When magellan01 uses the word “lying,” one must first ask him what he means by the term, since he may not actually mean lying at all.
I freely admit that the exclusionary language was directly applied to law clerks and not directly applied to judges or marshalls. I suspect that the law is written rather sloppily and should include all posts, but I do not know exactly how the authors intended it.
While it is possible that Moore may have intended to separate the issue of what appeared in the law and what events may have transpired prior to the passage of that law, he wrote it with what I would construe as a clear intent to conflate the actual text of the law with his imagined and baseless claim for the actions of the Congress at their inauguration. I consider this to be a deliberately dishonest claim and if you choose to consider it a mere “mistake” you are welcome to do so, although it is curious that his “mistake” conveniently affirms his “erroneous” view of the mixture of church and state when it would have taken no great effort to write that passage so that there was no confusion.
Are you through hijacking your own arguments, or do you need to continue this line of silliness for the purpose of avoiding having to deal with the dishonesty of both Prager’s distortion of history and Prager’s flawed (and xenophobic) claims regarding Congressman-elect Ellison?
Last night, I was at a wine & cheese party with one of the people leading the Keith Ellison transition team, working on hiring employees, locating office space, etc.
I happened to mention this thread. He laughed, and asked if people were really still going on about that. I said that they certainly were, 10 pages worth (though actual discussion of Keith Ellison seems to have stopped about 4 or 5 pages ago).
Also present was a newly-elected member of the School Board. He stated that they have to choose their own procedure, even to the extent of writing their own swearing-in text. And he didn’t know what he would use to swear on. Which started a major discussion among the people present. Some creative suggestions were:
a school textbook (but which subject?),
the District Code of Conduct Guidelines (allegedly longer than a Bible),
a packet of his campaign literature (to remind him of what he promised to work on),
photos of his children (the reason he gave for running for the job in the first place), and
a stack of his own school report cards.
He didn’t give a decision; just tactfully said we had ‘given him much to think over’.
Yep, we elected one smart guy to represent our district.
Interestingly enough, he was elected without any negative campaigning, talking about the issues and what was needed to make our country better. The voters ignored the constant negative, personal attacks on him and voted on issues. The Karl Rove-style negative attack campaigns do NOT always work!
(Of course, his opponents were pretty dumb in their negative attacks. They constantly attacked him because he had parking tickets that weren’t paid in time. I had many voters tell me at their door that they had gotten parking tickets, too. That just didn’t bother people: “Late parking tickets? That’s the worst dirt they can dig up on this guy? He must be a pretty clean politician!” Not very smart opponents, really.)
I don’t suppose there’s any chance that Virgil Goode, Dennis Prager, or those dipsticks at New Republic have been found with spontaneously exploding heads all of a sudden?
How, pray tell, does this change anything? Just because Jefferson owned the book? If Jefferson owned a book entitled “Why The United States Should Be Overthrown an Replaced With Another Monarchy” or “Why The United States Constitution Should Be in Perfect Alignment with The Vatican” would that give those books any more credence. He owned many books. Being the intellectual he was, he probably disagreed with some of them. Don’t you think?
This changes nothing. Except the degree to which some people are willing to suspend their critical thinking. Gladly, that has now been revealed.
The only good that comes of this is that the next Muslim who runs for office will be asked repeatedly which book he will swear upon. That should cause this from being an issue in the future.
Apparently it has only been an issue for you and Dennis Prager. Are anyone other than Muslims to be asked repeatedly which book, if any, they will use in their photo-op?
