Obama: Confused about the Declaration

by Dan Riehl 7 Jul 2012

 

 Former President George W. Bush endured any number of insults to his intelligence while in office. It didn't matter that he had graduated from both Yale and Harvard, worked in business, ran a Major League Baseball enterprise, or successfully served as a Texas Governor before being elected to a second term with a recording-breaking 69% of the vote. He was forever branded the dim bulb and hick from Texas, out of his league in the Oval Office. But that Barack Obama, he was the real deal - a Constitutional scholar, despite his never actually having performed as one.  Obama was just another Chicago machine politician before being elected president.

Given recent comments he made from the White House, Obama's not much of a student of History, or human rights, either. '"In his remarks, Obama suggested that the Declaration (of Independence) was the first time the God-given rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness had been "put to paper."'

While we may all love and embrace the recently celebrated Declaration of Independence, what Obama said of it simply isn't true. It's not even close.

As it's primary author, Thomas Jefferson, acknowledged, the Declaration was never intended to be based upon original thinking ... or writing. It was meant to express the "American mind," developed from and based upon centuries of thinking and writing, all of it well documented and commonly known.

As Jefferson wrote in 1825, '"All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c."'

What it simply was not is the first time the God given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were ever "put to paper," as Barack Obama more than implied. So much for the notion liberals would have Americans believe, that we've finally elected some genius who can make all their big government plans and schemes work, despite their having failed miserably every time they've been tried by governments anywhere in the present, or past.

Big Government