Jim DeMint embarrassed himself and his American history teacher the other day by saying, among other wildly inaccurate things, that the Constitution freed the slaves:
"Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people," DeMint said on "Vocal Point" with Jerry Newcombe of Truth In Action Ministries, as recorded by Right Wing Watch.
"Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to 'all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights' in the minds of God."
The Constitution was "like the conscience of the American people?" Hmmm, I thought the Constitution was the basis of the law of the land.
The Constitution didn't call us back to "all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights." That would be the Declaration of Independence. And I can't begin to understand what he means when he tacked on "in the minds of God" to that statement.
DeMint added that "big government" did not end slavery, a Republican did. "So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves. In fact, it was Abraham Lincoln, the very first Republican, who took this on as a cause and a lot of it was based on a love in his heart that comes from God," he said.
Right Wing Watch notes that while Lincoln was president, the Republican party was not the states-rights party. Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation was a presidential proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment was initiated by the federal government.
Historian Michael Les Benedict notes that Republicans at the time advocated a “nationalist” view of the Constitution, unlike “the largely state-rights Democratic party.” Abraham Lincoln’s critics, historian Don E. Fehrenbacher points out, pilloried him as a “tyrant” who was “bringing about destruction of the old Union of sovereign states and setting the nation on the road to totalitarianism” by “subverting the rights and powers of the states.” Confederate leaders insisted that the Civil War was a “war waged by the Federal Government against the seceding States.”
Lincoln, in fact, greatly expanded the role of the federal government and signed into law the first federal progressive income tax. --SOURCE
This guy was a US Senator and is now the head of a conservative think tank?
What were they thinking when they hired him?
10 comments:
Yep, it's Jim Dimwit living up to his namesake.
Jim Demint, doing his part in helping Sarah Palin seem smart.
More stupidity from the party that believes it owns the Constitution and no one else understands it.
Jim "Dimwit" indeed. And he's considered one of their smarter goopers.
We the People own the Constitition. All the people that is.
It shouldn'd be surprising that everyone believes they own it along with the right to interpret it as they will.
Conservatives view it as engraved stone and Liberals view it as a living malleable object.
The future looms large and it certainly will be interesting.
If someone told me that the Civil War was not fought over slavery... and then told me that Jim Demint is stupid for what he said... well, that surely would cause me to shake my head in disbelief.
I doubt that Jim DeMint can embarrass himself. To be embarrassed you have to have some semblance of a brain.
RN 'doing his part in helping Sarah Palin seem smart'
break me up! course, making Sarah look smart is kinda full time job...that's why Ann Coulter helps out
"[DeMint's ]rap is based on a series of palpable falsehoods that are extraordinarily common in the exotic world of “constitutional conservatism:” the deliberate conflation of the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution (this is how they sneak God and “natural rights”—meaning property and fetal rights—into the latter); the idea that the Civil War was about everything other than slavery; and the claim of Lincoln’s legacy, even though the Great Emancipator was in almost every respect a “big government liberal” as compared to the states rights Democrats—DeMint’s ideological and geographical forebears who touted the Constitution even more regularly (and certainly more consistently) than today’s states rights Republicans." --Ed Kilgore
okjimm... LMAO... You got it, it is a full time job. Maybe Coulter needs some support from Screwy Louie Gohmert?
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What? Me worry?
"Not intended to be taken as truth."
Mr De Mint was speaking off the record, off the planet, and off his head.
But hey, who cares? Mr De Mint is, after all, from South Carolina, now living within the "BeltWay."
Ema Nymton
~@:o?
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