E.J. Dionne The Washington Post Writers Group

August 10, 2010

E.J. Dionne
The Washington Post Writers Group
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20071

RE: In Vino Veritas? – Some comments on your column on Senator Dodd and the “Politics of Joy”.

Mr. Dionne,

Presumably you and Senator Dodd, AKA Chris the Grifter, were sharing a cocktail or four because the truth came dribbling out, so to speak.

“I’ve reached the point where I’d abolish the Senate if I could.”
Today
You

Perhaps not as bad as “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest” but then you say “it is more profoundly undemocratic than it was when the Founders created it…”

Two things are owed to the ledger.

#1 – I beseech you to consider that you may be wrong. You won’t. You can’t. The fly in the buttermilk here is that is what the Founders absolutely had in mind. “Your Constitution, sir, is all sail and no anchor.” This may shock and amaze you but the Founders and all serious political thinkers from the agora on put something like the Senate into being because they feared the democracy that you lust after. Honest. You can look it up.
#2 – Should you have a Damascus moment and realize as John Maynard Keynes did in 1944 that both the premises and the conclusions of his intellectual life were wrong you would become anathema to the vast Left Wing conspiracy known as modern American Liberalism. Keynes had the good sense to die shortly after his conversion to the moral and economic canons of Hayek. Thus, he was spared the rail ridden journey to the intellectual Coventry that apostates from statism are forced to endure.

Modern American Liberals like to say that they are for freedom, particularly when it involves political speech. Thus, when we heard for 8 years that Bush and Hitler were synonymous, it was said to be a sign of political maturity, When someone says that Obama has never run anything, “except his mouth” to quote Jesse Jackson, it immediately is looked on as a racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and openly caloric statement.

[In the 1864 election the Democratic Party and its shill, the New York Times, acquiesced in calling Abraham Lincoln a “baboon”. That’s for a different day.]
I would suggest that for the Dog Days of Summer reading that you devote some time for what the Founders actually wrote and said. It is painfully obvious that you have no – no as in zip, zilch, nada – knowledge of what they created.

“What have you given us?” was the question asked of Benjamin Franklin.

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

Democracy, at the time of the Constitution, was symbolized by the guillotine. The French, God bless them, have always had a way of bringing certain panache to any dish. That you would have been one of the servy boys begging to help drag the tumbrel there is no doubt. That you would have fetched more yarn for Madame DeFarge would have been the role for which you were destined.

Your only hope is a crash course in Edmund Burke. A Russell Kirk IV may be in order though I doubt the death panel laden Obamacare would pay for it.

As to Senator Dodd…he is leaving about a half step ahead of the Constable. His legacy will be a gazillion dollars worth of wretched mortgages, except the one he got as a “Friend of Angelo” on his house in Ireland, and further proof that Mendel was right. He is indeed his father’s son. Acorns never fall far from the tree.

Who picked up the bar tab?




Kevin Smith

PS – I take back my last sentence. The last time a Congressman, one named Dan Rostenkowksi, picked up a tab he went to prison. Every member since has perfected the art of short arms and long pockets when it’s time to settle up. Either that or they use their ubiquitous Chinese credit card. “Ubiquitous” because it doubles as an entrenching tool in the “shovel ready” brigade.