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Title: THE FEDERALIST
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29 October 2003
Federalist No.
03-44
Wednesday Chronicle
CONTENTS:
The
Foundation
Insight
Upright
Editorial Exegesis
Dezinformatsia
Sociocrats
Village Idiots
Short Cuts
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THE FOUNDATION
"Under all those disadvantages no men ever show more
spirit or prudence than ours. In my opinion nothing but virtue has kept our
army together through this campaign." --Col. John Brooks
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INSIGHT
"None are more readily taken with flattery than the
proud who wish to be first but are not." --Spinoza
"Clearly, a
civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the
energy and conviction to defend itself." --Jean Francois Revel
"There
is no nation so poor that it cannot afford free speech, but there are few
elites
which will put up with the bother of it." --Daniel P. Moynihan
"No
legacy is so rich as honesty." --William Shakespeare
"Nurture your
mind
with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes." --Benjamin
Disraeli
"The world we have created is a product of our thinking. It
cannot be changed without changing our thinking." --Albert Einstein
"There is no working middle course in wartime." --Sir Winston
Churchill
++ "The history of treaties throughout the
centuries is such that one should not stake one's life on a treaty." --Ronald
Reagan
"Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect
liberty when the government's purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are
naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The
greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding." --Supreme Court Justice Brandeis
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
--Mark Twain
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UPRIGHT
"The more progress we make on the ground, the more free
the Iraqis become, ... the more desperate these killers become, because they
can't stand the thought of a free society." --President George W. Bush
"Iraq is also becoming a
reflecting
pool of the world at large. Millions are slowly learning how different the
United States is from its critics in Europe." --Victor Davis
Hanson
"By
understanding liberty as an abstract or radically individualistic
principle, the
[Supreme] Court cannot help but dissolve over time all the social institutions
and moral restraints embodied in the law." --Peter Augustine Lawler
++ "Our Founding Fathers created a
government that was controlled by the people rather than the other way around.
The rule of law was to be supreme over group whims and pop fads." --Tom
DeWeese
++ "Of course, we pretend America is the
constitutional republic it always was. But we are living under a
'Constitution'
that would not be recognizable to those who wrote it." --James Antle
"Losing [the debate about marriage] means losing marriage as a social
institution, a shared public norm. The question is not whether this is a battle
we can win, but whether it is a battle we can afford to lose." --Maggie
Gallagher
"Politics in our country
is about money and power. End of story." --Charley Reese
++ "Choosing the lesser of two evils is
still a choice for evil. It's time for all conservatives to put principle over
politics." --Lee Shelton
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EDITORIAL EXEGESIS
"One of the more enduring Internet hoaxes is the chain
letter claiming that the government has an e-mail tax in the works. Well, if
Congress doesn't extend the Internet tax moratorium before it expires at
the end
of this week, the e-mail tax could soon cease to be an urban legend. The
current
moratorium, known as the Internet Tax Freedom Act, prevents taxes on Internet
access; double taxation of Web purchases; and discriminatory taxes that treat
online sales differently from offline sales." --Wall
Street Journal
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DEZINFORMATSIA
This week's "TheoLib" Award: "...[C]laims made for
Jesus
Christ by most Christians, from Vatican corridors to evangelical revival tents,
implicitly insult the religion of others. ...The general's offense was to speak
aloud the implication of a still broadly held theology. But that theology is
dangerous now. A respectful religious pluralism is no longer a liberal
hope but
an urgent precondition of justice and peace."
--Boston Globe columnist James
Carroll, on
Gen. Jerry Boykin
From the "See B.S." Files: "We should change our
attitude toward the United Nations. There has to be some power in the world
superior to our own.... We should not have attacked Iraq without the OK of the
United Nations.... Now we have to live with that mistake. We're living
with it,
and too many of our guys are dying with it." --CBS's Andy Rooney
This
week's "Spike" Award: "If things are really bad in Iraq, bypassing the
mainstream media won't make them any better, and that's what the Bush
administration seems to be trying these days.... There is, actually, a solution
and it's deceptively simple: level with the American public about what is going
wrong.... What's been found in the way of weapons of mass destruction does not
measure up to the pre-war warnings. When the administration starts dealing
forthrightly with those issues, the good news will speak for itself." --ABC's
Ted Koppel **When, exactly, will Koppel start
"dealing forthrightly with those
issues"?
From the
Commissars of Public Opinion: "We have a country that wants to believe it
is the
best in everything, but until all of us embrace the idea that health care
should
be a right, not a privilege, our system cannot be glibly described as, quote,
'the best in the world'." --ABC News "medical editor" Dr. Tim Johnson
This week's "Periplaneta
Americana"
Award: "Actually that $87 billion, Peter, covers all, reconstruction and
military operations, he said $66 billion over the next year will go to military
intelligence operations. It's a big number and it's very typical of this
President. ...He essentially is asking the public to support him in imposing a
kind of Pax Americana on the Muslim Middle East, it is a very big, enormous
task
he is asking the public to join him." --ABC reporter Terry
Moran
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SOCIOCRATS
From the "Thundering Herd of Jackasses": "I'd say
all of
us up here support our troops a great deal more than the president of the
United
States does." --Howard Dean ++ "Right
after 9/11, this administration determined to do bait and switch on the
American
public. President Bush said he was going to get Usama bin Laden, dead or
alive.
Instead, he went after Saddam Hussein. He doesn't have either one of them
today." --Wesley Clark ++ "What I voted
for was to hold Saddam Hussein accountable but to do it right. This president
has done it wrong every step of the way." --John Kerry
++ "Bush was wrong to go in in the first
place. To delay coming out doesn't make it right." --Rev. Al Sharpton
++ "We blew the place up, we have to
fix it
back." --Carol Moseley Braun ++ "Our sons
and daughters half a world away put their lives at risk every single day
with no
plan in sight. Is this our America? No, we have work to do." --John Edwards
++ And sometimes they get it right: "I
didn't duck it, I didn't avoid it, I voted to support our troops and I am proud
of it. ... If everyone had voted the way John Kerry did, the money wouldn't
have
been there to support our troops." --Joe Lieberman
From a Demo
presidential campaign stuck in neutral: "America cannot put its foot on the
accelerator of war and advocate peace. ... Freedom bids us to free ourselves
from the shackles of violence. When peace becomes innermost, it then becomes
outermost in our communities and our nation." --Dennis Kucinich on bringing
"outermost peace" around our nation
Some "Demo-Goguery": "If you want
to live like a Republican, you've got to vote for the Democrats." --Rep. Dick
Gephardt
A light in the darkness... "In terms of the percentage of
voters who identify themselves as Democrats, the Democratic Party is currently
in its weakest position since the dawn of the New Deal." --Clintonista Mark
Penn
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VILLAGE IDIOTS
This week's "Hollywonk" Award: "The past few years of
conflict mean that yet another generation of Israelis and Palestinians will
grow
up in hatred. We cannot allow that to happen." --Actor Brad Pitt and his
actress wife, Jennifer Aniston, announcing launch of a Hollywood attempt at
bringing a Middle East peace, which will also include seasoned diplomatist
Danny
DeVito
From the "Global Village": "We hope the firing will be more
precise and efficient [next time], so we get rid of this microbe and people
like
him in Washington who are spreading disorder in Arab lands, Iraq and
Palestine."
--Walid Jumblatt, Lebanese politician and Druze community leader, lamenting
that
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was unhurt in a Baghdad rocket
attack last weekend
This week's "Tyranny of the Few" Award:
"Segregation is a bad thing on the basis of race. Involvement of religion in
government is a bad thing, and I want it all gone just as I would like all
racism gone and all the other bad things. ...We have a Constitution that
says it
shouldn't be part of our government." --Semiprofessional atheist Michael
Newdow,
pledging his allegiance to eliminating religious liberty for all
citizens
This week's "Gender Disorientation Disorder" Award: "My mom
liked it actually. And my dad, weirdly enough, he thought it was fine, too. I
mean, come on ... it's Madonna. ... Oh my gosh [she is an] amazing kisser!"
--Britney Spears on her lip-lock with Madonna on a televised music award show.
Patrick Moore reformed?...
"[Greenpeace has adopted] a new philosophy of radical environmentalism... [Its]
agenda is a greater threat to the global environment than that posed by
mainstream society." --Greenpeace Founder, Dr. Patrick Moore on Greenpeace
today
From the "Village Academic
Curriculum" File: Christina Lough, a 13-year old A+ student at Garland McMeans
Junior High in Katy, Texas, is spending seven days in a "special disciplinary
class" and will lose her post as student council and honor society president,
because -- you guessed it -- she was caught at school with a small folding
knife
used for pencil sharpening. Zero tolerance, don't you know: "If we vary from
the rules, that's when the rules fall apart," notes school district lawyer
Christopher Gilbert
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SHORT CUTS
"Here's a note to [atheist] Michael Newdow, the 9th
Circuit Court of Appeals and all the other humor-impaired individuals whose
time
is spent obsessing on such Earth-shaking issues as the total elimination of
religious references from the public venue. God just called ... and he
says you
should get a life." --Ron Marr
"No Democrat wants to tell the leaders
of their party that they have halitosis." --Georgia Demo Sen. Zell Miller
"For Democratic candidates, [Bill Clinton] is the equivalent of
kryptonite. He stands next to them, and they die." --GOP consultant Craig
Shirley
"If [Wesley] Clark thought that [Serbia's Slobodan] Milosevic
was a formidable foe, he is about to learn the far more ruthless tactics of
Political Warfare 101." --John O'Sullivan
"Those people who have been
saying that California can go to blazes seem to know what they have been
talking
about. ...After three months of gubernatorial candidates blowing smoke
Californians should have known that there would be fire out there somewhere."
--Lyn Nofziger
Jay Leno.... As you
may have heard, the U.S. is putting together a constitution for Iraq. Why
don't
we just give them ours? Think about it -- it was written by very smart people,
it's served us well for over two hundred years, and besides, we're not using it
anymore. .... A bill allowing illegal
immigrants from anywhere in the world to receive drivers licenses was passed by
the California state assembly. And if you snuck in the country from the Middle
East they'll not only give you a drivers license, they'll throw in a pilot's
license too. .... You read about all these
terrorists, most of them came here legally, but they hung around on these
expired visas, some for as long as 10-15 years. Now, compare that to
Blockbuster; you are two days late with a video and these people are all over
you. Let's put Blockbuster in charge of
immigration.
David Letterman.... Top
Cool Things About Having a Bodybuilder as Governor: Every California classroom
will have a Soloflex; The Mr. Olympia contest now gets full coverage on C-SPAN;
He'll take that 8-billion-dollar deficit and... uh... punch it, I guess; Will
put an end to America's dependence on foreign protein shakes; He is nice; It's
very entertaining -- as long as he's not governor of your state; He'll have
something to fall back on when he gets
recalled.
Argus Hamilton.... Don
Rumsfeld admitted in a leaked Pentagon memo on [last] Wednesday that the war in
Iraq will be a long, hard slog. The American people already feel that way. As
soon as the administration decided not to seize the oil, the fun went right out
of it. .... President Bush flew to the
South
Seas Wednesday for a meeting in Bali. He was protected during his three-hour
visit by warships, an armored limousine and five thousand cops. The President
wanted to show Americans that it's safe to travel again.
.... Hillary Clinton will emcee an Iowa
dinner November 15th with all Democratic candidates in attendance. ...
Democrats
wonder if she will use the night to support the other candidates or declare her
own candidacy. She promised she will stand by her principles, so it could go
either way.
Lex et Libertas -- Semper Vigilo, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark
Alexander, Publisher, for the editors and staff. (Please pray on this day, and
every day, for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm's way around the world
in defense of our liberty, and for the families awaiting their safe
return.)
-- PUBLIUS --
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