Well, they didn’t want an overseas empire, Flummox. I’m just as disgusted with the way “lesser breeds” (as I’m sure even the most enlightened Founders considered blacks and Native Americans) were treated in times past as I’m sure you are. I also happen to believe that, as the prophet Hosea said of ancient Israel, this country has “sowed the wind” and is poised to “reap the whirlwind” if it doesn’t wise up and begin ASAP bringing the Empire to an end in a controlled manner.

Paul_GA, I’m not sure I even agree that the Founders didn’t want empire, they certainly supported expansionist polices that led to America’s blood-soaked march across the continent.

I do, however, agree that America is a “fat, bloated, corrupt, blood-drunk Empire” that needs to be fixed. Undoubtedly we would disagree on how to fix it, but at least we can make it that far.

Flummox, I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree, then, but I assure you, the Founders and Framers sure didn’t want this country to degenerate into the fat, bloated, corrupt, blood-drunk Empire it’s become.

Dodd is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill thoroughly corrupt politician.  Nothing else needs to be said about such a scoundrel.

You’ll have to dig deeper than a few out of context quotes, Paul_GA. I see nothing there that says the “Founding Fathers” didn’t want to leave us the representative democracy that they ultimately did. The fundamental definition of Democracy is self rule, and how is our representative democracy not exactly that? I think, Paul_GA, that you have it exactly backwards, what is liberty if it is at odds with self-rule?

On the other hand, Jefferson said ‘I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but the people.’ 

If a majority can’t be trusted with government power, then it seems any minority would be all the less to be trusted.  The less government, the better, of course, but even Jefferson’s liberalism held that the state must exist in order to prevent a worse one from arising, at least until we think of something better.

KISS, I believe Ms. Goodman’s op-eds are posted here at Truthdig at intervals. And most major-party politicians are, indeed, whores; I understand a madam from California has moved to NY state and is running for governor up there. I’d vote for her in a heartbeat; she’s honest! 

Truthdig should shit-can E.J. Dionne, Jr.
and find a real journalist such as Amy Goodman.
“I hope one day soon PBS will do an in depth investigative program on the
manipulations by this scum bag traitor Dodd in regards to his manipulations
concerning the financial fiasco. His big payoff is coming after he leaves office. Up
yours Chris, you are nothing but a whore.” by Steve E Has the right idea on Dodd. His BS has been a down-turn on finance, along with Frank for years and they both cow-tow to both parties that are in power.
Wait till health reform and taxes and social security light up the publics anger later in December and into 2011.
Our bastard president will make any deal the devils offer him. Our constitution has never been more endangered than coming events from the white house and senate.

I hope one day soon PBS will do an in depth investigative program on the
manipulations by this scum bag traitor Dodd in regards to his manipulations
concerning the financial fiasco. His big payoff is coming after he leaves office. Up
yours Chris, you are nothing but a whore.

As long as housing prices kept rising, the illusion that all this was good public policy could be sustained. But it didn’t take a financial whiz to recognize that a day of reckoning would come. “What does it mean when Boston banks start making many more loans to minorities?” I asked in this space in 1995. “Most likely, that they are knowingly approving risky loans in order to get the feds and the activists off their backs . . . When the coming wave of foreclosures rolls through the inner city, which of today’s self-congratulating bankers, politicians, and regulators plans to take the credit?”
Barney Frank and Chris Dodd doen’t. But their fingerprints are all over this fiasco. Time and time again, Frank and Chris insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in good shape. Five years ago, for example, when the Bush administration proposed much tighter regulation of the two companies, Frank and Chris were adamant that “these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis.” When the White House warned of “systemic risk for our financial system” unless the mortgage giants were curbed, Frank and Chris complained that the administration was more concerned about financial safety than about housing.
Now that the bubble has burst and the “systemic risk” is apparent to all, Frank and Chris blithely declares: “The private sector got us into this mess.” Well, give the congressman points for gall. Wall Street and private lenders have plenty to answer for, but it was Washington and the political class that derailed this train. If Frank and Chris are looking for a culprit to blame, he can find one suspect in the nearest mirror.

Some quotations, Flummox, with all due respect:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” ~ John Adams

“A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” ~ James Madison

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” ~ Ben Franklin

“It has been observed that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this.” ~ Alexander Hamilton

Anyway, that’s four examples. I must insist again, our Founders and Framers treasured liberty, not “democracy”. Again quoting Hamilton, “It’s not tyranny we desire; it’s a just, limited federal government.”

When this country cast the Founders and Framers aside in 1898 (except to give lip service to their memory) and began to create an overseas empire, that, I feel, is where our decline began. An empire declines slowly, but its eventual fall is sure.

Dodd says:  ““We have created as much of a barrier to running for public office as when some of those restrictions applied relating to gender, race and property.”
  He means those restrictions don’t apply any more?  He means gender, race and property don’t determine who gets elected to public office at every level?
  Count the women.  Count the non-whites.  Count those who can’t raise tons of money from people who pollute, steal, oppress workers, ship jobs overseas, hire expensive lawyers to manage their tax-exempt fortunes.
  Count the lobbyists who whisper dictats into the President’s ears 24/7.
  Count the Lear jets and the yachts,

  Once it was “liberty, equality and justice”
  Now it’s “gender, race and property.”
  So what else is new?

I meant to write, “muddy waters do not offer up solutions, only illusions.”

Paul_GA, exactly which “Founding Fathers” were you talking about when you say they “never wanted this country to be a ‘democracy’”? The truth is they did want a democracy (in other words self-government), and they chose a representative democracy as its form.

You should not spread fallacies like this, muddy waters do not offer up solutions, old illusions.

Well, G.Anderson, if you’re referring to a possible break-up of the USA into several “successor States”, all I can say is, every empire’s got to come to an end sooner or later, and of the empire in question can’t fold its own tent, then the tent will be folded by the forces of history and economics.

We’re living in interesting times, eh? Kind of makes me wonder about life during the decline of the Roman Empire; another case of a Republic getting too proud, stiff-necked and big for its britches, and imagining that its “glory” and “grandeur” would last forever ...

After thirty six years in the senate, he should be ashamed of what he and the rest of his rich buddies have done to this country..

Thirty six years, is just about the time frame, that it took to completely dismantle the country’s infrastructure, destroy it’s instituions, and turn hard working American’s into debt slaves…

What Nikita Krushchev, and the entire Red Army could’t do, the senate succeeded in doing. We won The Cold War for nothing, because of them.

Mr. Dodd, helped save the financial industry from reform, as well as the HMO’s from reform…Calling it reform doesn’t change the fact that it’s pure B.S…He helped insure that the corporations remain firmly in control…of their ability to keep plundering the people…

Of course he doesn’t want Elizabeth Warren in charge of things, even though it’s reform in name only,  there’s too much chance that she could still screw things up for the corporate crooks in the finacial industry who helped Dodd craft this bill.

Mr. Dodd should find a convienent rock to crawl under, if he had a conscience he would spend the rest of his life doing penance. 

Wall street remains in charge of the government. But since they can’t govern, we have no government.

And since we have no federal government, the states will assume more power… do we see where this is going?

On the contrary, if it were up to me, I’d repeal the 17th Amendment and revert to the old system wherein the Senators were elected by the state legislatures and represented the interests of their states as a whole (representing the peoples’ interests was supposed to be the job of the House, after all). The change in the way the Senate was elected was one more nail in the coffin of the old Republic and another building-block in the creation of the fat, bloated, corrupt Empire we live in today.

Some may call this “un-democratic”, but the Founders and Framers never wanted this country to be a “democracy”, but a constitutional federal Republic with checks and balances. Washington (or as I prefer to term it, “Mordor-on-the-Potomac”) badly needs checks on its power to coerce the people whose loyalty it demands, and to wage war overseas on those it terms its “enemies” and whom it commands its “subjects” to view as enemies, too.

Dionne: >>”...But (Dodd) reminded me of something missing in our public life: an ebullient joy about what democratic politics can accomplish…”<<

I guess it kind of depends on how you define the word “accomplish” and who benefits.

Interesting that Dionne completely fails to mention the current “scolding on progressive blogs” that relates to Dodd apparently being the chosen one to lower expectations for Elizabeth Warren (one of the few actual human beings to inhabit the swamp).

“...When it first looked like Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren might stand a serious chance of getting appointed at the first director of the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a regulatory agency which she was the first to suggest — Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) poo-pooed the notion, saying there’s a “serious question” about whether Warren is “confirmable.”...”

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/08/07/dodd-warren-fight

Dionne reminds me of that time Christopher “Tweety” Matthews was gushing about how Fred Thompson “smelled like a man”. (That was the last time that show aired in this house)

They have such complete and total admiration for power that it’s fried their brains.

Vote them Out! Drain the Swamp! Why wait for Professional Politicians to clean their mess? All Incumbents Out: 2010