"you moderns have a tendency to worship at the altar of the fathers"
And now for something completely unrelated to my previous entries --
I have the Sotomayor confirmation hearings playing on C-SPAN.org right now, and why am I totally not surprised that they are essentially a platform for all twenty members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to quote things out of context (e.g., Sheldon Whitehouse [D-RI] and Tom Coburn [R-OK] both cited Alexander Hamilton's writings in The Federalist Papers to prove two wholly opposite points in their opening statements) and attempt to outdo their colleagues in slavish devotion to the Founding Fathers? It makes me very much want to smack them over the head with "Thomas Jefferson's" foreward to Jon Stewart's America (The Audiobook), whose pithy captures my frustration with the rituals that accompany this entire nomination process.
Speaking of Tom Coburn, may I also make the point that I find it difficult to believe that, trained as he is in medicine (an admirable field, to be sure), he can honestly go toe-to-toe on issues of constitutional law with any nominee to the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers notwithstanding? It would be like me attempting to argue string theory with a quantum physicist, which -- no, just no.
Signing off, V.M. Bell
I have the Sotomayor confirmation hearings playing on C-SPAN.org right now, and why am I totally not surprised that they are essentially a platform for all twenty members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to quote things out of context (e.g., Sheldon Whitehouse [D-RI] and Tom Coburn [R-OK] both cited Alexander Hamilton's writings in The Federalist Papers to prove two wholly opposite points in their opening statements) and attempt to outdo their colleagues in slavish devotion to the Founding Fathers? It makes me very much want to smack them over the head with "Thomas Jefferson's" foreward to Jon Stewart's America (The Audiobook), whose pithy captures my frustration with the rituals that accompany this entire nomination process.
Speaking of Tom Coburn, may I also make the point that I find it difficult to believe that, trained as he is in medicine (an admirable field, to be sure), he can honestly go toe-to-toe on issues of constitutional law with any nominee to the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers notwithstanding? It would be like me attempting to argue string theory with a quantum physicist, which -- no, just no.
Signing off, V.M. Bell