Reposted from Joe For America:
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On its face, the comment is breathtaking in its arrogance and its presumption of intellectual superiority over we, the idjits that pay his salary. The larger problem with Obama’s statement, though, is that it misses the whole d@#n point of the Consitution all together.Not all the people who fought over each word and comma that went in to the Constitution were born to hippies and inspired by anarchists, and none of them – ZERO – were nowhere-to-be-found-on-campus Harvard law professors. No… the vast majority of these men were simply trying to make some sense out of the chaos wrought on them by their King as they continued trying to avoid the hangman’s noose long enough to put food on their family’s table.
I’d offer that we’re not too far removed from Colonial life at this very moment when you think on it a little while.
Consider, then, that the intentions the Founders had when they put this thing together were to keep it fair and balanced and simple, make it mean something… make it be a thing worth fighting for and dying to defend… and yet still make it changeable, when necessary to “keep up with the times”. But they also intended, it seems to me, to make it so d@#n hard to change that d@#n near all of us would have to be on board before anything of national significance or worldwide implication ever got done. (I leave it to you, dear reader, to ponder the ways of America these past few years if O-Care had been made to clear a Constitutional amendment process before enactment. I can smell burning hair, faintly, off in the distance).
And it should be lost on no one that Constutional amendments (after the original set) were connected in some way to every major civil explosion that has taken place throughout our relatively short history ever since. From the abolition of slavery to Womens’ rights to Prohibition (and its repeal) to Civil (voting) rights… each of these moments fomented hate and violence and death.
As the kids say these days… s$%t got real.
If nothing else, this should be proof enough that, however imperfect she may be (as were the men who signed on), her beauty is precisely because of her imperfections: we had to fight it out and get a consensus and settle our differences and move on toward a better life for all of us. And we did it as a country, not by backroom deals and party rancor and Executive fiat. We did it as a People.
Can’t say there’s too much of that going on these days… can you?
The whole of Obama’s quote is important, here, for a little context:
“But I think it is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture, the Colonial culture nascent at that time.If only the a$$hats in Washington now were half the men we had running things back when America was born, we wouldn’t be facing the insanity of all these “enormous blind spot[s] in this culture” we have today. Obama’s lament over the imperfection of the Founders is laughable; from incomprehensible debt to the socially-embraced (and federally-subsidized) murders of millions of unborn children [who will never grow up to subsidize the lifestyles of the entitlement class], we find ourselves facing the same old dilemma: partially blind leaders whose vision is clouded by the immediate times in which they live.
“African-Americans were not — first of all they weren’t African-Americans — the Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the Framers. I think that as Richard said it was a ‘nagging problem’ in the same way that these days we might think of environmental issues, or some other problem where you have to balance cost-benefits, as opposed to seeing it as a moral problem involving persons of moral worth.
“And in that sense,” Obama continued, “I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”
Our modern-day aristocrats have their own blindspots, to be sure, but it was the Founders who could see well enough into the future to recognize that there would be times to come in which nothing would be remembered of the lessons history would subsequently teach. They rightly knew that there would be times ahead when we would have only the Constution to turn to in an hour of need.
Blind though they might bave been, their vision far exceeded that which we have on our hands today… and more’s the pity.
[Cross posted from They-All-Suck (where the language filter is broken)
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