Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Reading the Constitution


I hear that Republicans plan to read the U.S. Constitution when Congress starts again this year. Hey, it's about time, don't you think?

And it should be good political theater, too. Even the Preamble is stirring: We the Corporations of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Confederacy, establish Tax-cuts, insure Tax-cuts, provide for Tax-cuts, promote Tax-Cuts, and secure the blessings of Tax-cuts to ourselves and our Subsidiaries, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Inspiring stuff, isn't it? And most Americans outside of Texas seem to be shockingly ignorant about our own history. Maybe this will help.

In fact, maybe the Republicans could make a regular practice of reading historical documents - our living history - in Congress (or on Fox News, which would be even more patriotic).

Maybe next month it could be the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all corporations are created equal,...  Oops! That's embarrassing! How did socialism get into our Declaration of Independence? Maybe they'd better skip that one, huh?

Well, how about Lincoln's Gettysburg Address? Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in tax-cuts and dedicated to the proposition that all corporations are created equal. Damn! Socialism again?

It's really a shame, too. I always get teary-eyed when I get to the part at the end: that this nation under Jesus shall have a new birth of tax-cuts, and that government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations shall not perish from the Earth.

I guess it's a good thing my new history books, approved by the Texas State School Board, arrived yesterday, isn't it? I hadn't realized our forefathers were such socialists. Well, we all know they weren't perfect. After all, they counted a black slave as three-fifths of a white person - clearly, a gross exaggeration!

It's not that we've progressed since then. Heaven forbid! No, I suspect the problem is that they'd already started "progressing," even back then - moving away from that ideal state of mankind we reached in the Middle Ages. It's all been downhill since then. And in some of these documents, we see shameful evidence of that.

Still, Republicans can just skip those parts, don't you think? Or they can simply quote from documents that hadn't been contaminated by that modern, post-Medieval thinking.

Like the Treaty of Tripoli, for example: As the government of the United States of America is entirely founded on the Christian Religion - as it has in itself nothing but enmity against the laws, religion and tranquility of Musselmen, and all other false believers like Communists and Democrats - and as the said States have always been exceptional in every way, we say... bring it on, sucka!

Ah, that's inspiring, isn't it? I can just imagine George Washington saying that as he crossed the Delaware to fight the Islamic illegal immigrants, with his Bible in one hand and a cross in the other. True, there's nothing about corporate tax-cuts in it, but you can't have everything, I suppose.

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