In America, what you really want is a president whose agenda is based on Christian theology.
A devout Roman Catholic who has risen to the top of Republican polls in recent days, Santorum said the Obama administration had failed to prevent gas prices rising and was using “political science” in the debate about climate change.
Obama’s agenda is “not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,” Santorum told supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement at a Columbus hotel.
I know Rick Santorum is right because the author of the Declaration of Independence and our third president wrote the following to our second president:
It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one . . . But this constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe. – Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams (1813)
I believe Thomas Jefferson was a patriot and one of the most influential and important of our Founding Fathers. I also believe he would have less than zero use for Rick Santorum and his gossamer fabrics of factitious religion.
Booman, I don’t want to make light of this, but what is with all of Mitt’s rivals letting their freak flag’s fly the very second they achieve some positioning over Romney? Why can’t they keep it zipped until they get the nomination? Now, all the talk of Santorum being just as electable as Romney will go out the window as Santorum is revealing his extremeness to the wider public.
I really wish Gingrich and Santorum would have been able to hold out just a bit longer. It would have made things so much easier for Team Obama.
But the freak flag works with the republican radical base that is driving these primaries. Half of them believe what Rick says. For example, the Netherlands euthanasia thing is widely believed on the right, having its very own viral email to spread it.
Romney can’t attack Santorum on social issues or religion because that just opens a can of worms for him. Hell of a pickle for Romney. One might even call it a pickle covered in santorum.
Rick Santorum and his brand of in-your-face Catholicism would have gone over like a lead balloon in Jefferson’s time. The colonial US was deeply hostile to Catholicism.
Jefferson was a deist, and as such believed the Roman Catholic church -indeed all churches and organized religions- existed to enslave mankind, to perpetrate lies, and to relieve people of their wallets.
In short: jefferson would have seen to it that Ricky was tarred, feathered, and exiled.
Indeed, anti-Catholic bigotry was quite welcome among the Revolutionaries, particularly in New England. Conspiracy theories about King James selling out the Pope and forcing the colonies to become Catholic were quite respectable at the time.
This type of prejudice continued for quite some time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursuline_Convent_Riots
Given this history, I don’t look at Jefferson’s little slam on the doctrine of the Trinity as quite as respectable as this post suggests.
The Trinity is not merely a Catholic doctrine. In fact, when the British Parliament decided to tolerate dissenters (although, not Catholics) they insisted that the dissenters affirm the Trinity.
If you want to know about that you should study John Locke.
Jefferson isn’t slamming Catholics; he’s slamming priests, reverends, pastors, and anyone else who makes a living telling people to believe 3 is 1 and 1 is 3.
He was a Unitarian.
He didn’t, however, want to argue about it. At least, not in any official capacity. He wanted to end the arguing.
Jefferson isn’t slamming Catholics; he’s slamming priests, reverends, pastors, and anyone else who makes a living telling people to believe 3 is 1 and 1 is 3.
In the culture of the time, this is the equivalent of saying “he wasn’t slamming Jews, he was slamming conspiratorial bankers.” There was a continuum between straight-up anti-Catholicism and anti-clerical individualism, somewhat comparable to the continuum between pacifism and fascist antisemitism among 1930s America Firsters. Certainly, though, Jefferson wasn’t targeting Catholics in that statement.
Catholic priests were always the models that “clerical oppression” critics would point to.
Wanna know why the RR hates abortion? Because of anti-Catholic bigotry. Catholics weren’t aborting, their families were growing. The protestants were aborting in high numbers. Even though Catholics were such a small percentage of the population, the Protestants still felt very threatened. Then they started opposing abortion, passing bans state by state…and then we had Roe.
yeah, and its also the reason non-whites are overtaking the white population.
sheesh, get real.
???
What do you mean “get real”? It’s the history of abortion in America. I never said their dumb beliefs were rational; in fact it was very very irrational because Catholics were so outnumbered as it was. Protestants with the help of the AMA swept the country with this crap.
I don’t know what to tell you lol. Them’s the facts.
Accepting the Catholic opposition to abortion was one of the prices that Southern Baptists had to pay in order to get Ronald Reagan elected. The Catholics, for their part, had to embrace segregation academies as “parochial schools”.
Oh, well I meant between 1820 and 1900…not post-Roe. But yes, for a long time it was Christian doctrine pitted against one another, until one unifying force with Reagan and onward. Now it’s simply the RR.
“Shall [these regions] be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
~Horatio R. Storer, 1868
Now there’s a video where Santorum tells us how 5% of deaths in the Netherlands are people being involuntarily euthanized. He says older people don’t go to the hospital there, because they’re afraid they’ll be killed. And he opines for the good old days when abortions were illegal and done “in the shadows” by “really bad doctors.”
I disagree with your post that Santorum was the lesser of two evils, this guy is a lunatic.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/19/1066333/-Santorum-on-euthanasia-in-the-Netherlands
Booman, I think you have touched on something that is much broader than Rick Santorum. Jefferson, Franklin, Paine and all most all the others (at least I would say a healthy majority of the founding fathers) were a product of the Age of Enlightenment, where Reason trumped heredity and religious institutions.
I find it ironic that Santorum, who tried to popularize the term Islamo-fascism (I always said that if there was an alien flying above the earth, who would they think were Fascists, the ones relying on military and invading other countries and whose corporate interests ruled, who would they think as Fascists?), tried to adorn the mantle of reason when he recently attacked the intolerance of Liberals:
Rick Santorum: “This is the intolerance of the left, the intolerance of the secular ideology. It is a–it is a religion unto itself. It is just not a biblical-based religion. And it is–it is the most intolerant, just like we saw from the days of the atheists in the Soviet Union. It is completely intolerant of dissent, because they fear dissent. Why? Because the dissent comes from folks who use reason, common sense and divine revelation, and they want no part of any of those things.”
Santorum, the Tea Party, and most of the Republican Party wrap themselves in the flag and the wisdom of the founding fathers when if given a fair reading (I believe) of what they did and said would not be representing the interest on the 1% over the interest of the 99%.
You quote jefferson, eh?
You talk a good game, Booman, but of the various candidates who have been considered over the last several months…Obama among them…there is only one who actually fits that description. Ron Paul. Yet you have no use for him whatsoever. (Other than taking money to post his ads, of course.)
Talk is cheap.
Obama knows this. Thus with one side of his mouth he approves the NDAA and with the other he claims that he will never use the more draconian possibilities that it presents as law.
Ron Paul yesterday:
That is a clear expression of his own morality. He is most definitely following the oracle of his own conscience; he has said over and over again that his own religious affiliation would have absolutely no bearing on how he ran the country if he were elected president and he is saying nothing past what any clear-headed human can “understand [and thus] therefore believe” with the sole possible exception of his ideas about the gold standard…ideas that are at the very least reasonable if yet unproven should one consider what has happened to the dollar over the past 50 years or so.
Talk is cheap. Politics today is all talk. Thus politics is cheap as well.
Bet on it.
Paul’s chances? Even as a third party candidate? Rapidly diminishing in the firestorm of cheap talk.
America’s chances for survival?
Diminishing at about the same rate.
You dare to quote Thomas Jefferson?
Me too.
I expect no change in your positions, Booman. You have allied yourself irretrievably with Obama, just as he has allied himself equally irretrievably with the corporate-owned American PermaGov about which Eisenhower, Ron Paul, others…and no doubt Thomas Jefferson if he were alive today…have so clearly warned us.
You pays yer money and y’takes yer chances.
But your chances are only as good as is your money.
Jefferson again:
You’re spending ghost dollars.
You’re selling wolf tickets, in street language.
Empty as a politician’s promise.
You either allowed to be posted or posted yourself…I forget which…the following image here.
Thomas Jefferson had a lifelong love affair with a slave.
Why not post an equivalent picture of him, Booman?
I dare ya.
We are already running on fumes.
Good luck with the next uphill route.
Think Obama can control Israel?
i don’t.
Think he’ll not back their play when they run it some several weeks before the election?
Please.
Which of the following best describes Barack Obama’s actions as president during his first term?
Jefferson?
Or Dr. Adolph Reed Jr. describing Barack Obama in 1996 as…
Please.
Grouch Marx once asked “Whatever happened to me?”
Whatever happened to you, Booman?
Really.
AG
I have always agreed with Ron Paul on his stance on the war and our wasteful spending on the military, but on all other Libertarian economic and social views, I find him personally wacko. To make the founding fathers Libertarian I think takes a stretch of the imagination. Property rights are supreme with Paul, whereas I think it could be argued, that it was not so with the many of those founding fathers. Here was a group of almost all propertied gentlemen who signed on to the mission state called the Declaration of Independence that dropped property from the John Locke’s inalienable rights of man and substituted the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
It was the king whom they opposed who was the Defender of the Faith and the Grantor of property. It was the governance of the 1% who were far removed from the population (across an ocean) to which they objected.
.
Property rights in U.S. Constitution of 1783 did abolish the slave trade by 1808 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 balanced the number of free and slave states.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
?????? Romney Nr. 1 In Maine, Maybe Overturned
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Too little, too late. Unless a perfect storm of some kind occurs the massed forces of the media have made a Ron Paul candidacy moot. It certainly won’t happen w/the Rebuttlicans, and as a third party candidate?
Not unless:
1-The Vacuous One Now In Power…hereafter referred to as The VONIP…completely fucks up up in public (gets caught literally screwing the presidential pooch, for example) or the whole economic imperialist system in one way or another comes crashing down upon all of our heads while simultaneously…
2-Whatever tomato can the Republicans try to prop up as a candidate starts frothing at the mouth during a debate or is definitively proven to be a mechanical or technological construct of some sort.
Barring something of that sort a third party candidate will be simply subjected to more of the same kind mass media minimization that has so far proven to be very effective on Ron Paul.
We are now living in a mediocracy.
From sea to shining sea, from station to shining station.
If one could collect the totality of media coverage on a given subject…and I do not care what that subject may be, from the presidency to gay marriage, from the Occupy Movement through the Tea Party to the relative importance of cupcakes in one’s daily diet..if one could collect the media coverage on a given subject and then create an algorithm that would calculate the relative power of each media statement (its audience size multiplied the importance of that audience in the day-to-day life of the country) multiplied once again by its positive-to-negative content regarding that subject on a scale of say 100 points, one would be able to absolutely accurately predict “what will happen” in the culture minus an Act Of God constant that would account for natural and unnatural disasters like the NOLA hurricane, Jeremy Lin or Sarah Palin.
Control of the media is control of the immediate future. Bet on it. The people in the CIA and elsewhere in this system who started Operation Mockingbird in the ’50s were prophets and seers of corporate power, and they pinned it. It’s only gotten worse in the ensuing 60 years or so. Much worse.
How to stop that awful fact from destroying this country long-term?
Damned if I know.
If some Paul Revere of the soul were to ride through a virtual Lexington of the American mind shouting “Wake the fuck up!!! You been had and your end is nigh!!!” the shutters of our houses would not even open because the citizens would be so busy in front of their computers and wide screen TVs devouring such vast quantities of hypnotrash that they wouldn’t even hear him.
And so it goes.
Down like a motherfucker.
Until it hits bottom.
When?
Maybe tomorrow or maybe 20 years from now. I really don’t know. But unless Thomas Jefferson’s take on “revolution” actually comes into play, the American Empire is doomed to the end of all statis.
What’s that you say? Thomas Jefferson? Revolution?
Yup.
Read it and weep.
Read it and think, fer chrissake!!!
And…
Jefferson could not foresee how “piled up” the media could make us.
“Large cities?”
How many millions slack-jawedly watch the nightly news programs and in unison cry out “Yes!!!” to whatever they are told?
One city, under God.
The god of Media.
Bet on that as well.
AG
Sort of like a certain racist p.o.s. Congressman who denounced racism out of one side of his mouth and publishes racist newsletters out the other.
No.
More like a certain post-racism, so called “progressive” president who recently signed into law the most pro-fascist piece of legislation (The N.D.A.A.) ever to pass the desk of a sitting president.
Bet on it.
Wait and see.
It’ll happen eventually.
Watch.
AG
No.
No?
Claiming to oppose racism and publishing the Ron Paul newsletters isn’t an appalling act of hypocrisy?
You can’t bring yourself to acknowledge that your hero has ever done anything wrong, can you?
“No.” No, it’s not hypocritical for someone who quotes Ayn Rand’s blather about racism and collectivism to publish those newsletters – that’s what you’re saying.
OK, Arthur. Just so we know you’re not biased or a kook or anything.
“Kook.”
The real definition?
Someone who does not toe the media line.
Also known as a flake to those who swallow that media line whole, hook, line and stinker. Like you. They’ve gotcha, Joe baby. But you can take comfort in knowing you’re not alone. In, fact you are part of the vast majority of Americans. As long as some appreciable segment of the mass media “agrees” with a certain approach, then it’s also OK for individuals to sign on to that position. “Progressives” have their media; “conservatives” have theirs and so on. “Centrists?” They have the most media. That’s why they’re in the center. The only other segment of the population that is equally as large as the centrists? The “I-don’t-give-a-shits.” They watch the real crap. Jersey Shore level. American Idol. All kinds of “reality TV.” Escapism. Whatever keeps them from not voting. That’s one less group that the PermaGov must consider.
There’s no Ron Paul channel, though. He’s live and uncontrolled, as are his supporters. That cop-out motherfucker Al Gore has this own channel. Why? Because he acceded to the fix in 2000 is why. Fox News is big, big, big! Why? Because it supports the Permanent War State. But since all stations are anti-Ron Paul, then it’s OK to to call names; OK to post repeated accusations of racism although there is more than ample evidence out there that he is not concerned with race one way or another.
What could be clearer than this statement, Joe?
Damned if I know. But you blockheads just keep on keepin’ on because the mass media gives you permission to do so. And why is that? Because his policies threaten the very substance of the ongoing scam that we laughingly refer to as “The United States Of America.” Stop the wars; stop the financial scam; stop the various levels of racial and sexual scam and get back down to work.
But NOOOOOoooo…you’ve gotta toe the line because you live in a deep, media-created hypnotic trance and there is no way on earth to wake you up. You’ve been asleep since you were a 2 year-old watching your first Capt. Crunch commercials.
Too bad. The only thing left to do is to sit back and wait for the scam to crash and burn.
Any day now.
Aaaaany day now.
Bet on it.
Before the end of Obama’s 2nd term, I’m thinking.
Watch. Like all dreams, this one will also come to an end.
Bet on that as well.
Watch.
It’ll be wake up or die eventually. I think a lot of people will take the latter because it will be the less painful of the two choices.
So that goes as well.
Good luck.
You’re gonna need it.
AG
The problem, Boo, is that your Jefferson quote is also a theological argument. An anti-trinitarian position in politics is no more justified than a trinitarian one. The nature of God is not a political question in politics according to the American tradition. All of this belongs in the church of your choice, or not choice.
It is not an anti-trinitarian position as much as it is a disestablishmentarian position.
Well, I can’t fault Jefferson for being opposed to antidisestablishmentarianism.
yes, I agree with you about opposing antidisestablishmentarianism. and thanx TarheelDem, I’ve waited all my life for an opportunity to use the word antidisestablishmentarianism, so I’m using it twice in this comment
Jefferson may have justifiably snuffed Santorum’s rhetoric but with today’s Santorum base and the disappearing GOP momentum, there’s nothing like a good old ‘they’re trying to kill your religion’ cry to entice their voters back into the polls.
Santorum is less catholic and more papist. There’s a word that hasn’t been relevant since the seventeenth century, whose religious wars spawned the Enlightenment.
Juan Cole calls Santorum an ayatollah, which is just another word for advocating popery.
It’s the counter-Vatican II come to fruition.
Oh, great. Next thing you know, the entire country’s gonna be awash in neo-Jacobites.
I am posting this in response to AG who start out:
You quote jefferson, eh?
I have always agreed with Ron Paul on his stance on the war and our wasteful spending on the military, but on all other Libertarian economic and social views, I find him personally wacko. To make the founding fathers Libertarian I think takes a stretch of the imagination.
Property rights are supreme with Paul, whereas I think it could be argued, that it was not so with the many of those founding fathers. Here was a group of almost all propertied gentlemen who signed on to the mission state called the Declaration of Independence that dropped property from the John Locke’s inalienable rights of man and substituted the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
It was the king whom they opposed who was the Defender of the Faith and the Grantor of property. It was the governance of the 1% who were far removed from the population (across an ocean) to which they objected.
“Wacko?”
You been had.
Santorum may be “wacko.”
Bush II most certainly fit the description. So did Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, just for starters. Kissinger too. Never a whisper of “wacko” from the media until well after they were out of power.
But Ron Paul?
Turn your fucking TV set off and go read his statements.
Lord preserve us.
AG
Go Tom! That Friend speaks my mind.
Thomas Jefferson is my second favorite founding father (G.W. will always be my favorite)…Proggressives…you’ll love this…I have to write a check to the IRS for 300,000, or so…
I a m concerned how the money will be spent…if I kept the money, I would have opened two more health clubs, employing any where between 25 to 50 people…not to mention getting several overweight Americans in shape….instead, my wealth feeds your entitlement society..,pathetic..,God help us…
Hey, no problem!
We promise every penny of that 300 grand will go toward the upkeep on an aircraft carrier of your choice! Now, doesn’t that warm the cockles of your capitalist heart?
Thanks, but no. How about we save horses from slaughter? Is that a better use than subsidizing entitlement-minded humans who are too “dignified” for manual labor?
Jefferson would be outed and ruined for that remark, today.
He would be falling all over himself apologizing to the Catholic bishops or he would be dead in the water.
Obama would demand an apology on their behalf!
Yeeeaaaaahhh…you’re writing this after Barack Obama just spanked the Catholic bishops and took a victory lap.
Apparently you did not notice he conceded the argument to them.
That concession will come back to haunt us.
It pretty much was an admission that the current laws in 28 states are actually illegitimate infringements on religious liberty.
But you go ahead and take your victory lap.
It’s tough to “notice” something that only exists in your imagination.
I love these people who see an anti-Obama faction wailing and gnashing its teeth over being thoroughly trounced, and who insist on their behalf that, no, they actually won.
It happens over and over and over.