My fellow Americans — The reason families are separated at the border is that the United States, like many countries, has laws governing border crossings by non-residents. When an adult is apprehended crossing our border illegally, they go into the criminal justice system and are placed in a detention center. Keep in mind that an American citizen apprehended in the commission of a crime is not processed any differently. If you are placed in a detention center, I assure you that your children will not be in there with you. A note on rhetoric: A strong line of argument should not require violent metaphors and manufactured hysteria — families “ripped apart,” children “torn from their mother’s arms” — to be persuasive. Read the Declaration of Independence, for example. Read more →
Author Archive: Thomas Jefferson
You Can’t Tell the Nazis Without a Scorecard
If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. — Maxine Waters And they should be made to wear armbands so they’re easier to identify! It’s getting to where you can’t tell the Nazis without a scorecard. Read more →
Thomas Jefferson: Animals, Not People
My fellow Americans — I heard or read the Trump sound bite — “These are not people. These are animals.” — several times this week, always with no context to clarify who or what the pronoun “these” refers to. I plan to use that line next time I visit the National Zoo. It’s going to be hilarious. Listeners and readers were invited to apply the broadest possible interpretation, i.e., Trump said immigrants are animals. He was reviled by people who relied on the short, skewed attention span of the American public to avoid facing the regrettable fact that they use the same “dehumanizing” language themselves. This doesn’t work as well as it did before Twitter became an online memory bank for better or worse. For example, here is CNN “journalist” Ana Navarro: Once it became widely known that Trump was referring specifically to MS-13 gang members, Nancy Pelosi and other… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson: Bush 41 Calls Trump a “Blowhard”
Stinging rebuke from a one-term president who won the White House on the coattails of Ronald Reagan! Read my lips: Hurry up and die. I dislike Republicans and Democrats equally. It’s a choice between which gang of thieves you want to be robbed by. Elect a Democratic president and get four years of trench warfare against Republicans. Elect a Republican president and get four years of trench warfare against Democrats. One of the things I like about President Trump: Democrats don’t like him, Republicans don’t like him, nobody likes him except the people who voted for him, and that’s enough. Read more →
Thomas Jefferson: Election Rigged For Hillary
My fellow Americans — Democrats are now confirming something that we already knew: the primary election was rigged for Hillary Clinton. I observed during the 2016 primary election campaigns that both parties would rather lose the White House than give up the power to shove horseshit candidates down the public’s throats and make them think that’s who they voted for. Read more →
The 30 Most Anticipated TV Shows
My fellow Americans — I just saw a link to The 30 Most Anticipated TV Shows of 2016. How many TV shows do you people have if thirty of them are the most anticipated?! Some despotic regimes around the world rely on starvation and threats of violence to keep the people in a state of submissive compliance. Here in America, the same collective stupor is effected via mindless entertainments and gadgetry. I’d like to see my countrymen raise themselves out of depression, paralysis and failure and resist this massive government/corporate dystopia — But I might miss my TV programs, said the serfs and lackeys. Read more →
You Say Anarchy, Sir, Like It’s a Bad Thing
Frankly, one of our political parties is insane, and we all know which one it is. They have descended from the realm of reasonableness that was the mark of conservatism. They dream of anarchy, of ending government. — Bruce Bartlett My fellow Americans — I’ll tell you who’s insane: anyone who’s not dreaming of anarchy at this moment in history is insane. People forget that this great nation was founded by anarchists, born out of an armed revolution against a corrupt government. As I said at the time, “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” I assure you, though, that regrettably neither current political party dreams of anarchy. They both dream of exactly the same things: self-aggrandizement and rewarding their most powerful supporters with political spoils. The well-known liberal cartoonist Ted Rall wrote a book a couple… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on Why Your Health Insurance Premium is Going Up
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers. — Despite New Health Law, Some See Sharp Rise in Premiums – NYTimes.com That headline should not read “DESPITE new health law,” it should read “BECAUSE OF new health law.” But we were going to get things for free! We were promised better things at a lower cost! In my day, most of the citizens were farmers or merchants or tradesmen. They lived by their hands and their wits. They had horse sense and they knew when they were being sold a bill of goods. Of course, that was before television. Americans today are unfortunately rather stupid. Most of them don’t know anything about economics, science, history, government… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson Solves the Country’s Obesity Problem
A slight minority of Democrats (48%) say the government should be extremely or very involved compared to 13 percent of Republicans. Non-whites (47%) are more likely than whites (25%) to say the government should be very or extremely involved in finding solutions to the country’s obesity problem. — Obesity in the United States: Public Perceptions My fellow Americans — The country doesn’t have an obesity problem. If you’re obese, that’s your problem, not the country’s problem, and you bear the costs of it, financial and otherwise. Some people might argue that obesity causes an increase in public health costs. That is untrue. Think about it. If you die in your 40s because you’re too fat, you have saved us all a lot of money, to the extent that your healthcare costs are borne by the public. If you’d maintained a normal weight and lived to be 80, you’d still have end-of-life… Read more →
“Creating Jobs” and Other Fallacies
Almost everything appertaining to the circumstances of a nation, has been absorbed and confounded under the general and mysterious word government. Though it avoids taking to its account the errors it commits, and the mischiefs it occasions, it fails not to arrogate to itself whatever has the appearance of prosperity. It robs industry of its honours, by pedantically making itself the cause of its effects; and purloins from the general character of man, the merits that appertain to him as a social being. — Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1792) My fellow Americans — I’m hearing in the pre-debate analysis that voters are looking for the candidate who’ll help them have a better life. Speaking as someone who was there at the beginning, I can tell you that helping you have a better life was not America’s original value proposition. Everyone was welcome to come here and try to make… Read more →
Pleonasm of the Day: Offended Muslims
ple·o·nasm, noun the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; redundancy. an instance of this, as free gift or true fact. My fellow Americans — U.S. embassies in Egypt, Libya and Yemen have been attacked by Muslims offended by a YouTube video. “Offended Muslims” — there’s a pleonasm for you! The embassy in Egypt, hoping to pacify the attackers, issued a statement opposing “continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” DISAGREE! We should be APPLAUDING efforts to offend religious believers. We should be STEPPING UP efforts to offend religious believers. My friends and I risked everything — including our lives, that’s how important it was to us — to ensure that Americans could speak their minds without interference from government. Religion is all horseshit anyway. There’s no God. There’s no… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on “You Didn’t Build That”
Almost everything appertaining to the circumstances of a nation, has been absorbed and confounded under the general and mysterious word government. Though it avoids taking to its account the errors it commits, and the mischiefs it occasions, it fails not to arrogate to itself whatever has the appearance of prosperity. It robs industry of its honours, by pedantically making itself the cause of its effects; and purloins from the general character of man, the merits that appertain to him as a social being. — Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1792) My fellow Americans — You see how my friend Tom Paine, 220 years ago, perfectly anticipated — and rejected — your President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” quote. Oh yes, we were aware of the “progressive” philosophy — that everything good comes from government — even then and we wanted no part of it. By the way, I notice that… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on Weinergate
Rep. Weiner of New York — one of the 13 original colonies — has been sending photos of his penis to women in Texas, Washington and other points west. When I was president, Texas and Washington weren’t even part of the country, and if I wanted to show a woman my dick, she had to be right there in the room with me.1 And still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress. Yes, I could have made a sketch and sent it through the mail but that could take weeks. Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on Christine O’Donnell
For all of you pussies out there making fun of her, just know that I would bang her, and if I would bang her, then she’s hot. Read more →
You Don’t Say
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama told voters repeatedly during the health care debate that the overhaul legislation would bring down fast-rising health care costs and save them money. Now, he’s hemming and hawing on that. — Health care politics run into economic reality – msnbc.com Could not have seen that coming! Read more →
Don’t Send a Community Organizer to Do a President’s Job
My fellow Americans — I’m angry. Not just because the southern coastline of our nation — including Louisiana, which I purchased from Napoleon in the sweetest deal of 1803 — is being destroyed. Read these pathetic remarks from our president, Barack Obama: The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue. “Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on the Oil Spill
I do not believe that the federal government should have a central and powerful place in American life. I believe in freedom and self-reliance. Some people, like President Obama, disagree with me. He believes you should part company with your freedom and your money for the privilege of having the government take care of you — wipe your collective backsides, so to speak — from cradle to grave. In which case — why doesn’t he know how to plug an oil leak? — Tom Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on the Health Care Bill
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. — TJ My fellow Americans — This is a glorious day in our great nation! No, I’m not referring to that tragedy of a health care bill, which I’ll get to in a moment. I’m talking about Free Pastry Day at Starbucks! Who doesn’t enjoy a tasty scone with his morning coffee? Now, on a more somber note . . . Goodbye, representative democracy! Farewell, consent of the governed! President Obama today signed into law a far-reaching measure that will affect everyone living in these United States, now and in the future. It is opposed by most of the country and it is now law. I would never have believed that the government I helped to establish would one day engage in this kind… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on Freedom
We’re not interested in government fixes, we’re interested in freedom. — Sarah Palin My fellow Americans — This Palin woman stimulates me on multiple levels. She’s absolutely right in what she says. Let’s go back to first principles. We founded this country as “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” not as a goddamn hippie commune for pussies. I believe in America and I believe in Americans. I believe that the majority of Americans — not as one-sided a majority as there was in my day but a majority nonetheless — do not want to be condescended to, do not want to be talked down to, but rather just want to be left alone to succeed or fail on their own merits. Yours eternally in freedom, Tom Read more →
Thomas Jefferson on Obama’s Healthcare Speech
My fellow Americans — Perhaps it was unfair of me to be critical of President Obama’s healthcare speech without having heard it. There’s not much to do on a Saturday night when you’re dead, so I read the transcript: We’ve estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse. . . . The only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud, as well as unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies . . . Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan. And how much money are we talking about, sir? Now, add it all up, and the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years. WTF?! I… Read more →