Reflecting the Quality of the Electorate

A Problem With the Donkey

A preacher wanted to raise money for his church and on being told that there was a fortune in horse racing, decided to purchase a horse and enter it in the races. However, at the local auction, the going price for horses was so high that he ended up buying a donkey instead. He figured that since he had it, he might as well go ahead and enter it in the races. To his surprise, the donkey came in third!

  

The next day the local paper carried this headline: PREACHER’S ASS SHOWS.

The preacher was so pleased with the donkey that he entered it in the race again, and this time it won. The paper read: PREACHER’S ASS OUT IN FRONT.

The Bishop was so upset with this kind of publicity that he ordered the preacher not to enter the donkey in another race. The paper headline read: BISHOP SCRATCHES PREACHER’S ASS.

This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the preacher to get rid of the donkey. The preacher decided to give it to a nun in a nearby convent. The paper headline the next day read: NUN HAS BEST ASS IN TOWN.

The Bishop fainted in shock. When he came to he informed the nun that she would have to get rid of the donkey, so she sold it to a farmer for $10.00.

The next day the headline read: NUN SELLS ASS FOR $10.00.

This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the nun to buy back the donkey, lead it to the plains, and let it go.

Next day, the headline in the paper read: NUN ANNOUNCES HER ASS IS WILD AND FREE.

The Bishop was buried the next day.

Spot the Differences

President George W. Bush's speech after the capture of Saddam Hussein:

"The success of yesterday's mission is a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq. The operation was based on the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator's footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers in the hunt for members of the fallen regime, and in their effort to bring hope and freedom to the Iraqi people. Their work continues, and so do the risks. Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate them!"

Barrack Hussein Obama's speech after the killing of Osama bin Laden:

"And so shortly after taking office,  I  directed Leon Panetta, the Director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.  Then, last August, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground.  I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and I authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan."

Cogent Commentary

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Myron Magnet
 
Constitution Party

 
It’s past time for Republicans to take action against President Obama’s lawlessness.
 
31 July 2014 

What’s wrong with Republicans? Here is a Democratic president who has declared, and demonstrated, that he will not be bound by the Constitution but will do whatever he can do—both within and beyond his constitutional powers—to cram his agenda down the nation’s throat. But since Republicans control one house of Congress, and that one chamber controls the purse, why is the GOP as paralyzed as a deer in the headlights to arrest such a power grab? And why has the Speaker of the House made himself so negligible a figure on the national stage, most recently by addressing the Obama-created border crisis with an immigration bill as feeble and irrelevant as it is unpopular, when he and his majority have such power at their command to counter a president who has passed beyond the bounds the Founders set for the national executive?

No doubt, the president is impeachable. Of course he hasn’t committed high crimes, in the sense of beheading citizens after star-chamber trials—though if it be true that he knew of and approved the IRS’s mistreatment of conservative nonprofit groups, that would certainly be a high crime, no less than President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up was such a crime, as the tapes he lacked the sang-froid to destroy showed. But the Constitution specifically envisioned impeachment for such unconstitutional misdemeanors as a president’s not carrying out his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and to take care that the laws be faithfully executed—the president’s main constitutional duty. So government by edict, like that exercised by Charles I or Lenin—as when President Obama simply decrees rolling changes in his half-digested health-care law, or when he opens the border to “children” in contravention of our immigration laws—is prima facie impeachable conduct. 

But politics, it’s worth emphasizing these days, is the art of the possible; and impeachment is politically unrealistic. Even if Republicans win a famous victory in the upcoming senatorial elections, they will come nowhere near having the two-thirds Senate vote needed to convict. So impeachment would be mere political theater, which the Democrats seem to think would greatly help their fundraising and voter-turnout prospects—it would show “progressivism” under attack, by extremists and racists, as Attorney General Eric Holder likes to charge with equal measures of obtuseness and malice. And Democrats are right in this electoral calculation, because Republicans have no Sam Ervin—no one as eloquent and learned in the law and in history to make the case, as Democrat Ervin came breathtakingly close to doing in the Watergate hearings, that the president had crossed the line into tyranny.

For now, Republicans should use the power of the purse as effectively as they can, and should try their damnedest to explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. They have made a good start by cutting the IRS’s enforcement budget by 25 percent. They should go further: cut the agency’s total budget by 50 percent, until the IRS produces the evidence that the House has subpoenaed, and and which the IRS at first claimed had accidentally been destroyed. Let IRS staff be fired or salaries slashed, until someone feels the pain enough to admit what happened. 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has crammed through Senate confirmation a Joe McCarthyesque new administrator for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission? Then defund FERC entirely—and take to the talk shows to lay out the reasons why shaking down citizens for offenses neither they nor anyone else knew existed is unacceptable. President Obama has made illegal appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which renders null and void all regulations and rulings that the board has made since then? Defund the NLRB, 100 percent. The president has unilaterally repealed our immigration laws? Let the House reaffirm them, and pass a resolution censuring the president for his lawlessness. And let Republican congressmen explain again and again that the Constitution didn’t create a king, and that the ancestors of today’s Democrats, with Thomas Jefferson at their head, were vigilant—indeed, verging on paranoid—in guarding against such a possibility. Nor did the Constitution give America a queen: so Mrs. Obama’s endless vacations, triumphal progresses of a lavishness that Marie Antoinette would have envied, should be condemned as outside the American tradition, even were it not a time when a whole generation is suffering the economic consequences of the administration’s no-growth policies.

An opposition party can only do so much when it controls but one house of Congress, but the Founders’ system of checks and balances not only licenses but positively enjoins it to do whatever it can to rein in lawlessness in the other branches. Let the House do its duty, not by rushing to the Supreme Court as if it were the school principal, but by defunding whatever unconstitutional measures it can. An important part of that duty is to explain, with as much wisdom and eloquence as it can muster on every Sunday talk show, why the Constitution demands such actions—and what kind of republic the Constitution’s Framers envisioned.

Myron Magnet, City Journal’s editor-at-large and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, is the author of The Founders at Home, recently published by Norton.

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