Talk about making a mistake everyone can see! Atheists in California have done a disservice to their own crusade to spread atheism by launching a new billboard campaign that ascribes a false quote to Thomas Jefferson. That’s right, they’ve essentially become liars for atheism.

In Costa Mesa, California a group of atheists calling themselves Backyard Skeptics have unveiled a billboard to sell atheism to the general public that features a quote they claim came from Thomas Jefferson, the Third President of the United States.

“I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature,” the billboard “quotes” the president as having said. “It is founded on fables and mythology,” this quote concludes.

That would be a stinging rebuke of Christianity, indeed… were it true. Unfortunately for this little atheist group it seems that their quote is a fake quote the group found on the Internet and assumed was real.

The atheist group thought the quote came from a letter that Jefferson wrote to a “Dr. Woods.” But there is one little problem. Jefferson scholars cannot find such a letter. The Jefferson Library confirms that no such letter exists. The library also notes that no such phrase or any combination thereof exists in any of Jefferson’s extensive collection of papers.

The atheist group, seems to shrug off their embarrassing mistake, though, telling reporters that they will look into it later. Worse, they told the Orange Register that even if the quote was fake it really represented Jefferson’s views anyway. Where have we heard “fake but accurate” before?

As the Jefferson library notes, it’s a bit hard to believe that Jefferson saw no “redeeming features” in Christianity since he spent months cutting and pasting and rearranging the Christian Bible to his own liking! If there was nothing worth the effort in there he had a funny way of showing it.

But talk about true believers, these atheists. They’ll let neither logic nor the word of all the scholars in the world that Jefferson never uttered their favorite quote deter them that he somehow despised Christianity anyway!

Sadly, Jon Cassidy, writer for the Orange Register, was also bamboozled by another atheist lie about Jefferson in his piece. He furthered the lie that Jefferson “was a Deist.”

Jefferson was a Deist, who believed in a hands-off creator, not a Christian, but he adored the humanistic aspects of Jesus’ teachings, according to the library. A library report cites his letter to William Short of Oct. 31, 1819, in which he called the teachings of Jesus the “outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man.”

This Jefferson-the-Deist business is has been a lie told by atheists for at least a generation. In fact, it is a calumny visited on most of our founders. It is also not true.

Never in his life did Jefferson call himself a Deist. He called himself a Unitarian (what we might call a Unitarian Universalist today). He did not call himself a Deist. Why should we call him something he never called himself?

Additionally, while many modern atheists and half-informed hobbyists in things historical imagine that all or even many of the founders were “Deists,” the truth is that almost none of them were — at least not by their own admission. Washington wasn’t. Hamilton wasn’t. John Adams sure wasn’t. Neither was Madison or Monroe.

It is absolutely true that a large portion of our most famous founders had a great amount of disdain for organized religion and/or the priesthood. After all, students of history that they were, the founders knew that religious orders and churches were involved in some of the worst massacres in human history. Not only that but such monstrous actions were within recent memory of the founder’s era. It’s only natural that they were suspicious of organized religion.

But we simply cannot pretend that this country was not founded by thousands of extremely devoted Christians. Even if a few of our most well known founders were somehow secret Deists, not many of their peers and co-founders nor their supporters back in their home states were anything but sincere believers.

After all, religion was one of the first things that our founders strived to protect! Remember that whole “freedom of religion” thing?

Perhaps two leading founders at one time claimed themselves Deism for themselves, but that is all I’ve ever run across.

When he was a young man Ben Franklin once wrote that he was a Deist. But he was hardly a “regular” Deist — if there is such a thing. When he was young, Franklin thought perhaps every universe had its own god but that perhaps they did not involve themselves too much in their own little realms. Not very orthodox Deism, that.

The other was Governor K. Morris, the man responsible for helping write the Constitution of the United States. According to a book on Morris written by Richard Brookheiser, Morris claimed Deism for himself.

The problem is that many historians ascribe Deism to our founders (even Morris was publicly an Episcopalian) based on those historian’s interpretations of the founder’s views. These claims based on historian’s feelings then get passed down from one generation to the next as “fact” even though it is not based in fact. Certainly it may be true that our founders harbored Deist ideas and it may be true that they feared a political backlash in a nation filled with Christians for saying so out loud, but if they didn’t call themselves Deists, how can we? The fact is, even in their private papers almost none of them accepted Deism as their own.

In all the years of reading on the founders I’ve done I’ve never seen any other founders calling themselves Deists. If someone out there has proof otherwise I’d love to hear it. But please don’t send me to a website. Remember what Abe Lincoln said: “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.” In fact, don’t even take my word for all this. Look it up yourself. If you can find words written by a founder claiming Deism for themselves, please let me see it.

But let’s not take the revisionism by decades of historians with an agenda as “fact.”

I have been interested these days to hear the left citing George Washington, the father of our country, to support their ideas against the GOP and their hope that Obama will pull out of the Middle East. Specifically they have been citing Washington’s farewell address where he supposedly warned Americans against getting involved with foreign nations and getting caught up in those evil “foreign entanglements.”

It is quite amusing to see lefties in love with a founding father or American history and principles for the first time in their lives, certainly, but it isn’t just the left revealing a sudden respect for a founding father with citation of Washington’s address. Ron Paulites and those of an isolationist bent on foreign policy have also been bandying about Washington’s farewell address as some sort of “proof” that one of our “first principles” was to stay away from foreign nations.

What was Washington really saying, though? Did he warn us against “foreign entanglements”? Did he think the U.S. should steer clear of all political situations from without and simply relegate ourselves only to trade with everyone else?

We have to point out, that Washington never used the words “foreign entanglements” in his farewell address. That has been a decades-long misconstruction of his last letter to the nation. He did ask why we should “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition,” but he never used the exact words “foreign entanglements.”

That dispensed with, we move on to the assumed isolationism of George Washington’s address. What did he mean and did he mean it to be a permanent principle from which the U.S. should never stray?

First of all we must realize that the U.S. had been up to its neck in “foreign entanglements” before it had even become a nation. With wars against the French decades earlier, then the rebellion against Britain with help from the French, pleas to the Dutch for loans, not to mention intrigues in Canada and clashes with Spanish holdings in the new world, the progenitors to the United States and then the young nation itself was already a key player on the international stage.

Further the United States had envoys in most of the major European nations long before Washington’s farewell address. So, to act as if the U.S. was isolated from the rest of the world and that Washington’s entirety to stay that way was some axiomatic delineation of American foreign policy is simply wrong headed. The U.S. was already so “entangled,” if you will.

One of the important goals of Washington’s letter was to shore up his own foreign policy decisions. Washington had angered the Jefferson/Madison wing of the federal government when he decided not to side with France against England after our revolution ended. In fact, while leaning as an anglophile, Washington tried to tread a fine line of “neutrality” between France and England. His address was meant to justify this policy choice. It was less a doctrine for the ages and more an immediate act of politics.

There was also an important bit of reality that caused Washington and Alexander Hamilton to eschew full support of France and lean toward England. We hadn’t the naval power to back up any major involvement in Europe. In fact, if we had decided to jump in with France, there was no way at all we could have escaped major damage from the extensive and powerful British Navy if we sided too directly with France.

Washington’s idea of neutrality was based in part on the complete inability of the U.S. to back up its foreign policy. But even in that case he did not say in his address that we should forever stay away from any foreign involvement.

Here is the key section of his address:

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.

To warn Americans against “permanent alliances” really should go without saying. Decades later a fast friend of the United States basically said the same thing when he said there are “no eternal allies” and “no perpetual enemies” for any nation.

Washington went on to say, though, that sometimes we must form alliances. “Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture,” he wrote, “we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”

Obviously he understood that always staying neutral — as Paulites and liberals maintain — is not possible.

It should also be realized that this was Washington’s (and Hamilton’s) vision. The farewll address was not an explication of standard practice even when it was written, but Washington’s ideals. Many founders disagreed with this vision. So to act like an isolationist policy was a singular founding principle is a horrible misread of history.

In To the Farewell Address, the seminal book about the address and the era in which it was given, Felix Gilbert warned us all not to accept the flawed assumptions of just what was going on with Washington’s farewell address.

In the conclusion to his essay, Gilbert wrote:

Because the Farewell Address comprises various aspects of American political thinking, it reaches beyond any period limited in time and reveals the basic issue of the American attitude toward foreign policy: the tension between Idealism and Realism. Settled by men who looked for gain and by men who sought freedom, born into independence in a century of enlightened thinking and of power politics, America has wavered in her foreign policy between Idealism and Realism, and her great historical moments have occurred when both were combined.

In other words, today’s neo-isolationist view of America’s “real” foreign policy ideals is woefully incorrect. The U.S. was never isolationist as a first principle. Ron Paul is wrong and so are the liberals that have a sudden and uncharacteristic respect for a founding father.

Finally a note… I posted this on BigPeace.com already, but an interesting phenomenon occurred. Instead of discussing the piece as written, a ton of Ron Paul nuts, and other deluded types, decided that this piece was my excuse to justify military interventionism. Ridiculously, they claimed I was somehow excusing WWI, or our current Middle East policies.

Their comments just prove that too many people do not read for content any more but only want to use an article as an excuse to provoke argument over their own half-baked ideas.

The fact is, this article is discussing only one thing and that is the purpose of Washington’s farewell address when it was delivered in 1796 and what it means to American first principles. I have no interest in using this piece to excuse or justify anything that happened after Washington left the scene. This article is not meant to ascertain what amount of foreign policy is optimal, only that isolationism is not an American first principle.

If WWI was wrong or our Middle East policy is misguided, those are discussions for other articles, not this one.

Finally, one idiot spammed the BP.com piece with comment after comment saying I was “using the wrong quote” for the beginning of this piece. He said that Thomas Jefferson said “entangling alliances” and that my attribution of it to Washington is wrong. This is another guy that can’t read for content. I know it’s wrong and that is my point for saying Washington didn’t say it! But it isn’t me that is pushing the phrase on Washington, it is the many others I mentioned at the top and that is why I am correcting the record.

America is fast coming to a crossroads from which there will be no return if we take the wrong path. Do we take the road that leads away from America and toward a Euro-esque way of governing? Do we cast aside our American character and bury our great nation in a grave of socialist-styled authority? Do we damn our progeny to a failed superstate that violate every tenet of our original ideals?

I say we do not. I say we reject the Democrat’s Euro-esque ideas and refocus ourselves on American exceptionalism. Our federal system has strayed far from our founding ideals and we may soon find that its time for a new Declaration of Independence from a tyrannical government that has usurped power from proper authority.

Since it was just Independence Day over the weekend (and I waited until it was over on purpose so as not to obviate from that celebration), I offer this new Declaration as a rallying cry to all those willing to return to our true American character…

A New Declaration of Independence

When in the Course of human events it again becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with a failed authority and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God as well as our original, properly constituted laws entitle us, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that we should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of we the people; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to repair to their former Systems of Government. The history of the present President, his Congress, and our recalcitrant federal government is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

It has abused its role over the law and instituted fiat rules that are detrimental to the common good — welfare, cap and trade, oppressive taxes, onerous regulation on business are recent examples.

It has forbidden governors of states to pass laws useful to local needs and has interfered in state business.

It has refused the right of local government to govern at home and has as a matter of course caused local legislators to carelessly assume they have no power.

It has defacto dissolved the authority of state governments so that the representatives of the people constantly defer to rule from Washington.

It has refused to secure the borders so that all manner of foreigners of the lowest station might flood these shores without hesitation while refusing to allow those foreigners with useful skills and education to enter and apply for citizenship.

It has allowed capricious courts to usurp proper legislative duties and to rule from the bench.

It has seated judges with no opposition or investigation and has not required judicial candidates to express an interest in the true meaning of the law of the land.

It has erected a multitude of new regulatory offices few of which have any basis in the Constitution and has as a form of graft filled them with friends, lobbyists, and placemen.

It has refused to properly fund our armies in times of peace without including graft and monies unconnected to the needs of our armed forces.

It has therefore interfered with the military stopping it from operating at peak efficiency.

It has conspired with powers outside our duly constituted authority to take away our constitutional rights, to subvert our national laws, and has given assent to forces such as the UN to rule us from afar without accountability. These outside forces are hateful of our system and desire it’s end. Therefore we accuse our government of attacking us from inside.

For positing that UN forces are superior in authority to our own:

For signing treaties inimical to our national interests:

For cutting off free trade with worthy countries such as Colombia, yet opening trade with evil countries such as China:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us of our constitutional rights of property, life, and self-protection at every opportunity:

For creating rules that encroach on freedom of religion:

For increasing the size of government to never before seen size and power in a manner against our founding principles and for purposefully creating chaos in business, banking, and every other area of the private sector with never ending regulations that strangle, confuse, and stifle American growth:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

And for corrupting our legislatures with federal largess and assuming unto the federal government all powers to rule from Washington D.C.

It has abdicated its Constitutional role and essentially come to see the people as an enemy and waged philosophical war against us.

It has plundered our businesses with overweening regulations, capriciously outlawed entire fields of business, and burdened the lives of the people with oppressive taxes.

It has created an army of police, taxmen and regulators to fan out across the land to assault and imprison our citizens, to confiscate lands to federal ownership and to lay waste the economy and bring our people into a form of dependency akin to slavery.

It has often sent our armed forces to foreign nations without a proper mission, held back necessary funding, and burdened it with untenable “rules of engagement” which has limited our troop’s ability to fight to win, and has allowed barbarous enemies to gain the upper hand on the battle field.

It has attempted to separate the citizenry into warring factions yet has allowed our enemy to easily enter the country and perpetrate a merciless Muslim warfare which is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, religions and American institutions and intends enslavement of us all.

In every stage of these violations millions of citizens have gathered in the streets to protest these government outrages yet no heed has been paid to the agony of the people in its hallowed halls.

Nor have we been heard by our Democrat brethren. We have warned them of the destruction of the American rule of law, yet they are uninterested in this plight. We have appealed to their love of country and we have reminded them of the glorious history of our great nation to no avail. They have turned a deaf ear to Constitutionality, a cold shoulder to our American character, and our law and we find their sympathies lie with Europeans instead of their fellow Americans. We must, therefore, consider them enemies of our national interests, safety, health, and welfare.

We, therefore, the representatives of the American tradition and character assemble as citizens proud of our history and institutions, and in the tradition of our national power being held in the hands of the people, assert our loyalty to our true American system. We hold this government to be illegitimate by its usurpation of power and its obviation of our laws. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence that has been rejected by our enemies, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

We’ve already had the tea party. Now, let the new revolution begin!

Personally, I’m not inclined to accept their apology.

Whenever the MSM does something like this, they claim that it’s all about political correctness, and trying to avoid offending those of us who don’t believe in God.  I’m sorry, but I’m just not buying that explanation…

Like it or not, this nation was founded by Christians and other people who believed in God.  The people who believe in God in America still outnumber the non-believers by a huge percentage.  Ignoring that fact and insulting millions of believers, while claiming to be protecting the delicate sensibilities of a vocal but tiny group of non-believers makes absolutely no sense.  While I don’t condone favoritism toward Christianity or any other specific religion, I certainly don’t want to see America become a “godless’ nation either.  The belief that we answer to a greater power is an important part of the moral fabric of this nation, and it’s become pretty obvious to me that there are people in the American media who are obsessed with destroying that belief.  They are attempting to strip ANY and ALL references to God and religion from our society.

They clearly have an agenda, and if weakening the moral fabric of this great country is a necessary step in implementing it, it certainly must be an evil one.

However, while our media may get away with something like this during an American Idol episode, I think they bit off a little bit more than they could chew doing this during the U.S. Open.  If I had to guess, I’d say roughly 90% of the U.S. Open viewing audience is comprised of patriotic, God fearing adults who have had just about enough of this garbage.  We didn’t take this particular incident lying down, and we made our feelings known.  I find that fact encouraging,  but it certainly won’t be the last time we see this tactic.  Their relentless assaults on God, religion, and morality will continue.  We must remain vigilant, and make our voices heard whenever they occur.

If we don’t, the next thing we know, they’ll be screwing around with the National Anthem before our baseball games ….

Oh wait … Rosie O’ Donnell already did that, didn’t she?

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof is a simpleton. There is really no other way to say it, no gentler phrasing possible, to explain how childish and uncluttered his tiny little mind really is. The latest example of his utter inability to think clearly can be seen in Kristof’s screed against Americans that love America. Kristof thinks that conservatives and Republicans should look with longing at the troubled nation of Pakistan and see it as a model state. He says that they are no better than Muslim extremists that employ oppression, murder, and terrorism as a tool of the state. No, he’s serious.

How does he justify this simple-minded, hyperbolic, partisan hate-speech? Not very well, I’ll tell you that much.

He makes all sorts of idiotic charges against Republicans, but the best way to understand how unthinkingly childish his screed is, is to simply imagine that everything he says conservatives support he must imagine that liberals are against. After all, the only way to see his calumnies as such is to imagine he thinks that he stands on the opposite side of the ideas of which he accuses conservatives of being in favor.

Let’s take his points and then imagine what the opposite is and you’ll see what I mean.

He says that Republicans are for the lowest tax burden. If this is true and he finds this a negative point, then we must assume Kristof wants the absolute highest tax burden, a crushing tax burden that destroys all capitalist endeavors. That would be the opposite, wouldn’t it?

Next Kristof says Republicans want a limited government so that, “burdensome regulations never kill jobs.” The only take away here is to understand that Kristof sees this as a bad thing. He is smarter than we are, you see. So, Kristof, then, wants a government that is so burdensome that it kills jobs. He must. He finds the non-burdensome government to be a negative against Republicans doesn’t he?

He says conservatives embrace “traditional religious values and a conservative sensibility.” He obviously, then, wants no traditional values at all, hates all religion, and wants no common sense, conservative sensibilities to prevail. He wants chaos and no law — because the rule of law is the ultimate in conservative sensibility, after all.

He says Republicans want a world where “criminals are never coddled.” We must understand, then, that Kristof must think that criminals are never really guilty of anything and that they need all the coddling we can afford them. Crime is a misnomer in Kristof’s world… well, unless you are a Republican, of course. Then you are not just a criminal, but evil.

“The budget priority is a strong military, the nation’s most respected institution,” Kristof mocks. Then we must assume he wants no military budget and that even if we do have a military, it should not be a respected institution.

He adds to his pro-military negative by saying, “Citizens are deeply patriotic, and nobody burns flags.” Are we to take it that Kristof wants a world where no one is at all patriotic, not even a tiny bit, and where flags are respected so little that they are burnt everyday? Wouldn’t we have to in order to take his piece seriously?

All these negative things he ascribes to Republicans and conservatives then leads him to the unsupported and hyperbolic conclusion that Republicans should love Pakistan because that terrorist nation displays all the virtues that he claims Republicans love. And so, we have to assume Kristof thinks liberals love the exact opposite sort of world.

Upon reflection, Kristof’s world of polar opposites, one where there is no patriotism at all, where business is crushed by government, where there are no jobs, and chaos rules because there is no rule of law, is as disgusting as the world he says conservatives want. But we are forced by the extremist rhetoric in his ill thought out piece to believe that he thinks liberals want that chaotic world nonetheless. Just to take his piece seriously we’d have to believe it.

Now, do I think that this fool Kristof really desires a nation built in a starkly obverse fashion to the points he charges as negatives against Republicans? Not in all cases, certainly, and absolutely not in those harsh terms. His liberal ideas are far more subtle than those cartoonish opposites would entail. It would be childish to claim that he and his liberal friends did feel this way. However, he employed the same childish, anti-intellectual thinking process to attack conservatives and gave them no such benefit of truthfully considering their conservative values.

Certainly the differences between conservative Americans and Muslim radicals are obvious to anyone that engages their brain even a little bit. The fact is the “values” that Pakistani radicals support are not in any way at all similar to those that conservatives and Republicans in America support.

Take his charge that conservatives and Republicans are all about those “traditional religious values” and how, in his warped thinking, Kristof says Pakistan is somehow just like the Republican ideal in this respect. Kristof is, of course, employing the worst in half-truths.

Yes, both Pakistani Muslim radicals and conservative Americans believe in “traditional religious values.” But their core principles are not in any way similar. The religious principles that Americans believe in are varied but none of them include the rape of infidels, the murder of children that date the “wrong” sort of people, or the torture and oppression of those that disagree with them. Using the simpleton’s argument that all “traditional religious values” are exactly the same is as anti-intellectual as can be.

In fact, using his empty thinking process we could claim that America’s founders are no better than Muslim radicals, can’t we? Is Kristof saying that George Washington, John Adams et al are no different than Osama bin Laden?

In the end Kristof’s thinking is as simple minded as saying that conservatives Americans and Radical Islamists are exactly the same because both like sunny days, as brainless as saying that all animals that have fur must, then, be dogs. His sort of foolishness dispenses with having to think about anything, which is comforting to liberals because thinking is anathema to their need to feel their way through life.

Sadly, his sort of anti-intellectualism is what passes for “deep thinking” with so many on the American far left, not just among the illiterati of journalism but the university set as well. It is a complete failure to use their heads for anything other than a hat rack.

The left is always a bundle of contradictions. On one hand leftists set themselves up as the ultimate in “tolerance” and a guarantor of “freedom” to do as one wishes. Most leftists imagine themselves interested in making sure everyone is free to do as they wish to the point where that they are almost libertine about it. Until… until it comes to the freedoms of those they oppose. Then, all of a sudden, their tendency toward fascist group-think comes out in full force.

Joe Schoffstall of the Media Research Center highlighted that liberal “for me but not for thee” tendency in a recent video in which he asked a handful of Washington D.C. liberals if they’d like to sign a petition that bans conservative’s free political speech. Naturally, they were happy to do so.

One of Joe’s signers had that liberal confusion down pat. “I think there is freedom of speech,” the young woman said, “but sometimes… there has to be some kind of control. I mean, look at the Tea Party, you have all this hate going on,” she blathered. She went on to say that freedom of speech is “not something this country needs any more.”

One would imagine that if her freedom to speak were curtailed she’d suddenly find that hoary old First Amendment something she could not live without.

Here is what it said on the faux petition Joe was asking them to sign:

“The undersigned hereby adamantly demand that the United States government shut down right wing hate sites. The hate speech propagated by sites like the Drudge Report, Hot Air, Instapundit, Big Government, and others must not be allowed to corrupt our political discourse any longer. These sites are dangerous not only to truth and freedom but also to our society as a whole. BAN THEM NOW!”

Now, let’s do clear something up about what the founders instituted with the First Amendment. The founders, you see, were chiefly concerned about political free speech. One of the things that history taught the founders was that governments tended to kill political opposition (often times literally) by using the force of law to stop people from speaking, printing tracts and books, and organizing competing political parties. This oppression was something that the founders hated.

Their concept of free speech was not a generalized, all encompassing assumption that anyone could say anything at all, however. The founders were focused on political speech but did not assume they were creating a libertine right to say any old thing that a person wants to say in public.

During the founder’s era, for instance, the states commonly used accepted powers to curb certain kinds of speech. Few people doubted the government’s power to curb some types of speech. But political speech, regardless of what it was about, was assumed protected.

That right to political free speech was affirmed when the Alien and Sedition Act, the debacle law instituted in John Adams’ presidency, was repealed by Thomas Jefferson. The generalized assumption of free speech in all subjects finally came later in our history through many court cases. Still, even those cases present some limits — we are all familiar with the principle that you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater.

I give this brief history lesson to point out a particular irony about the we-care-more-than-you leftists that want to ban conservative’s political speech. The left is particularly un-American in this fascist desire to shut down the Rush Limbaughs and Andrew Breitbarts. After all, the founders had written the First Amendment specifically to protect the speech of the Limbaughs and Breitbarts — and for that matter, left-wingers like the Keith Olbermanns and Chris Matthews of the world, too. Our founding principle is to protect the very speech that the left wants to shut down.

That makes these putative Americans not very American, doesn’t it?

Tim Rutten is a left-wing, hack writer from L.A. He is always good for contemporary left wing trope but the other day we discovered that he is also good for the sort of uninformed blathering that leftists of his ilk pretend is American history. Chiefly that of America’s religious history and the so-called “wall of separation between church and state.”

In a June 1 piece about Mitt Romney, Rutten regaled us with his “reading” of Mitt’s current political reality. Rutten proposed that any question about Mitt’s Mormonism was somehow a threat to the United States.

Before I get to Rutten’s warped take on U.S. history, let’s take this business about the attacks on Mitt’s Mormonism.

To make his point, Rutten proves himself keen on unduly enlarging the supposed attacks on Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion from both today and in his earlier run for the White House. While there were attacks on Romney for his religion in 2008, those attacks were relatively minor and never really made much headway against his candidacy.

Certainly there are many thousands of Christians that don’t think Mormonism is a Christian religion. I believe that it is a correct assessment, too. But so what? Whether Mormonism is a Christian religion or not has nothing whatever to do with Mitt Romney’s suitability for becoming president of the United States. Only a small minority of Republican voters hold Romney’s Mormonism against him. I’d guess that number would dwindle to even less should Mitt become the GOP nominee, too.

But Mitt’s positions on the issues are another thing. Conservative Republicans stand against Mitt Romney, not because he is a Mormon but because he is one of the most athletic flip floppers of modern Republican history. Let us remember that no one is questioning Jon Huntsman’s Mormon religion and Orrin Hatch, also a Mormon, has been a stalwart Republican for many years without being overly attacked for his religion.

For Mitt, his religion is the last thing to trouble his possible voters base. Romney is disliked because he’s been on every side of every issue over the last 30 years. His religion is the last thing on most Republican’s minds. Rutten is simply wrong as can be about his whole premise.

Now, let’s get to his garbled read on American history.

The second half of Rutten’s piece centers on the “no religious test” provision in the U.S. Constitution. Rutten fears what he thinks is a Christian propensity to damn non-Christians and his easily enflamed imagination sees sudden “religious tests” being applied to Mitt and, by extension, everyone else. It’s a threat to the very existence of America, Rutten posits.

Rutten rightly notes that the founders designed the Constitution to prevent those religious tests from being deployed against our candidates for office, but he incorrectly relays the whole history of the provision.

Rutten points to one of those wonderful “experts” that left-wingers always resort to in times like this. In this case it is one William Lee Miller who claims that the founders wanted a nation “nonreligious in its civil life.” Miller, according to Rutten, also notes that the Constitution never mentions God or the “providence” to which “many deists among the framers often alluded.”

It is absolutely true that the founders did not want a national religion. But he is incorrect in the claim that the founders expected religion to be wholly separated from government and the character of the nation. In fact, even the so-called deists among the framers felt that religion must inform the moral character of American life, both common and political.

Rutten is also wrong that there were all those “deists among the framers.” This is a canard that the left has trotted out for decades, ever since the early 1900s when Charles Beard warped American history toward his communist ideology and dragged our educational establishment along with him in so doing. There were in fact, only two of the most involved founders that can be claimed to be “deists.” Ben Franklin once called himself a deist and so did Gouverneur Morris — Morris helped write the Constitution.

No other founder called himself a deist. No, not even Thomas Jefferson. He called himself a Unitarian or a Unitarian Universalist. Heck, Jefferson even frequently attend the church services held right in the halls of Congress when he was president, so he obviously had no thought of banishing all vestiges of religion from government.

It is absolutely true that some of the big name founders were not very conventional in their religious beliefs. Adams railed against the clergy, and Madison and Jefferson both were not your run-of-the-mill religious Virginians. Neither was George Washington, for that matter, yet as Vincent Phillip Muñoz notes, Washington was quite happy to mix religious ideals with the civic religion of the United States. Conventionally religious or no, the truth is that the ranks of the founders were not shot through with “deists.” It is simply an historical myth that they were.

In any case, we need to understand that Christianity formed the basis for all the moral assumptions upon which the Constitution and American society were based. And while Rutten is right that God does not appear at all in the Constitution, the all powerful God does appear several times in the Federalist Papers, the very book written to extol the virtues of that Constitution. Remember also that the Federalist Papers was written in part by the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison. Further, the Christian religion and tenets are referenced by the founding generation more than any other set of ideas as they wrote tracts, books and newspaper articles to impress their American case on their fellows in the decades before the framing of the Constitution. (Do check out, among others, the book, “We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future,” by Matthew Spalding, for more.)

The problem with Rutten’s false impression is one of limited scope. To focus solely on the lack of “God” being in the Constitution and making the case that religion has no part in American life or government is woefully uninformed. The fact is that Christianity was laced entirely throughout the founder’s philosophy and they never intended to have religion divorced wholesale from government.

But for those like Rutten, making sure that Americans do not find out about the real religious history of our nation suits their purpose to make religion wholly non grata. As it happens, the truth is much more complicated than the Christianity-haters of the left want anyone to understand.

One of the main forces behind the Tea Party movement and the disgust that many Americans have with the federal government is its supreme arrogance and its constant unwanted and unwarranted power grabs. This is one of the things that the American people really need to put their attention toward reversing.

Perhaps it is just beginning?

Alaska, for instance, has just thrown its weight behind the opposition to the federal government’s obscene persecution of an Alaskan citizen who was arrested for violating rules that the federal government has imposed on those Alaskan waterways flowing through national parks.

The state is claiming that regardless of what the man did on the waterways, the federal government has no authority to arrest and prosecute the man because the waterways are in Alaska’s purview and the feds are over stepping.

Another recent example is in the millions of dollars that the federal government is forcing local city and state governments to spend on new street signs. The feds have changed its regulations on the typography on street signs and is requiring all street signs in the country to conform to the new regulations. From whence does this arrogance come? Well if states get federal highway money the feds feel they have the right to demand that the states spend that money the way the feds say they must spend it. If that means wasting millions on new street signs then that’s just what they will expect to be done.

Then there’s the multiple states joining the lawsuit over Obamacare. At least 20 states attorney generals have joined together to fight off President Obama’s attempt to take over the country’s healthcare system.

The federal government’s grasping for unconstitutional power is everywhere these days from the EPA, to the president, to Congress making rules without really bothering to justify them under our governing document.

All might not be lost, though. There is a growing movement among the various states to begin to reapply their 10th Amendment rights.

The 10th Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” States are beginning to find a renewed interest in this clause.

Certainly it should come as no surprise that this is occurring when one reviews the many, many ways that the powergrabbers in Washington have exceeded their authority and encroached on the sovereignty of the states.

Another effort is the “Repeal Amendment” effort as seen at www.repealamendment.org. The site tells us of its goal…

Our Founding Fathers gave enumerated powers to the Federal Government and reserved most of the power for the States. Today, the federal government has usurped the power that the Founders originally intended for the States.

The Repeal Amendment is dedicated to restoring our nations economic liberty by advocating for an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that restores the balance of power between the States and Federal Government.

The Amendment these folks would like to see passed is this:

Any provision of law or regulation of the United States may be repealed by the several states, and such repeal shall be effective when the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states approve resolutions for this purpose that particularly describe the same provision or provisions of law or regulation to be repealed.”

“This doesn’t undo some of those bad Supreme Court cases and doesn’t resolve some of the problems of the Seventeenth Amendment, but it does restore some of the balance of power that was originally intended — and the mechanism by which we can control some of the out of control spending and get our debt under control,” said Marianne Moran, executive director of RepealAmendment.org.

It is hoped that this renewed interest in state’s rights will lead to knocking down the federal government’s power a few pegs and eliminating some of the undue and illicit power that the federal government has stolen from us.

Our fourth president, James Madison, has been called the father of the Constitution for not inconsiderable reasons. Madison was highly educated, widely read, and well thought of. He was also a prescient man. Madison was so prescient that in February of 1788 he was able to describe the precise reasons why his beloved Republic would be faring so badly 222 years later in 2010.

Madison’s far-reaching delineation of our current troubles appears in the Federalist Papers, a document that Thomas Jefferson proclaimed “the best commentary on the principles of government ever written.” There in Federalist 62 — his explanation of the senate — we find an amazingly clear prediction of how badly we’ve gone off track in Washington D.C., not to mention our state and local governments.

Student of history that he was, Madison understood that democratic governments often suffer from the malady of unfaithful elected officials. “It is a misfortune incident to republican government,” Madison wrote, “that those who administer it may forget their obligations to their constituents, and prove unfaithful to their important trust.”

The founders and writers of the Constitution intended that the Senate help keep the federal government on track serving as a “salutary check on the government.” The Senate, they proposed, would serve as a check on the passions of the House of Representatives and possibly an overzealous president. They intended that the senate would slow the wheels of government and help keep the interests of the states alive in the halls of Congress. It would become known as the “most deliberative body in the world” exactly for this reason.

Originally Senators were appointed by the state legislatures in order to represent the interests of the states. Since the members of the House were elected by state voters to represent their interests, electing senators seemed duplicative. After all with the whole of the people electing the president and the individual voters of each district electing their member of the House of Representatives it seemed that the voters were getting plenty of representation. The states needed their interests protected and so senators were appointed by the states for that purpose.

That delicate balance would end in 1913 when the Seventeenth Amendment altered the original plan and made provisions for voters to directly elect members of the Senate just as they do their House members. No more would the states be represented in Washington and as each decade passed into the future our politicians began more and more to take on that “misfortune” that Madison so lamented.

Noting that any person that is “inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan at all” is immediately “marked” as a “victim to his own unsteadiness and folly,” Madison insisted that governments that act similarly forfeit “the respect and confidence” of everyone.

Every nation, consequently, whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability, may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of their wiser neighbors.

Madison is right that nobody likes or trusts a flighty fool. But Madison was not talking in merely general philosophical terms. He saw his own fledgling nation already acting is such a self-defeating manner under the feckless Articles of Confederation that he hoped the new Constitution would correct.

But the best instruction on this subject is unhappily conveyed to America by the example of her own situation. She finds that she is held in no respect by her friends; that she is the derision of her enemies; and that she is a prey to every nation which has an interest in speculating on her fluctuating councils and embarrassed affairs.

The country was already floundering due to its ineffective form of national government. Madison saw the Articles of Confederation as a complete failure offering no stability for his nascent nation. But as he went on to explain why the Constitution would be better than what they had in the Articles, Madison seems to be describing exactly the situation we are confronted with today.

Today we are faced with a government that no one can count on. It is capricious, constantly changing, and grabbing new power unto itself nearly every month. Businesses cannot make plans for the future for fear that those plans will be ruined by the next government power grab. Greedy politicians that are more interested in power for themselves and their party than they are about governing beset us. They exhibit a supreme arrogance that only comes from those that feel they are unaccountable to anyone but themselves. Additionally, as these oppressive government tendrils reach further into our lives we find that those lobbyists who understand and/or can guide the next set of rules constantly emanating from government are the only ones that benefit. Sadly the people are either the last to benefit or don’t benefit at all.

Read, then, Madison’s description of a failed state and you’ll find it a perfect description of our predicament.

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood… Law is defined to be a rule of action but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

Madison noted other consequences of these calamitous failures.

Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uniformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few, not for the many.

Sound familiar? Remember that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insisted that we had to pass Obama’s budget bloating Obamacare bill so that “we could know what’s in it”? We’ve had senators and members of the house insisting that they can’t be expected to actually read the bills they are voting on? We have dozens of bills floating from one unaccountable committee to another until no one is sure what is at what stage of consideration? We have government convening in the dead of night to slip things past the people and thousands of documents dumped on Friday evenings so that no one sees them? We’ve also had federal agencies issuing reams of new regulatory changes every month with no real accountability at all. Madison’s description of a calamitous government poisoning the blessing of liberty is no exercise in philosophy. It is a precise description of our current governing climate.

Were it not for its elegance, one would think that Madison’s words were ripped from today’s news.

Madison continued:

The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? … In a word, no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy.

The end result is that the people themselves no longer have a bond of affection to their government.

But the most deplorable effect of all is that diminution of attachment and reverence which steals into the hearts of the people… No government… will long be respected without being truly respectable… without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.

With approval ratings of congress and presidents at all time lows and voter turnout at a trickle of what it should be, who can’t see that the people have lost reverence and attachment to their government? Madison was exactly right with his warnings.

After all this, what is the solution to our ills? Is Madison’s Constitution itself at fault? Of course we have not had Madison’s Constitution for well over a hundred years. We’ve allowed his blueprint to become bastardized, warped, and made a shadow of its former self. Have some things gotten better? Sure they have. But on the whole we’ve strayed far from our founding principles and of what was prescribed in the Federalist Papers.

The only solution is to begin a systematic trimming of government. Scores of federal employees and their departments need to be summarily eliminated. Pensions canceled. Programs ended. Departments snuffed out. We need to force our politicians to adhere to the Constitution by insisting that they justify their policies by pointing to which clause tells them that their actions are Constitutional. We need to begin impeaching judges far more than we do. In short, we need to start taking government out of our lives, not involving it more.

But above all, today our politicians think we are their servants. We need to remind them of who controls whom.

Richard Cohen is what passes for an opinion editorialist in the Washington Post — not a learned one, just a bloviating one. Cohen’s latest, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” is at the same time as self-loathing as it is historically stupid. Not only does this nonsense Cohen ladled out upon us all serve an example that you don’t have to actually know anything to be in our modern Old Media establishment, but it is evidence that the profession of editor is long dead.

In his ten paragraphs Cohen indulges every left-wing trope that one can find. Whites are all racist, we don’t do enough for “the poor” in America, Christianity is the root of all evil, and it all started in the 1850s when the Republican Party was born. Most ridiculously, Cohen a-historically seems to think that the art of compromise died in American politics when the GOP was born. This last bit alone is guffaw worthy to say the least.

Oddly, Cohen appears to imagine that the idea of American exceptionalism was born in the 1900s and does not date to the founding era. Regardless of when it was born, Cohen’s main point is that American exceptionalism does not really exist. His is the same sort of self-flagellation that all leftists indulge, the kind that says the USA is no better than, say, North Korea, or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

Coehn starts his screed by quoting left-winger W.E.B. Du Bois, a man that led the African American community away from the ideals of determined self-reliance espoused by George Washington Carver or Booker T. Washington and toward the victimhood status that is so pervasive and destructive today. Naturally that quote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” sets Cohen’s piece right on the path that assumes all whites are racists — and that, presumably, makes American exceptionalism a lie.

Now, let’s put racism in a bit of historical perspective. America is not the only place on the planet where it exists nor was it born here. Yes, we had slavery, but we weren’t the first or the last to have it and we fought a war to end it. Yes, we had a unique racial problem in America, yet because of the ideals laid down by the founders — freedom and liberty for all — we beat it. Cohen does not see that because he does not want to see that.

Still, to Cohen, the idea of America’s exceptional nature is a “cult of American exceptionalism.” He scoffs at it. He derides it.

Cohen’s next a-historical “point” is this:

The phrase has an odd history. As Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz reminds me, American exceptionalism once applied to the hostility that the American worker — virtually alone in the industrialized world — had toward socialism. Now, though, it is infused with religious meaning, which makes it impervious to analysis. Once you say God likes something, who can quibble?

Cohen thinks that only lately the idea has become “infused with religious meaning”? This does not square with quotes from many of the founders wherein one can find all sorts of allusions to the concept that America is blessed by God and linked closely to Christian religion. In fact, many of the founders thought a Christian religious upbringing was essential to the nation’s success.

Thomas Jefferson thought that Americans had a unique gift from God. He said, “My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy.”

Benjamin Rush, for instance, once said, “the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion.”

Justice Joseph Story said, “There never has been a period of history, in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as laying at its foundation.”

George Washington said, “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.”

James Madison: “The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities impressed with it.”

Another from James Madison: “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as subject of the Governor of the Universe.” –James Madison

These are just a few. There are hundreds more.

It wasn’t just Americans that thought this, foreigners also thought America was exceptional. French traveler and writer Alexis de Tocqueville remarked many times on America’s greatness. All these quotes came long before the current era during which Cohen imagines only now has seen religion mixed with the idea of American exceptionalism. The fact is that the health and greatness of America has always, always been linked closely with the religion that Cohen seems to so despise.

Next Cohen claims that because we have a high murder rate and a high execution rate, why, that must mean the USA is not an exceptional nation. This, of course, leaves out the many thousands a year that China and Iran execute. I guess Chinese executions don’t factor into Cohen’s figuring because, well, that shoots down his claims, doesn’t it?

Cohen’s next angle of attack was to claim that our education system makes mockery of American exceptionalism.

American exceptionalism has produced a dysfunctional education system — more than 14,000 school districts, lots of bad (but job-protected) teachers, oblivious parents and students who are too dumb to know they’re dumb. American eighth-graders score 66 points below their Japanese counterparts in math, yet almost 40 percent of American children think they’re good in math. That figure for Japan is 4 percent.

I won’t dispute this as a straight fact. But why has this happened? Cohen is remiss not to say. Democrats and left-wing educational policy caused this disparity, not American exceptionalism. In fact, the idea of American exceptionalism has been torpedoed by these left-wingers in our mis-educational establishment and that has contributed to that decline. The fall of our educational system has only occurred in the era of American liberalism — an ideology that is antagonistic to American exceptionalism, just like Cohen is.

Cohen’s next bout of navel gazing centers on the trope of an American Indian genocide, something that has been readily debunked. Were the Indians treated with kid gloves? Hardly. But to say they were treated worse here than indigenous peoples elsewhere have been treated is a canard. The fact is that Indians were killing Indians for hundreds of years before we ever came along and their rivalries and racist sentiments were often employed against each other in coordination with whites.

Naturally, Cohen wants to claim that this focus on religion is only cover for homophobia, prayer coercion, traditional marriage supporters, and global warming denial — all left-wing worries, to be sure.

Then comes the oddest claim of all: that the GOP is responsible for the end of compromise and the Civil War.

The huge role of religion in American politics is nothing new but always a matter for concern nonetheless. In the years preceding the Civil War, both sides of the slavery issue claimed the endorsement of God. The 1856 Republican convention concluded with a song that ended like this: “We’ve truth on our side/ We’ve God for our guide.” Within five years, Americans were slaughtering one another on the battlefield.

Therein lies the danger of American exceptionalism. It discourages compromise, for what God has made exceptional, man must not alter…

Lunacy. Apparently Cohen thinks that the GOP should have compromised on slavery! But even so, even if that was just an unclear notion and he does not think that, he seems to imply that there was all sorts of “compromise” going on before the Civil War and the birth of the GOP destroyed that harmonious America he longs for.

The stupidity of this is that the Slavocracy in the south, the Democrat Party of the era, had created in the 1830s what was called the gag rule, a policy that killed any discussion of the slavery question in congress. It’s a bit hard to engage in vaunted compromise when one cannot even discuss the issue! And this rule was born long before there was a Republican Party (born in 1854). Before that one has but to go back to the tough election of 1800 to see a dearth of the sort of compromise that Cohen seems to imagine was pervasive before the evil GOP was born.

Anyway, here is how he wraps up this laughable mess:

And yet clearly America must change fundamentally or continue to decline. It could begin by junking a phase that reeks of arrogance and discourages compromise. American exceptionalism ought to be called American narcissism. We look perfect only to ourselves.

It would be easier to argue that “fundamental change” is what has led to the decline that Cohen laments. We are not being led down the garden path by blind adherence to the ideal of American exceptionalism. We are being disrupted and laid low by his own creed of left-wing, Euro-centric, socialist idealism. That “narcissism” Cohen points to was born of FDR’s lurch to the left and cemented by LBJ’s disastrous “Great Society” ideals.

Cohen seems to know precisely nothing about history. Further he has no perspective on the history of the rest of the world and does not see the essential greatness that has always guided America to the greater freedom and liberty that has made it the light unto the world.