Monday, February 6, 2012

Junius to President Obama



Fourth in an occasional series

Sir:

One little thought to encounter, in this day and age, a person of Your Excellency’s high standing effectually walking about with a placard reading “No Popery!”; yet, you are a man possessed of many archaic sentiments and strange notions, so we cannot, in earnest, admit to genuine surprise. To sincere bafflement, however, we do register a claim, inasmuch as your brazen assault on matters of conscience acts as a bellows to further inflame the growing skepticism among the citizenry concerning the fidelity of your oath to uphold the Constitution – surely, an odd sort of strategy to pursue in an election year that will cap a term of office in which the rhetorical opiates of early days have lost much of their potency through immersion in the solution of hard reality.

That the fastening of legal duties incompatible with its dogma upon the Catholic Church should represent mere ignorance, rather than a calculated attempt to undermine the authority of that ancient institution, is a possible explanation of the event which I would be sorely tempted to believe, given the historical and cultural obtuseness of your regime; the truth, or not, of this hypothesis, however, is irrelevant in view of Your Excellency’s overarching statist designs, which admit of no independent arbitration between the demands of the government and the constitutional rights of the citizen, and therefore impose no requirement for understanding, or, ultimately, even conceding the existence of, the latter. Whether your decision should proceed from ignorance or malignity, the result is the same.

It is a feature of Your Excellency’s vision, long known to all, that America should model its policies and institutions on those of Europe. How unfortunate that we did not guess that the Europe you had in mind was Tudor England. How doubly unfortunate that we are saddled with an administration bent on replacing our traditional sources, not only of political wisdom, but of spiritual guidance and succor, with the sterile tracts of dead revolutionists, and the insane enthusiasms of their intellectual descendants. I daresay it will not be long before you acquire the distinction of having become both a religious and a secular anathema, leaving you fit for nothing but a permanent sojourn in whatever academic or public policy fever swamp that can afford you room to pitch your tent. It is a bad end, Sir, and one I fear that, should you live even unto a great old age, you will never achieve sufficient grace and wit to repent of. But then, it is not remarkable that feet of clay are so often matched by a head manufactured of the same material.

5 comments:

JeffS said...

Feet of clay? Oh, yeah.

Head of clay? I'm thinking granite myself.

rinardman said...

Pres. Obama to Matt Liur: “Our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes.”

i.e.-"Wouldn't I make a great dictator!?"

RebeccaH said...

I would love to see Junius lay about President Jug-Ears with his gold-topped cane. It's a favorite mental movie of mine.

Anonymous said...

Deborah Leigh said... I was thinking wood with Geppeto played by Alinsky. But unlike ending in that story from 1940, the current version never makes the change. No happy ending.

Paco said...

"Toadvine, hand me down the horsewhip from yon peg."

"Veddy good, m'lord".