The founders

Week long series about what the 4th of July means to Lex.

After Christmas, the 4th of July is my favorite holiday. There’s something about the American Revolution and the cast of characters that gave birth to this great nation that is and always has been inspiring to me.

One the one hand you had the war. It was like a hapless sub-division football team with 1-6 record, taking on an undefeated USC team. England was a world-wide power with the best army and navy in the world. The colonies had trouble raising, equipping and paying its army and virtually no navy.

But after 5 years of war, the colonies, with the help of the French and the advantage of fighting on home turf, forced the British to cut their losses and let the Americans go.

So, on the one hand you had the military miracle carried out by an undermanned, under equipped and underpaid army while on the other hand you had this dream team of intellectual political thinkers who set up this whole experiment in democracy. A bi-cameral legislature that had elected representatives and appointed senator from each state; a president elected by electors from each state and a totally independent judiciary. At the time, the American form government was far revolutionary than the war that gave it birth.

Now consider that these great minds constructed this government in, what today is, about a 12 page typewritten document. By contrast the latest abomination that our elected officials have laid upon us was the 1,500 page Cap and Tax bill which passed the house last Friday with not a single representative able or willing to read the entire bill.

Crisis, or perceived crisis or manufactured crisis, breeds foolish laziness. That is what we have today: A group of “lawmakers” hiding behind the fig leaf of “crisis” to justify their own craven, stupid laziness passing 1,500 pages Cap and Tax, 800 pages stimulus, 100s of pages of TARP legislation. All of these were rushed through congress under the “we have to do something” rule with not the slightest clue as to what traps and pitfalls are contained in the 100s of unread pages.

Our current situation gives proof to the notion that what takes a group of geniuses a generation to create, only takes three or so Demo-Dope buffoons; the Dear Leader, Peloser, and Scummy Reid, six months to destroy.

Tomorrow: Why white guys get the blame