E!!

NR editor Rich Lowry wrote a great piece on Friday.  You should read the whole thing, but here are the opening paragraphs of his column entitled “Our Founders the Realists”:

As a nation, we were extraordinarily blessed in our revolutionaries. It wasn’t just that they were brave and determined. So were the avatars of revolution throughout the 20th century who wrecked nations and peoples. No, what makes them so wondrously distinct is that they were also just and wise, grounded always in a clear-eyed view of human nature.

“There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” James Madison wrote in The Federalist, “which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.” When revolutionaries talk of depravity, it is often to brand their class or ethnic enemies for destruction. Gas chambers, prison camps, and killing fields inevitably follow.

The depravity of which our Founders spoke was different. It ran through the hearts of all men, themselves included. It tempered their expectations of what they could achieve and what they should attempt. No secular millennium, no perfectly harmonious republic — because, as Madison wrote, “the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man.”

“Enthusiasm there certainly was — a revolution is impossible without enthusiasm,” Irving Kristol writes of 1776, “but this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt, introspection, anxiety, skepticism. This may strike us as a very strange state of mind in which to make a revolution; and yet it is evidently the right state of mind for making a successful revolution.”

The Revolution was institutionalized in the Constitution, an inspired exercise in leveraging human failings against one another — “ambition counteracts ambition” — to create a stable structure of liberty.

I often wonder what the Founders would say if they could be brought forward in time and witness the modern American scene.  I think it would make an excellent screenplay, if done right.

It seems the New York Times decided to fill 2009’s quota for poignant, truthful reporting on the very first day of the year. Having published a surprisingly straightforward and touchingly personal account of the Cuban-American story, they can now return to their regularly scheduled brainwashing.

(The online piece is dated Dec. 31, but the article appeared in the NYT print edition yesterday.)

Every now and then an E!! reader-commenter deserves front-and-center for noting some aspect of a story I overlooked…or for seeing it in a new way.  Here’s Mike Davis quoting and commenting on a LV Sun story about the four Nevada Ron Paul delegates who ended up voting for McCain:

“Carl Bunce claims Gestapo tactics were used to coerce him into voting for McCain, but I found Lisa Mascaro’s article in yesterday’s Sun to be particularly revealing:

“Dyer said he and Bunce, who ran recently failed in congressional primary elections, want to run for office again. So they had motivation to play nice.

“When the roll call vote came, Bunce and Dyer forfeited their seats so two McCain supporters could fill the slots.

“Not all of Paul’s supporters are pleased. Wayne Terhune, the Sparks dentist who had helped lead the fight, said ‘they should have at least abstained’

“As party Chairwoman Sue Lowden announced Nevada’s 34 unanimous votes for McCain, Bunce and Dyer were at a concert a few blocks away.

“They were listening to Rage Against the Machine, the 1990s rock band that once offered a soundtrack for a generation of politically disaffected young fans.”

After all of the nonsense over the last 4 months to get these guys there, and when the vote finally goes down, two of the four delegates weren’t even in the building.

That’s frigging sad.”

(Mike Davis is the state chair of the Nevada Republican Liberty Caucus, a grassroots org for libertarian-leaning members of the NV Republican Party who are committed to advancing the Republican majority by recruiting and electing candidates dedicated to constitutional government, economic opportunity, and individual liberty.)