May 25, 2009 – Many years ago, when I was in high school, I ran into kind of a strange, lonely, muscular young man with a keen intellect and a quick and inquiring mind.  He was full of life and future promise.  Many nights we would sit in his 1940 coup until well after midnight, discussing philosophy, science, religion, school, cars, women, politics and airplanes.  Not necessarily in that order.

Sometimes during our talks, he would sketch out cars, free hand.  The detail in his drawings was astounding, in both depth and perspective.  It was as if he could see every detail of the car he held in his mind and then transferred that detail through his arm and hand, to the paper.   This skill he possessed, was indeed a gift but a gift that never blossomed into a full-blown talent.

May 25, 2009 - On Memorial Day I like to reflect on a few of my buddies who never made it back from Viet Nam.

Bobby Case never made it out of our tractor after hitting a land mine. The Amphibian tractor burned for two days, Bobby was burnt alive.

After being pinned down on a road in Chu Lai while going on an ammo run for the grunts, Johnny Adomoli grabbed his M-14 and led the charge out of the tracked vehicle, but was stopped by a snipers bullet which tore apart his forehead.

Uncommon valor was common virtue for the American troops who secured our nations liberty.

There is a reason why up until now I have avoided discussing in any detail the particulars of the Constitution itself. My purpose in doing so was to ensure you had, at least, a basic understanding of the how and why it came to be written, and the difficulty in getting the states to ratify it.

While it may appear that the Constitution was nothing more than a series of compromises, you would be mistaken in thinking it was something that was haphazardly thrown together. A great deal of care went into establishing a system of government with the various checks and balances you may have heard mentioned in discussions of the Constitution.

It truly is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in the United States that we do not demand that our schools to devote the time required to fully educate our children about the principles contained in this amazing document. If we did, I would not feel the need to explain what we should have been taught.

May 25, 2009 – I have this theory that every so often governments go insane. Usually they have someone who is already demented heading up the government, but it takes a majority of the elected body to enact crazy laws and it takes the government apparatchiks to engineer the systemic failures, the wars, and the crazed rush off the cliff.

The election of 2008 is a splendid example of this. The majority of voters elected a man with the thinnest possible resume for the job of President. Indeed, the man has refused to release his birth records to reassure voters he met the minimum, Constitutional standards for the job. The man, however, was a skilled orator, able to give voice to the TelePrompter speeches written for him by master manipulators.

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” - Hanlon’s razor

May 25, 2009 – Solutions to epic problems can usually be found in an objective return to basics. Too often, smart people exacerbate a problem with reinventing the wheel and mandating fixes doomed to failure and mantled in arrogant presumptions.

Ayn Rand once clearly restated an intrinsic reality, “…it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals –that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government – that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen’s protection against the government.”

As the nation struggles in the frothy wake of petty partisanship, ‘he said/she said’ sophistry, and ‘gotcha’ golden rules (the guy with the gold makes the rules) garbage, it becomes increasingly obvious that to assume the folks who created the mess will successfully clean it up is a shattered pipe dream.

“Gaza is not on the Pope’s itinerary, nor will it be. There will be no change in these plans. But I’ll say it very clearly, the Pope is absolutely not going to Gaza.”

Such were the astounding comments made by the Pope’s spokesman in Israel, Wadie Abunasser, prior to Pope Benedict XVI visiting Palestine and Israel.

As if there was no massacre in Gaza, no families entirely slaughtered, no human rights violated to match the record of the most grisly of crimes in modern history. As if Gaza were a mere irritant in the annals of human suffering. More, as if there were no Catholic flock in Gaza. To clarify, there are actually nearly 2,000 Catholics in Gaza, apparently not important enough for the ‘cut’.

May 20, 2009 – I predict that Hillary Clinton will be Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court.  If not this time, she will most certainly get it the next time around.

Why?

During the elections, a mysterious transition occurred.  Hillary went from slinging brickbats one day to being submissive and agreeable to everything Obama said the next – gazing upon him with eyes not unlike a teenage girl fulminating about her first dream prom date.

May 20, 2009 – As my last essay explained, the Constitution had been ratified by the required number of states. However to convince enough states to agree to the ratification the Federalists had made a promise to come up with a Bill, enumerating certain rights that were to be considered sacrosanct, rights which the government could not infringe upon.

It cannot be emphasized enough that people were extremely suspicious of any new form of government in which the possibility existed for abuses of power. Therefore, they wanted assurances that this newly established system would not trample upon their rights, and newly gained liberty, as had the British.

As I explained in my last segment, the Philadelphia Convention was, more often than not, nothing more than a heated argument over the size, scope, and structure of the proposed federal government.

Although the delegates were not unanimous in their approval, they did manage to come up with the Constitution as it exists today. Yet it was still merely a piece of parchment with words written upon it. For the Constitution to go into effect it had to be ratified by nine out of thirteen states, as per the requirements contained in Article 7.

This was not going to be an easy task, for as we already know that during the Convention there were some that were not happy at all with the new government that this document outlined.