If TJ is in heaven right now, and he’s able to peer through some celestial portal and behold the BS Barack has saddled this nation with -- a country, by the way, that Jefferson labored to make independent from tyrants -- then I would bet that Thomas is more ticked than a boar that just had its balls clipped.
How do I know Jefferson would loathe Obama and seek to jettison our Jester-In-Chief? Well, it’s principally via Thomas’ musings -- musings that, for the time being, we’re still afforded the wherewithal to access; principles that also happen to have made our nation great and that used to be taught in our school system.
Plow through the following from one of our nation’s illustrious framers’ quills and try to tell me with a straight face that Jefferson wouldn’t have sought to derail BHO via tooth, fang and claw:
1. The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
2. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors?
3. A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
4. If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.
5. The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife.
6. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.
7. No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands or tenements].
8. The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
9. Laws that forbid the carrying of arms… disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes… Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
10. In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
11. I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, & as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
12. It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good disposition.
13. I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
14. The disease of liberty is catching; those armies will take it in the south, carry it thence to their own country, spread there the infection of revolution and representative government, and raise its people from the prone condition of brutes to the erect altitude of man.
15. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories.
16. Still one thing more, fellow-citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
17. A private central bank issuing the public currency is a greater menace to the liberties of the people than a standing army. We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
18. Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules. That these rules shall be as equal as prudential considerations will admit, will certainly be the aim of our legislatures, general and particular.
19. I have been happy … in believing that … whatever follies we may be led into as to foreign nations, we shall never give up our Union, the last anchor of our hope, and that alone which is to prevent this heavenly country from becoming an arena of gladiators.
20. I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
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