A whole hatful of quotage, forsooth.
Commenting on the recent decision of Judge Doughty in Missouri et al vs. Biden, columnist Patrick Lawrence wrote recently,
“A lot more people now stand to see that a bitter war in defense of their constitutional rights has to be fought. And it will be evident to a lot of these newly aware people that this nation’s most powerful newspapers and broadcasters are complicit in a liberal authoritarian attack on the rights that reside in American law.”
But there’s nothing to suggest that people are waking up or actually see that. Judge Doughty’s opinion granting the preliminary injunction said: “the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The 155 page opinion details what various Executive Branch agencies and high level government officials from the White House on down were doing not only to suppress Free Speech, but to punish anyone who had the temerity to speak out against Gummint policy and official narratives.
The sad truth is that most people are not really very interested in the subject, the relative few who are interested are too lazy to make much of an effort to inform themselves, and even fewer still (if any) are willing to “pledge their lives, their fortunes or their sacred honor” to do anything about it.
That’s why what is happening is happening! “The most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”? Who cares? The general reaction to it – or to the Fifth Circuit’s decision Friday is pretty much a big yawn.
Oh, I’m afraid it’s a good bit worse than that, seeing as how with every passing day it becomes more apparent that most people, far from not caring, are actually, literally opposed to freedom of speech, as well as to freedom more broadly. Thus is the near-total success of the Left’s laborious implementation of Gramscian Long March theory confirmed. Now, brace yourselves for that potpourri of quotes I mentioned.
So there’s the answer to Patrick Lawrence. As with Ukraine, most people are blissfully unaware of what is really going on and/or just do not care.
Much as it pains me to quote Harry Truman, Judge Doughty quoted from Truman’s Special Message to Congress in 1950 in the conclusion of his July 4th opinion. It’s worth repeating:
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one place to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
Later, in the same message, Truman concluded:
“We must, therefore, be on our guard against extremists who urge us to adopt police state measures. Such persons advocate breaking down the guarantees of the Bill of Rights in order to get at the communists. They forget that if the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”
And what would Oliver Wendell Holmes say? Maybe he’d say it is time to bring home our troops from Europe and start fighting right here at home for the Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights. We won in 1783, maybe we could do it again.
Maybe. Then again, though, I wouldn’t be holding my breath waiting for it if I were you. As with most precious and worthwhile things, freedom doesn’t just fall into our laps like manna from heaven. Those who want it must go out and take it for themselves, then guard it, jealously and ferociously, forever afterwards.
(Via WRSA)
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Truman. Perhaps the Least Worst Dem ever?
Not sure I’d go that far. He happily went along with the nascent Military Industrial Complex in getting the US into the Korean notWar.
OTOH, so did many republicans. I despise Truman, but Kenny may be right.
I lost an uncle to old age last night, the last of my dad’s career military brothers. He went to Korea at age 21 (Army) and would argue the “notWar” part. He also served in Vietnam. Retired, but served as an adviser for Desert Storm. Good man.
Oh, it was a war but it wasn’t called a war. That POS Truman called it a police action so that he wouldn’t need Congressional approval to deploy troops, a typical Democrat maneuver.
Gotcha. I had forgotten that little nugget. Thanks for the reminder, should have figured it out myself.
My dad fought in Korea. To the end of his days, he had nightmares which woke up him up screaming more than once a week. Used to scare the everloving hell out of me when I was a kid.
Never would talk about his wartime experience much, if at all, until I’d gotten a lot older and, at my insistence, he told me one (1) story about racing to the scene of an F86 crash near his base, when he rushed up with a cpl others to see if the pilot had survived and found a cockpit heavily coated with a red goo that looked like strawberry jam, and one (1) story about the time he won a medal for helping unload a burning railroad freight car that turned out to be full of crates containing WP munitions, which none of the higher-ups thought was worth warning my dad and his team about.
Turns out some things really never DO change.
Sincere condolences on your uncle, Barry. I figure I don’t have to wonder what he’d think of today’s Woke military. I know what my dad would have, and his older brother Murray, who was picked to serve on the honor guard for the first session of the UN for his meritorious service in WW2.
Thanks Mike. He was a man that served his country for 40 years active duty. 18-58, then retired and continued working as an adviser for the contracting side.
He’s the 3rd career military uncle to pass in the last 2 years. We’ve gotten to that age (been there a while). My Dad is the last of 7 and 95 this fall.
Was any Dem better? Especially in the 20th and 21st Century?
If you limit the comparison to Dem presidents since 1901, then Truman was the least-worst.
It does say something that we have to go back at least 125 years to find a Democrat president who wasn’t godawful.
Although Jefferson was supposedly a Dem, the modern Dems seem to have begun with Andrew Jackson.
Perhaps Jackson was the least worst, granted that Jefferson wasn’t a Dem.
If you count Jefferson as a Dem I guess it’s Jefferson
Jackson
Truman and then all downhill from there.
And he happily fellated Mousey Tongue by stopping MacArthur from dealing appropriately with the ChiCom swill!
Probably a bigger mistake was Losing China to the ChiComs.