “miracles.” Its eternal words command our devotion. Of course, the hagiographic depiction of the Founders is far from novel, but Tea Party supporters take it to an extreme because they reject conventional accounts of history. Just as they reject the mainstream media’s depiction of current events because of supposed liberal bias, they believe that mainstream historians have distorted American history to paint the Founders and America in a negative light and to undermine what they view as American values. As Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen declare in A Patriot’s History of the United States, for decades “those writing history have allowed their biases to distort the way American history is taught, . . . utterly downplaying the greatness of America’s patriots and the achievements of ‘dead white men.’” In July 2010, Glenn Beck, one of the most trusted figures among Tea Party supporters, hosted an hour-long program of his Fox News show entitled “Restoring History,” in which he told his viewers that American history books are full of lies produced with “malicious progressive intent.” For the last hundred years, Beck explained, leftists (as he characterizes them) have been rewriting history because they knew that they had “to separate us from our history to be able to separate us from our Constitution and our God.” Beck warned that all conventional views of American history are suspect: “You’ve been taught one lie, I think, your whole life.” The Tea Party’s mission thus involves not merely restoring the Founders’ Constitution, but also restoring the true history of the Founders.
The Tea Party invokes the Founders in distinctly religious terms. Tea
Party supporters frequently declare their “faith” in the Founders. The Wetumpka Tea Party declares, “We believe in the principles that our country was founded upon: Faith, Honesty, Reverence, Hope, Thrift, Humility, Charity, Sincerity, Moderation, Hard Work, Courage, Personal Responsibility, Gratitude.” The Vidalia Tea Party likewise affirms its adherence to the “values upon which the United States of America was founded,” which they identify as beliefs in “Natural Law, . . . free will, [and] the primacy of individual and personal responsibility.” All Tea Party groups claim to speak for the Founders and to stand for their values, but they often differ about what those values are. Tea Party groups declare these
distillations of the Founders’ principles without any reference to history but as affirmations of faith.
b. The Commie-Fighting Constitution of W. Cleon Skousen
To the extent that the Tea Party supporters point to written sources for
their understanding of the Founders and the Constitution, they rely on narratives that reject conventional history and which, in turn, have been spurned by mainstream historians. As Harvard historian Jill Lepore has declared, Tea Party claims about the Founders are “to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution.” The most popular sources about the Founders and the Constitution among Tea Party supporters are
the books of the late W. Cleon Skousen, an ardent supporter of the far-right John Birch Society. His Cold War-era books about the Constitution share a singular goal: to save America from international Communism Legal historian Jack Rakove once described Skousen’s work as “a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit. Nonetheless, hundreds of Tea Party groups use Skousen’s books as the basis for seminars devoted to educating their
members and the public on the principles of the Constitution and to show that the answers to America’s problems can be found in the wisdom of the Founding Fathers.
Like Beck and many Tea Party supporters, Skousen believed that leftists
have sought to manipulate what Americans believe about history, undermining belief in the Founders and the Constitution in order to make it possible to trick the nation into accepting Communism, which right-thinking Americans would otherwise recognize as a foreign doctrine.58 According to Skousen, the false history foisted upon Americans succeeded in creating a “[g]eneration of lost Americans” and a nation of “un-Americans,” who had lost touch with their national identity.
Skousen sought to reintroduce America to the true Founders, presenting
them as a unified group of chosen disciples to whom God revealed a divine formula for government. He scoffed at conventional versions of American history that depict the Founders as relatively nonreligious deists, declaring that the Founders “continually petitioned God in fervent prayers, both public and private, and looked upon his divine intervention in their daily lives as a singular blessing.” Skousen likewise rejected the conventional understanding that the framers of the Constitution were principally influenced by European philosophers
of the Enlightenment era, including Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Far from following what Skousen refers to as the “fads of European philosophy,” the Founders took their inspiration from the Bible and the ancient Anglo-Saxons. In fact, the Founders rejected all “European” theories and “made European theories unconstitutional.”
Elaine,
I am sorry that I forget that Bible, er..I mean civics class!
Elaine,
And artfully done….. You’re good at what you do….. And it appears you don’t have a hidden agenda…..
AY,
I’m a deceitful mudslinger. Haven’t you heard?
*****
rafflaw,
Didn’t you know that God actually carved the US Constitution on a tablet that Moses brought down from the Mount?
Elaine,
Your works exceeds words…..
Interesting update Elaine. It is amazing that people can actually believe this drivel.
All Patriots ‘Know’ That Moses Wrote the Constitution
By Garrett Epps
Oct 29 2010
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/all-patriots-know-that-moses-wrote-the-constitution/65353/
Excerpt:
The subject of today’s class is the Constitution, but the discussion keeps veering to various methods of sending Mexicans back where they came from.
Not surprising: Our instructor is Lester Pearce, Arizona Justice of the Peace and brother of Russell Pearce, author of that state’s harshly anti-immigrant Senate Bill 1020 1070. Lester Pearce can’t stop mentioning that Mexicans have begun leaving Arizona since the official persecution began. In fact, Pearce says, he wants to send some Americans to Mexico too. “I wrote a bill when I was in the legislature to give [the Gadsden Purchase] back to Mexico, because we had people in Tucson who were socialists.” Mexico didn’t want them, he says.
We are in the basement of Our Savior’s Way Lutheran Church in Ashburn, Va. It is Saturday, October 23, ten days before the midterm elections. A group of 50 patriots has gathered for a seminar of “The Making of America,” presented by the National Center for Constitutional Studies. NCCS, headquartered in Malta, Idaho, sends speakers across the country to reveal the truth that liberal elites have hidden about the American form of government. The seminar is sponsored by four local groups–a Constitution-oriented meetup in Purcellville, Va., the Loudoun Patriots Organization, the Virginia Conservative Party, and the Loudon County Republican Women’s Club.
The atmosphere reminds of me of a church pancake supper. The 50 people attending are mostly at or near retirement age, and overwhelmingly white, though there is a young Asian-American woman in killer boots, and several fashionably dressed moms with their young children in tow. By and large, these seem like people who would make wonderful neighbors–civic-minded, polite, outgoing. The conversation at the tables, however, doesn’t center around the pastor’s last sermon but on which Democratic politician the speaker hates most (“Obama claims to be a constitutional scholar. He knows just enough to undermine it”) and the viciousness of media bias against good candidates like Christine O’Donnell (“She’d be fine elsewhere, but in Delaware she’s not going to win”).
But what’s striking is how much these people hunger to understand America and its Constitution. “I have a master’s degree,” one man said to me, “and nine-tenths of this information I never got in any formal education. That’s not good when you live in a country that you don’t understand.” There’s a palpable yearning for tools to understand and change the terrible mess we’re in.
Given that curiosity, it’s quite striking that the seminar, which begins at 8:30 a.m., takes until 1:30 to get to the actual Constitution.
That’s because we have to learn the basic truth about the Constitution: God wrote it. It comes directly from the government instituted by Moses when he led the Children of Israel out of Egypt. That system was re-instituted in England around 450 A.D. by the Anglo-Saxon rulers Hengist and Horsa. The Founding Fathers, led by Thomas Jefferson, copied the Constitution directly from the “ancient constitution” of the Anglo-Saxons.
At this point a faint alarm bell should be ringing. First of all, just for the record, Jefferson didn’t take any part in writing the Constitution. He was in France, and when he read the Constitution he had mixed feelings about it. (Jefferson did actually write the words “a wall of separation between church and state,” which Judge Pearce and the NCCS generally regard as a pernicious myth.)
But the louder alarm should come from maps and displays in the materials that suggest, without quite saying, that the Anglo-Saxons were in fact the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. On page 20 of our workbook, a map shows an arrow marked “Northern Tribes of Israel,” running from Palestine to the Caucasus region. That arrow stops in 721 B.C.; another arrow begins at the same place at the same time: “Migration of Celts, Angli, Sacki, etc.” It stretches to Northern Europe and then to England. NCCS Founder W. Cleon Skousen’s big textbook, The Making of America, says that “many have thought the Yinglings, or Anglo-Saxons, included a branch of the ancient Israelites because they came from the territory of the Black Sea . . . and because they preserved the same unique institutes of government as those which were given to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. But whether related or not, there is certainly irrefutable evidence of a cross-fertilization of laws and cultural values between these two peoples.” (Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s recent piece on Skousen is here.)
This coy suggestion embodies what historians call the “British Israel” theory–the idea that the English nation, not the Jews of Europe, is the rightful heir of God’s Covenant with Abraham. One of the major figures in the growth of this anti-Semitic ideology in the U.S. was Howard B. Rand. Rand’s Anglo-Saxon Federation worked with William B. Cameron, Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic ghostwriter, to link British Israelism with the American far right wing.
Gene H.
AGAIN… you persist to make false pronouncements about that which you admit again that you have not read.
Your radical political far left agenda is overpowering any vestige of intellectual capacity you claim to possess.
Why do you persist in attempting to deceive people about a book you know absolutely nothing about as you have never read it?
This book does not mislead or even attempt to mislead ANYONE. If you actually bothered to read it you would see how ridiculous your claims are.
You must be seriously disturbed to persist in this line of thought when a simple reading of the book would do you no harm. Unless facing the truth would cause you a nervous breakdown or some kind of psychotic episode… if that is the case, maybe you shouldn’t read it… if the truth is that damaging to your psyche. For normal people… the truth will set you free.
The book allows ordinary people to be dilberately misled by someone with a very unconstitutional political agenda about what the Framers knew, thought and meant when they drafted the Constitution.
As for self-promotion? I’m not selling myself or anything else. I am, however, promoting than the idea that people should consider the original source material – which is written in English by mere mortals – and think for themselves instead of reading the editorialized polticized polemic pablum that Skousen tries to pass off as scholarship. The letters of the Founders and the Federalsit Papers are not hard to understand even if the style is a bit stilted for the modern reader. There is no problem they should encounter reading it that checking a dictionary won’t solve. But let me guess. You’re the kind of person who thinks Cliff’s Notes and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books are just the best thing in the world. When you are lazy or incompetent in your reading, you are not learning how to think, you are learning to parrot what someone else wants you to think. It’s a major distinction. But to imply REAL PEOPLE can’t understand the Federalist Papers and the letters of our Founders is insulting to REAL PEOPLE. Do you think they are so stupid they need Skausen to interpret for them papers and letters written in the language they have been speaking since childhood? I don’t. They should read the source material and see what the Founders thought without anybody else interpreting it for them so they can make up their own minds. Yeah. Encouraging people to read the best evidence possible in the form of the original source material and to think for themselves! What was I thinking!
Clearly I am promoting a dangerous idea.
As to not personally reading Skousen? I’m too old for fairy tales and I have a professional understanding of the subject that tells me prime facie Skousen was a poltical polemicist but legitimate scholar of the Constitution he wasn’t. I don’t read Skausen because he’s bullshit. I don’t read the bullshit Stromfront publishes either. After you’ve read “Mein Kampf” in the original German, the rest of it is kind of repetitive. I also don’t read Sidney Sheldon, B.E. Ellis or Jackie Collins either and for similar reasons. Once I identify garbage, I try to cull it out of my reading lists. Garbage in, garbage out.
As to why I villify Skousen now? It would be because I know enough about him to know he’s was a nasty lil’ theocratic brown shirt with a half-assed understanding of the Constitution and that when I villify him it seems to really piss you off. Which I find just hysterically funny. It’s just adorable when you lil’ teabaggers foam at the mouth.
Gene H.
You continue to be – and I quote you- “the fucking moron” with your narcissistic self promotion as if that allows you to continue to speak on “The 5000 Year Leap” which you admittedly HAVE NOT READ. Moron indeed.
Again you sling mud at me falsely claiming I “hero worship” Skousen. It is the truth of the book that I speak of. You continue to avoid the issue that his work is the ONE work that pulls together an understanding of the creation of the Constitution and the minds of the Creators.
It is wonderful that several advanced degrees and years of extra studies and education have allowed you to begin to understand some of their writings and beliefs so you do not need the input of any other source as you know it all.
This book allows ordinary REAL PEOPLE to get in one reading more than you have attained in decades of study. Still you do not read that which you attempt to vilify by attacking the author. Your stupid deception says more about your intelligence than your ego driven narcissistic rant of accomplishments.
“Actually what you pointed to is a small part of the original writings”
Actually, it’s not, but small is a relative judgment and infinite regression becomes an issue at some point. However, it is irrelevant to the main point that the original source material is the best source for information on what the Founders knew and thought rather than the editorial distortions as presented by someone with a contemporary political ax to grind. Also, I’ve read the source materials and then some. I don’t need some theocratic schmuck telling me what he thinks it means. I’ve seen enough of Skousen’s claptrap to know that claptrap is putting it mildly. I’ve also seen enough of what self-identifying tea party members call their “Constitutional scholarship” to know it’s totally laughable. Why? Well because my formal education includes a law degree from an accredited school which demanded that I study Constitutional Law as part of my graduation requirements. Unlike some people, I actually stayed awake in class and paid attention. I even took notes and read beyond the assigned reading. I’m funny that way. I’d rather understand something for myself when it’s that important than have someone else spoon-feed me what they think it means as filtered through their agenda(s). I’ve also studied the Constitution in other contexts such as comparative international law. I dare say I understand the history and the application of the document as well or better than Slousen who despite having a legal education is notorious for his far-right wing fringe views. His use of the word “Constitutional” is quite frankly propagandistic bait to sell his extremist views to people who don’t really know what the term “Constitutional” entails. He was an End Timer, a zealot and hate mongering fringe extremist. Not to mention, anyone who seriously thought Eisenhower was a Communist agent is simply a fucking moron. But that’s your boy Skousen! Quite frankly, the only thing Skousen’s writings are good for is wrapping dead fish. I don’t include lining bird cages because his bile and ignorance would probably leap off the page and strangle the birds to death.
See? Now that was some mud slinging. Made all the more effective by being factually true and combined with my true opinion of the “man” (and I do use that term loosely in Skousen’s case). He was a vile piece of extremist right-wing American brown shirt. I’ll trust my own scholarship on the matter of Constitutionality rather than that tripe you teabaggers are feeding off of. If that offends? Too bad. I still suggest others read the source materials if they are interested instead of relying on Skousen’s garbage pseudo-scholarship.
You should be careful who you hero worship.
You might get some on you.
Gene H.
Actually what you pointed to is a small part of the original writings that Skousen used in the 40 search of all the original documentation that went into this one of a kind compilation. You would know that if you actually bothered to read it instead slinging mud at me hoping that no one will notice that you continue to avoid the issue that this is truly a great explanation – using the quoted works of the Founders NOT your mud slinging name calling avoidance that this is in fact the only piece of work of its kind that anyone has ever undertaken to show the combined knowledge and thoughts of our Founders that created the Constitution.
It never ceases to amaze me how you liberals can mindlessly comment on so many things you have no personal knowledge of, by slinging mud to avoid the truth, and expect that will pronounce you an intellectual.
Blouise:
The deceitful mud slinging and fear mongering gets people to do things that are against their own best interest.
Guaranteed there were none in that meeting that had actually read the book and all decisions were based on the deceptive mud slinging of the left. Name calling, mud slinging, deceptive spin, out and out lies, to create fear and avoid the truth of the issues is what they use to control those in the population that do not bother to do their own research.
Fortunately more and more people are actually waking up to see the deception being fed to them. They are doing their own research to find out the truth for themselves, not listening to either side, and they are seeing where the truth comes from and where the deception comes from.
Elaine,
Such a group attempted to insert themselves into one of our local schools. The School Board meeting was packed with parents from several denominations and the Tea Party group’s petition was emphatically denied. The Tea Party members in attendance seemed stunned that so many Christians were misunderstanding their intent. It didn’t take them long to grasp the fact that their intent was perfectly well understood by all these Christians and the disapproval was unanimous.
I think they moved on to the next town.
Oooo. Shouting. That certainly makes you more credible, Stevie. And everyone knows he who shouts loudest is right, right? Right ……………..
“There is no compilation f the Founding fathers explaining the Constitution as I stated. The compilations you point to are about each founding Father and comparisons of them as to their individual philosophies and their lives … biographies… but NOP WHERE is their any other tie in to the creation of the constitution and the knowledge and thinking behind it.”
Actually what I pointed to was original source materials that are in their own words to the thinking and knowledge behind drafting the Constitution as held by the Founding Fathers themselves. It is what is known in legal circles as “best evidence”. I’m certain that they knew what they were thinking far better than some remote in time editor does, let alone a remote in time editor with a contemporary political ax to grind.
You feel free to point to secondary interpreted materials as better proof over the original materials themselves and be sure to shout some more though.
It looks
gooddingbats on you.