OBAMA: CONFUSED ABOUT THE DECLARATION
by DAN RIEHL 7 Jul 2012, 10:00 AM PDT
Former
President George W. Bush endured any number of insults to his intelligence
while in office. It didn't matter that he had graduated from both Yale and
Harvard, worked in business, ran a Major League Baseball enterprise, or
successfully served as a Texas Governor before being elected to a second term
with a recording-breaking 69% of the vote. He was forever branded the dim bulb
and hick from Texas, out of his league in the Oval Office.
But that Barack Obama, he was the real deal – a
Constitutional scholar, despite his never actually having performed as
one. Obama was just another Chicago machine politician before being
elected president.
Given recent comments he
made from the White House, Obama's not much of a student of History, or human
rights, either. "In his remarks, Obama suggested that the Declaration (of
Independence) was the first time the God-given rights of life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness had been 'put to paper."'
While we may all love and embrace the recently celebrated
Declaration of Independence, what Obama said of it simply isn't true. It's not
even close.
As it's primary author, Thomas Jefferson, acknowledged, the
Declaration was never intended to be based upon original thinking ... or
writing. It was meant to express the "American mind," developed from
and based upon centuries of thinking and writing, all of it well documented and
commonly known.
As Jefferson wrote in 1825, "All its authority rests then
on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in
letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as
Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c."
What it simply was not is the first time the God given rights to
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were ever "put to paper,"
as Barack Obama more than implied. So much for the notion liberals would have
Americans believe, that we've finally elected some genius who can make all
their big government plans and schemes work, despite their having failed
miserably every time they've been tried by governments anywhere in the present,
or past.