Tea at Trianon: Utter Ignorance and Constitutional Illiteracy

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, April 29, 2019

Utter Ignorance and Constitutional Illiteracy

From the Conservative Review:

Wednesday night on the radio, LevinTV host Mark Levin decried the “utter ignorance and constitutional illiteracy” surrounding the possibility that President Trump may invoke executive privilege to keep former White House counsel Don McGahn from testifying before the House of Representatives. Levin called out House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., for saying that the time to assert executive privilege on this matter “has long since passed” because it wasn’t invoked during the Mueller probe. “This is a separation of powers issue. A president must be able to talk to his own counsel,” Levin countered. “And the president must determine who his own counsel can talk to about what they talked about.”