Tea at Trianon: Babies and Bottle Caps

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, November 3, 2008

Babies and Bottle Caps

Anthony Esolen offers some compelling thoughts on what really is at stake tomorrow. How any Catholic could ever vote for Obama is truly beyond my comprehension.

At every opportunity, Mr. Obama has voted against laws requiring that doctors and nurses do what is reasonable to save such a baby's life, or even, as our eminent Robert George has put it in his recent article for the Witherspoon Institute, to wrap it in a towel, so that it will be warm as it dies. He has said that he voted against such a law in Illinois because the law was unnecessary; that was a flat lie, as Professor George shows. What Hillary Clinton found in her heart to do -- or could not find in her conscience not to do -- Mr. Obama rejected.