So now Karl Rove is in "contempt of congress", right? Well, I never thought I would ever be on the same side with Rove, but there are an awful lot of Americans right now who are also in "contempt of congress".
And like many other Americans, I suspect, I am also in contempt of the ENTIRE administration, the supreme court, and most of the American press. Guys, you gave it away. You wanted to impress the president and you took it all in and laid it at his booted toes.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Jesse Helms
Jesse Helms died yesterday. Big man? Yes. Good man? Great man? Well. . . .
I must admire Helms for one thing. When he didn’t like what was going on he wrote about it, he got on the radio and talked about it and when it still didn’t go the way he thought it should he ran for office. That’s the heart of the American way, the way prescribed by the great political philosophers. So that is the good that I see in Jesse Helms. The problem I see is that when he was elected he represented only a part of his constituency, and rather than support and defend the constitutions of the State of North Carolina and the United States, he waged battle against both of them. He accumulated personal power and used that to accomplish his narrow tasks and abandoned both his authority and his duties.
Part of the reason that the democratic process is important is that it is the way in which civilization can hope to improve itself and learn from the mistakes of the past. People like Jesse Helms represent powerful forces which pull all of us backward into the darkness. Except for his change towards the treatment of AIDS, he seemed to be virtually the same person when he died as he was as a young man. In short, he didn’t seem to learn as he went through life, and remained the same man he had been programmed to be in his twenties and thirties.
As we close the door on Jesse Helms presence now, let us remember him for what he has to teach us.
© John Womack, 2008, All rights reserved.
I must admire Helms for one thing. When he didn’t like what was going on he wrote about it, he got on the radio and talked about it and when it still didn’t go the way he thought it should he ran for office. That’s the heart of the American way, the way prescribed by the great political philosophers. So that is the good that I see in Jesse Helms. The problem I see is that when he was elected he represented only a part of his constituency, and rather than support and defend the constitutions of the State of North Carolina and the United States, he waged battle against both of them. He accumulated personal power and used that to accomplish his narrow tasks and abandoned both his authority and his duties.
Part of the reason that the democratic process is important is that it is the way in which civilization can hope to improve itself and learn from the mistakes of the past. People like Jesse Helms represent powerful forces which pull all of us backward into the darkness. Except for his change towards the treatment of AIDS, he seemed to be virtually the same person when he died as he was as a young man. In short, he didn’t seem to learn as he went through life, and remained the same man he had been programmed to be in his twenties and thirties.
As we close the door on Jesse Helms presence now, let us remember him for what he has to teach us.
© John Womack, 2008, All rights reserved.
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