Thursday, November 20, 2014

Cicero and Buckley to the Rescue

Blogging has had to take a back seat to the law, which (as they say truly) is a jealous mistress.

Nevertheless, there has not been all that much I care to blog about. The news is almost uniformly desultory, uninspiring and (dare I say) lacking in hope. The lawlessness at the very top has infected our institutions and governments down to the lowest level -- and they all seem to be getting away with it! What is the point of complaining if the checks and balances we used to be able to rely upon are out of order and dysfunctional?

[UPDATE 11/21/2014: Birds of a feather ....]

A few bright rays emerge from the Mordor-like fog. Ted Cruz quotes Cicero on the floor of the Senate, indicting Barack Obama as Marcus Tullius once long ago did Catiline. And former Senator and retired federal judge James Buckley has a new book forthcoming, that promises a straightforward way out of a lot of the mess. Called Saving Congress from Itself, its recipe is simple: put an end to every kind of transfer payment from Congress to the States. You may preorder it here (or get the Kindle version if you would like to start reading it now), and read more about it here.

May God save the United States of America.

4 comments:

  1. Do you honestly believe that Senator Cruz has read anything beyond the first lines?

    Perhaps he really does equate a plot to murder senators with leniency to poor foreigners.

    On the other hand, I have to hope that he didn't know about the rest of the oration:

    "The senate is aware of these things; the consul sees them; and yet this man lives."





    The senate is aware of these things; the consul sees them; and yet this man lives.

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  2. Calm down, Rick -- he did not read the whole passage as Cicero delivered it, back when Catiline was plotting against the Senate itself. But the parts he did read were the relevant ones about how a leader presumes he is above the law, and untouchable. And given that the leader is Obama, and given our current Congress (even as it will be in January), Obama is and will continue to be untouchable and above the law. So we need the likes of Ted Cruz to remind him that he is doing nothing new under the sun.

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  3. Each letter, word, sentence, and paragraph perfectly encloses my feelings. Doodling inside my brain last night, I posted a picture of Bobbie Lee along with a bit of a silly, wistful song about the great Confederate General and American personality, a picture of the Constitution of the United States of Amierca, a song by Bob Dylan from 1963, a song by the Everly Brothers from 1959. This was after the disgusting demonstration of hubris of this thing the Obsolete Press and the anti-traditionalists foisted upon the Republic.

    Then, I scrolled up several of the articles written by our Rabbi here, thought about the rabbis who had been murdered in Jerusalem, ate a peanut butter and jelly on brown bread, milk and went to sleep.

    Mentally, Emotionally, and culturally exhausted. May the Saints intervene to save the Republic.
    El Gringo Viejo

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  4. It was no surprise to me that Cruz would quote Cicero.
    What astounds me is that Obama quotes Ronald Reagan and St. Paul, and thinks it is relevant.

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