If folks like Joe Farah don't want to get labeled "fake news," they should stop making these mistakes, even as they have been called out many times before for this particular one.
A taste:
“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments.”
– James Madison
Now that we have a president-elect who seems to understand how government that tried to do too much ends up doing nothing but harm, wouldn’t it be nice if he learned about and talked about the very best kind of government – self-government?
America’s founders knew all about it.
1 comment:
Since you ignored his point, it doesn't really make much difference, eh?
He should have gone with a more germane quote, say John Adams'
...we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
His essay works just fine with this correction.
I launched into an explanation of how we have lost the founders’ concept of self-government today – and that without it, the Declaration of Independence and the best Constitution ever devised by man aren’t enough to keep our nation free. I suggested that nine out of 10 Americans don’t even know what self-government means.
[Eleanor] Clift jumped in and began her attack.
I can’t remember exactly what she said, but her response indicated to me that she didn’t know what self-government meant.
So I asked her point-blank: “Eleanor, do you know what self-government means?”
She said: “Well, I would point to local communities and I think people are more interested in taking a role in how they are governed in their immediate neighborhoods and cities and towns than they are in how the central government is operating.”
To which I replied: “I think that Eleanor just betrayed that she’s one of the nine out of 10 of Americans who do not understand what self-government is. It’s not about local government, state government or central government. It’s about governing ourselves as individuals, being accountable to God, having a morality that guides us in our actions.”
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