Grand Ideas

View 709 Friday, January 20, 2012

There is a difference between crime and rebellion, as there is a difference between sin and denouncing the concept of morality. Saying let he who is without sin caste the first stone is not the same as approving adultery.

It was painful to watch Santorum during the debates last night. It is not that I disagree with anything he said – well, let me amend that to anything I remember him saying – but that I don’t think that it’s an effective nomination strategy to draw attention to one’s virtues by pointing out the faults of others. Leave that to someone else. There will always be a someone else.

Santorum has the virtues we have always sought in a Chief Executive. He is fairly sound on the conservative issues. He has never had to govern a liberal state, so he has never been required to compromise. He sounded Presidential the night of the Iowa Caucuses. I understand that his followers believe that he performed well in the debates last night. I do not share that view.

I found his attacks on Romney and Gingrich painful to watch, and unenlightening. I would have appreciated more an explication of what he would do with the office. As to his accusations of grandiosity: I can remember when the notion of a Contract With America and a Republican majority in the House of Representatives after forty years in the wilderness was considered grandiose. I can remember when Strategic Defense was considered grandiose and called Star Wars in derision. I can recall when winning the Cold War was considered grandiose, and negotiating a CoDominium of the United States and the USSR, First World and Second World to dominate the Third World was thought to be inevitable. Does anyone else remember Kissinger as Metternich, and détente? I certainly do.

The Founding Fathers of the United States boldly proclaimed that A New Age Now Begins. That was a grand idea. The Philadelphia Convention of 1787 proclaimed

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

That was a grandiose idea. We were building the city on a hill, an example for the world to follow. A New Age Now Begins. Maybe it’s time we remembered such matters.