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In Defense of the Founders

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

The latest print version (not yet on-line, so far as I could see) of the American Prospect contains an article titled Did the Founders Screw Up?, subtitled Why Presidential Democracy No Longer Works in America. This sent me burrowing through my Ipad to find a draft blog post that never made the cut (if you think the stuff I publish is crap, just imagine the stuff that I don’t stick up), which contained, among other things, some musings about the Constitution’s inadequacies.

So, did the Founders screw up? Were I on the jury it would take me less than a minute to return a not guilty verdict. The Founders did not see themselves as little gods (most of them, after all, were as close to non-believers as you could get those days), nor did they see the Constitution as holy writ. That’s why they included not one but two ways to amend the Constitution. Here’s how I put it in that never published draft post:

The founders would have been the first to admit that the Constitution, like all works of man, was fallible, and would not necessarily answer to future needs and situations. They knew that they couldn’t predict the future, so they provided for a method of changing the Constitution. One method, never used, allows the states to petition for a new Constitutional Convention. The constitution is, in fact, showing its age. The flaws in it, along with various anomalies grafted onto it (e.g., the filibuster, the two party system), and circumstances the founders could not have foreseen (corporations allowed to spend unlimited money in secret to buy elections by decree of the Supreme Court, technological changes, vast differences between the populations of states with equal representation in the Senate, etc.), have conspired together to doom this country to dominance by an unholy alliance of the rich and the superstitious. We could use a new constitution.

Imagine, though, if we had to pick delegates from among the crop of politicians currently occupying the national stage (and where else, realistically speaking, would we get them?). Is there anyone out there who would argue that the resulting document would be anything but a travesty?

So, the Founders did not screw up. They did what they had to do: trust that future generations would carry on their work. Their framework worked well for the 18th century and long into the 20th, but like any system it has weaknesses, and those weaknesses have been systematically exploited. The 18th century model doesn’t work in the 20th century, but we are incapable of seeing the problem, which is just as well, because if we did, we would be incapable of addressing it. The Constitution’s inadequacies will eventually bring us down, but not as quickly as we would if left to our own devices. The fault, dear friends, is not in our stars or in the Founders, but in ourselves.

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Can we get rid of Obama?

Monday, September 5, 2011

My number two son refers his Facebook friends to Matt Stoller’s article at Salon, in which he urges the Democratic Party and its constituencies to start a conversation about ditching Obama. He puts the problem succinctly:

If would be one thing if Obama were failing because he was too close to party orthodoxy. Yet his failures have come precisely because Obama has not listened to Democratic Party voters. He continued idiotic wars, bailed out banks, ignored luminaries like Paul Krugman, and generally did whatever he could to repu diate the New Deal. The Democratic Party should be the party of pay raises and homes, but under Obama it has become the party of pay cuts and foreclosures. Getting rid of Obama as the head of the party is the first step in reverting to form.

Stoller suggests that party figures run as favorite sons or daughters in their home states as a way of forcing the issue to the forefront. From there, he suggests, real alternative candidates might emerge, or, I suppose, Obama could get religion (Democratic party style). There’s a lot of reasons this won’t happen, the general spinelessness of Democrats being in the forefront. But the reality is that it would get nowhere unless Obama’s core constituency-black voters- were behind it. That would mean that some influential black politicians would have to be among those taking on Obama in their home states. No one can blame black voters for being emotionally invested in Obama, even though his policies have wreaked disproportionate harm on the black community. The Black Caucus is rumbling, so who knows, if someone could put a coalition together, it just might work.

I continue to believe that Obama will win, since the Republicans are doing their best to throw the election. In fact, from their point of view, they’d be far better off if he remained as President. They will continue to control the government, so they could get everything they want, and blame the Democrats for the results. Were they to actually take the presidency and retain effective control of Congress there’s no doubt they would be massively repudiated in 2014, by which time, however, they might have permanently subverted what little is left of our representative government.

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An apostate speaks

Monday, September 5, 2011

Read this. As a friend of mine wrote, there’s little here that’s new (I’ve certainly made most of these points), but it’s all in one place, and from an insider from the other side.

More proof, by the way, that the present day function of the Democratic party is to appear to oppose the Republicans.

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Bill Maher on sexism

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Bill Maher has a little fun with Sarah and Michelle:

It’s truly amazing that this guy is on TV, even if you do have to pay to see him. To me, the most shocking thing was the number of times Sarah has graced the cover of Newsweek.

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I’m not sure what she means

Saturday, September 3, 2011

This comic cracked my wife up this morning. She says it reminds her of someone, but I can’t imagine who.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, September 2, 2011

Before their unfortunate veer into disco, the one form of music that is not truly music, the Bee Gees were a decent enough group, featuring harmonies on reasonably decent songs. So, despite their sins, for which I’m sure they have since repented (having pocketed the boodle therefrom) they deserve their .15 seconds of fame on this blog. Anyway, I actually chose this song because it’s the only one I could think of that makes reference, however slightly, to our present plight (or perhaps yours-our lights are back on), albeit in the case of this song they’re referring to our sister state to the North. But there’s not much we can do about that; no one writes songs about Connecticut.

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Back from the Shadows again

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

So, my wife and I were sitting at our dining room table, bitching and moaning about CL&P’s lousy repair record (according to their website, not a single customer in Groton had gotten power for about a day and a half) when suddenly, a fan went on. It took us several seconds to realize what that meant, at which point there was much rejoicing in the land, or at least our little sliver of it.

Do I take back the black thoughts I directed at CL&P? Not a bit of it. These outages should never be so widespread, nor should CL&P employ fewer line persons now than when Gloria struck. I know I grow old and cranky, but this I remember. In my first year of law school, in December of 1972, I resided with my mother in Hartford. There was odd weather that month. Two or three severe ice storms hit the state and the result, not surprisingly, was a lot of downed power lines. There was much talk about implementing a rather obvious, albeit costly (in the short term) solution: burying the power lines. This, I am informed, is what they do in socialistic Europe. Of course, it never happened. I note as well that the two municipal utilities in our area have returned their service areas to about 100% of service, proving that socialism works in some situations, particularly in the case of natural monopolies, and particularly in the case of natural monopolies for the necessities of life, such as water and electricity. Recall, also, that it was only the municipally owned utilities in California that avoided the worst of the supply manipulation several years back. I’m fairly sure that if we broke up our privately owned utilities into smaller, municipal or regional utilities, anything we lost by losing economies of scale would be gained by the fact that we needn’t generate a profit.

This hurricane has taught us several lessons we won’t learn. Here’s one: Those of us in the reality based world should realize that we have to start pushing back, and pushing back hard against the climate change denialists. Unfortunately, being people who appreciate the truth, we are reluctant to assign the blame for any individual climate event to global warming. It wouldn’t be quite honest. But whether we choose to fight fire with fire, or stick with the truth, we have to be aggressive about making the point that these events are, overall, getting more frequent and more extreme. Unfortunately, it does us no good to do this unless the politicians who get our votes join in, but there’s no chance of that. The Republicans are quite capable of convincing a large percentage of Americans that this country, which is currently borrowing money at an effective interest rate of less than 0% (meaning we can, in essence get money for free), is bankrupt, and they can even get the Democrats to go along with the scam, but the Democrats are incapable of, and not interested in, convincing people that climate change is an imminent threat, despite the facts. I personally have long since given up on the idea that this is merely incompetence on the part of the Democrats. The institutional party has no interest in taking on the corporations. The role of the Democrats is to pay impotent lip service to the desirability of dealing with the issue, but to bemoan the fact that there’s simply nothing they can do, and go on to the next surrender. Republicans, on the other hand, never give up. They’re a bit like those punching bag toys: knock em down, and they come back up, insisting, like the knight in Monty Python, that it’s only a scratch. Eventually, the most extreme position becomes palatable by virtue of endless repetition, and they get what they want.

Ah, but this rant must end. Yes, we are, this time, really on the eve of destruction, but for the moment I can savor the cup of hot tea I’ve been lusting for all week, and look forward to a warm shower tomorrow morning.

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Closed due to power failure

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Realistically, I doubt that our power will be back before the weekend. Maybe, if I’m lucky, in time for Friday night video. Right now I’ve managed to get my iPad near free wireless, but more opportunities will be infrequent, so I’ll stay shuttered for the duration.

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Some Political Predictions about the hurricane

Saturday, August 27, 2011

What we might expect to hear:

1. Obama failed to take the hurricane’s threat seriously and failed to lead. Also, from the same folks, Obama overreacted. Also, still from the same folks, Obama should have left the hurricane to the professionals and by interjecting himself into the situation he was merely engaging in political grandstanding and was endangering the lives of the storm’s victims.

2. The government’s response to the hurricane was inadequate and also, by the way, the government has no legitimate role to play in responding to natural disasters, all of which should be dealt with by the states, unless they happen to happen in a state in which the speaking politico happens to reside, in which case the government’s failure to assist that state is shocking, appalling, and Obama’s fault, despite the fact that the politico in question voted against properly funding FEMA.

3. There were no mismanaged natural disasters when Bush was president.

4. I’m not saying there’s necessarily a connection, but did you notice that the hurricane hit several portions of the country where gay people live?

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Friday Night Music-Everything’s Broken

Thursday, August 25, 2011

I’ve put up Ben Sidran before, and ordinarily I wouldn’t deem him worthy of a repeat performance, but his is the best video version of this song that I can find, and for reasons that should be painfully obvious to anyone with their eyes open, this song seems quite timely right now. I’m ordinarily an optimistic kind of guy, beneath my veneer of cynicism, but I’m afraid that recent events have left me with a gnawing feeling that- well, that everything’s broken.

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