|
Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: The Stupid and
the Dishonest Join the Attacks on Ron Paul
In a January 18 interview with Glenn Beck Rick Santorum decided to compare
his view of the Constitution with that of Ron Paul. His statements can only
be described as delusional and totalitarian.
Santorum first claimed to have read an eighteenth-century dictionary that
defined happiness as "to do the morally right thing." This is how
the founding fathers defined happiness, he said. This is Santorums
definition of "happiness," not the founding fathers. Its a good
bet he is lying when claiming to have read an eighteenth-century dictionary.
(But I suppose anything is possible with a man who brought his deceased
infant home who died two hours after birth and slept with it after showing it
to his children, as Santorum admits to have done).
The freedom to do whatever you want to do as long as you do not harm
anyone else or interfere in their equal freedom would "lead to
libertinism and lead to chaos" said Sanctimonious Santorum, who has also
pledged to do what he can to put an end to contraception if elected
president. Contraception changes "the way things ought to be," he
says. Santorum is self assured that he, and he alone, understands "the
way things ought to be" and pledges to use the powers of the state to
forcefully impose his "understanding" on the entire country.
But the founding fathers are known as champions of freedom, are
they not? But what kind of freedom? According to Santorum, who apparently
fancies himself as an historian, freedom in America means "the freedom
to do what you ought to do what you are properly ordered to do [by
a politician like himself] as someone living a good, decent, and ordered
life" (emphasis added). "Thats the differentiation that I believe
Ron Paul and I have with respect to what liberty is," said Santorum. To
Rick Santorum, "freedom" means doing what government
"properly" orders you to do, as long as government is controlled by
good, proper, moral people like himself, the K-Street lobbyist for the
Pennsylvania coal mining industry (and anyone else who will pay his huge fees
for influence peddling).
This is not the view of the American founding fathers, as Santorum
claims. It is more likely to have been the mindset of the founders of the Soviet
Union, not the American union. It is the mindset of the neoconservatives
whose founding members were, after all, Trotskyite communists. This includes
the self-described "godfather" of neoconservatism, the late Irving
Kristol, who reveled in talking about his youthful Trotskyite roots.
If Santorum really wanted to know how the founding fathers defined freedom
he would not make up imaginary, two-century old dictionary entries but would
read what the founders actually said. A good place to start would be Thomas
Jeffersons first inaugural address where he stated: "[A] wise and
frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall
leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and
improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has
earned. This is the sum of good government . . ." It is hard to imagine
that Jefferson, the author of the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom
that strongly opposed the governmental imposition of any religious
views on anyone while defending religious liberty in general, would have
admired an Uber-Catholic Theocrat like Santorum. For government to compel a
man to support a religious cause with which he disbelieves, wrote Jefferson,
is "sinful and tyrannical."
When Ron Paul says that such victimless crimes as prostitution or smoking
pot should be decriminalized, says Santorum, "thats not the moral
foundation of our country," once again pretending to be The Expert on
the thinking of the founding fathers. Theres one problem with Santorums
historical revisionism, however. Prostitution was in fact pervasive in
Colonial America. Prostitutes traveled with George Washingtons army, serving
as nurses and cooks as well as prostitutes. In fact, there were no laws in
America banning prostitution until Massachusetts enacted the first one in
1917. (The 1910 "Mann Act," named after Congressman James Mann,
prohibited "white slavery" for the purpose of prostitution).
Federal laws against prostitution were first enacted after women got the
right to vote and immediately outlawed prostitution in the vicinity of
military bases when their husbands and boyfriends were off serving in the
military. In other words the founding fathers agreed with Ron Paul, not Rick
Santorum, on personal liberty issues.
America is "not just a collection of freedoms," said the
insufferably sanctimonious Santorum. It is, instead, a collection of orders
from the state defining what "proper" behavior is. Stalin himself
could not have said it better.
|
|