Mr. Obama’s comments at his Presidential Center show a lack of knowledge, or his latest attempt to split the American people. Both options are believable.
Barrack Obama said something stupid. In other news, the sun rose in the east. Film at eleven.
In Mr. Obama’s remarks at the opening of his Borg cube last Friday, our 44th president insulted the Founding Fathers. Not for the first time, and likely not for the last. He also lied about Obamacare and seizing control of the auto industry, but that is expected from a power-hungry narcissist like him. The quote I’m referring to, emphasis mine:
In forming our union, the founders fell terribly short of the declarations promised, leaving slavery intact, allowing states to restrict the franchise to white men who owned property.
But in drafting a constitution and a Bill of Rights, they did have the foresight, the genius, to provide us with a framework that allows each generation to make our union more perfect. And over more than two centuries, through petitions and protests, marches and strikes, moral appeals from the pulpit and conversations at the family dinner table, men and women from all walks of life, of every color, every faith, every region took up the cause of democracy and made it their own. Until we the people came to include not just some of us, but all of us.
No Mr. Obama, the Founding Fathers did not “fall terribly short” in their efforts to establish this nation. They were trying to form a “more perfect union,” with thirteen states arguing over various issues. They had to compromise on multiple subjects.
Smaller states did not want to be overpowered by the larger states, so they established a bicameral legislature. The House of Representative to stand for the people, members apportioned by the population of the state. The Senate represented the states, with two members each, selected by the legislatures. To ensure small states would have a voice in choosing the president, an indirect method of election was created, the Electoral College.
Again, one compromise after another. One of the greatest compromises was in regard to the “peculiar institution” of slavery.
Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence (not present at the Constitutional Convention). A complicated man with this issue, his first draft of the Declaration included a clause against the King regarding slavery:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
To keep the colonies from fracturing at this critical time, this specific clause was removed, replaced by a more generic “had excited domestic insurrections among us.” Yes, sometimes you must temporarily concede a critical issue for a greater good.
While the Constitution did not stop slavery until the Civil War Amendments, it did allow for banning the importation of slaves from overseas 25 years after ratification. In 1807 Congress passed a law banning importation of Africans, but slavery would not be eliminated for another 60 years. Not exactly “falling terribly short” Mr. Obama. Without this wisdom, the American nation would likely have failed just as it started.
Finally Mr. Obama, you failed to mention how this matter was settled. Not with petitions, protests, marches or strikes, but with blood. Our greatest war, over 600, 000 men killed at the hands of their brothers to end this evil.
To put that into perspective, America’s population in 1861 was approximately 31.4 million people. We lost almost 2% of our population in four years to end slavery (today that would be around 6.5 million). Yet this wound is not mentioned by the first black president of the United States. I wonder why?
As far as the vote reserved to white men with property, that was the standard of the day. Women in England did not get to vote until the 1920s, in France till after World War II. So Mr. Obama, it was not an issue at the time, but I’m not shocked at your comment. You have a nasty habit of looking down your nose at people and judging them.
I have visited five presidential libraries (Reagan, both Bush’s, Eisenhower, and Truman) over the years, and they are worth a visit. As a trip to Chicago is not in my foreseeable future, I won’t be going to the Obama Center.
I don’t think I’ll miss anything.
Michael A. Thiac is a retired Army intelligence officer, with over 23 years experience, including serving in the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the Middle East. He is also a retired police patrol sergeant, with over 22 years’ service, and over ten year’s experience in field training of newly assigned officers. He has been published at The American Thinker, PoliceOne.com, and on his personal blog, A Cop’s Watch.
Opinions expressed are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of current or former employers.
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