There's no excuse for Jim DeMoron, and still less excuse for people who take him in any way seriously

The shame of Dan Quayle wasn't that he was so lazy or stupid, or even that he has led a life and reaped the rewards of wholly undeserved privilege. The shame is that he has the arrogance to present himself on the public stage -- and has been so successful.

"Jim DeMint is correct that there was a belligerent during the American Civil War that rejected 'big government.' He’s just wrong about which side that was."

-- Ian Millhiser, in "Head Of Top Conservative Think Tank
Makes Spectacularly Uninformed Statement About Slavery"

by Ken

You remember the famous Dan Quayle potato-potatoe incident? Whe Vice President Quayle, with the TV cameras rolling, presumed to "correct" a schoolkid's perfectly correct spelling of "potato" by adding an "e"?

What was outrageous wasn't that he had been too lazy or stupid to learn how to spell a word like potato, regrettable as that may be in the case of a man wo had been elected to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, three terms in the U.S. Senate, and a term as vice president of the U.S. No, what was outrageous was that a person of his ingrained ignorance had the gall to correct (and on national TV) a kid who had actually taken the trouble to learn how to spell the word.

Well, that and the fact that a wildly overpriviileged beast of such consummate ignorance, arrogance, and utter unconcern about either should have been elected to two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, three terms in the U.S. Senate, and a term as vice president of the U.S. That's what escalates it from the level of richly deserved personal humiliation to stinging national disgrace.

In this context, I invite you to read this exchange:

GUEST: This progressive, the whole idea of being progressive is to progress away from those ideas that made this country great. What we’re trying to conserve as conservative are those things that work. They work today, they work for young people, they work for minorities and we can change this country and change its course very quickly if we just remember what works.
INTERVIEWER: What if somebody, let’s say you’re talking with a liberal person and they were to turn around and say, ‘that Founding Fathers thing worked out really well, look at that Civil War we had eighty years later.’
GUEST: Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people. 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. But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like Wilberforce who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people. 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.

The guest was Heritage Foundation boss man (and former U.S. Sen.) Jim DeMoron, once one of the most influential obstructions in the U.S. Senate process, speaking on the broadcast Vocal Point with interviewer Jerry Newcombe of Truth in Action Ministries -- as passed on by Right Wing Watch's Brian Tashman. (I should add that Brian calls attention as well to other monumental imbecilities of DeMoron's from the broadcast, and also that I was directed to his post by a ThinkProgress post by Ian Millhiser, to which we'll be returning.)

There isn't a single assertion in this loose-screw-a-thon that isn't wrong but catastrophically wrong, in almost every case turning the actual meaning upside down. As should be clear to anyone who has spent a few weeks in a high school American-history class can tell, DeMoron has not the slightest clue what's in the U.S. Constitution, which specifically allowed and provided for slavery. As every schoolchild knows, this is the single most blatant deviation from grace in the founding of our republic.

And of course, unfortunately for him, DeMoron has heard a few catch phrases from the Declaration of Independence, but since he has never read it or had any instruction in U.S. history, he has not a shot at understanding those undigested bits. For the same reasons, knows nothing whatsoever about either the life or politcal thinking of Abraham Lincoln. His notion that he and Abraham Lincoln have anything whatsoever of a political nature in common just because they're both Republicans demonstrates that he knows as little about the life or work of Lincoln, or about the history of the Republican Party, than he knows about, well, anything else in the universe, with the sole exception of how to succeed a savage promoter of criminally insane ideologies that can only be believed by the mentally defective.

And yet here is this demented, savage beast displaying the unmitigated gall to insist on replacing actual history with his psychotic lies and delusions. Why isn't such a loathsome specimen of antihumanity not booed and spat at anytime he foists his demented carcass on an apparently unsuspecting public.

Now, if you'd like to see DeMoron's moronicisms more politely and rationally (not to mention elegantly) dismantled, in addition to looking at Brian Tashman's Right Wing Watch post, we can look at how my cherished legal eagle Ian Millhiser did it in the aforementioned ThinkProgress post, "Head of Top Conservative Think Tank Makes Spectacularly Uninformed Statement About Slavery." (I might note that the URL for Ian's piece contains the slug "jim-demint-may-have-just-made-the-most-uninformed-statement-anyone-has-ever-made-about-slavery" Yes!)

It’s difficult to know where to begin a list of the errors this brief passage. The phrase “all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights” does not appear in the Constitution, although a very similar phrase does appear in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, the Constitution, at least as it stood before the Civil War, had very different things to say about the subject of human equality. It provided, for example, that “[n]o person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” The original Constitution also contained explicit language prohibiting Congress from banning the importation of new slaves until 1808.

Nevertheless, DeMint is technically correct that “the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution.” That’s because the Thirteenth Amendment provides that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude. . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Thirteenth Amendment did not, however, simply come into being because Abraham Lincoln had a “love in his heart that comes from God.” Rather, it happened because Lincoln led the nation in a massive big government program known as the “Civil War“.
During this war, the United States raised an army of over two million service members who clashed with a Confederate army of about half that size. Moreover, the war effort increased federal spending nearly 25 times. As the leader of a centralized government in Washington, DC, Lincoln also issued a document known as the “Emancipation Proclamation,” which ordered slaves in the Confederate states freed.

Notably, while the Thirteenth Amendment ended the legal practice of human chattel slavery, state laws such as the Black Codes and the Jim Crow laws were enacted in the South to maintain the inferior status of former slaves and their descendants. These laws were eventually eradicated by big government as well, primarily through legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It’s also worth noting that the Confederate system of government differed from the Union’s system in that it placed far less power in a strong central government. While the United States Constitution, permits the federal government to “lay and collect taxes . . . and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” for example, the Confederate Constitution excluded the power to “provide for the general welfare.” Thus, the United States Constitution permits major national spending programs such as Medicare or Social Security, while these programs would have been unconstitutional in the Confederacy. Similarly, the Confederate Constitution includes a rigid limit on national infrastructure spending — forbidding its congress from “appropriat[ing] money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce” — a limit that does not appear in the United States Constitution.

So Jim DeMint is correct that there was a belligerent during the American Civil War that rejected “big government.” He’s just wrong about which side that was.

[Note: There are lots of links onsite.]

I don't know that anyone thinks of the Heritage Foundation as anything but a propaganda mill since DeMoron took over there, a comedown from its former status as an embarrassing fount of right-wing political hackery. Hey, there's an important gap between embarrassment and disgrace.

In case you haven't reminded yourself recently, this is what the party of Lincoln has come to.

#