[Peace-discuss] on Kucinich and Paul

[John W.]

So what Carl is trying so very hard to say (or perhaps NOT to say) is that 
there is NO President in the entirety of American history that he likes.  :-)



At 03:03 PM 11/13/2007, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

>Having been reared in Virginia, I've always been partial to Cyrus 
>Griffin.  Of course, his office was undermined by the treasonous assembly 
>in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.  They'd all sworn allegiance to the 
>Articles of Confederation and were supposed to suggest only improvements, 
>but instead made an executive power-grab because they were afraid that 
>only a militarily strong executive could put down the movements toward 
>social transformation underway at the time (e.g., Shays' Rebellion).
>
>The Philadelphia putschists were consciously trying to roll back the clock 
>on democracy, in order to protect wealth: as their chronicler (James 
>Madison) said, the coup they engineered that year was designed "to protect 
>the minority of the opulent against the majority."  So poor Cyrus (named 
>for the Persian king who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem) had to 
>go.  (He then went off to negotiate personally for reconciliation with the 
>Creek nation, as he had done in regard to Great Britain fifteen years before.)
>
>For more recent times, we have the lapidary judgment of Noam Chomsky, "If 
>the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president 
>would have been hanged."
>
>Before the war H. L. Mencken is supposed to have said, "One party always 
>devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is 
>unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right..."
>
>I'd suggest, if you haven't read it, a recent edition of Howard Zinn's 
>People's History of the Untied States, which tells the story with the 
>politics left in. We usually get only the jingoist version.  --CGE
>
>
>
>Karen Medina wrote:
>
>>Carl,
>>
>>I pick on you because you are a historian, is there a president that
>>you did like? I'd be especially interested in comparing that person's
>>campaign rhetoric and their deeds.
>>
>>-karen medina