I've been re-watching the HBO series John Adams and its jarring, and depressing, to see how far we have fallen in statesmanship and citizenship. There has been no politician on the national scene in my lifetime that equals the intellect and the public spirit of Adams, Jefferson or Washington. Look at the collection of ciphers, reprobates, thieves and carnival barkers we had running for president this time around and weep for the republic.
To be sure, the founders were not perfect. Jefferson and Washington owned slaves. Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Act. Jefferson was too ideologically-blinded to recognize that the French revolutionaries were building, not a liberal republic like in America, but the first terrorist, totalitarian state. Recent events have shown he was not the last secretary of state to exhibit such myopia where foreign revolutions are concerned.
But despite their faults, they and their compatriots were dedicated to establishing government that would preserve liberty and they produced between them the two greatest legislative/political documents in the history of the world, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. They bequeathed us a fortune and we, the wastrel heirs, have pissed it away, some by design, some by negligence. Now Barack Obama seems to devise a new unconstitutional outrage every day and his successor seems guaranteed to be a dishonest, self-interested tyrant, regardless of which party wins, and only a small minority of citizens seems to care.
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