Tea at Trianon: Resisting the Haters

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, October 28, 2019

Resisting the Haters

From The Daily Signal:

I’d like to hasten to say that obviously there are many federal employees who do their job dutifully every day, but there is a significant minority that have openly said they’re a part of the resistance. There’s been some different tapes of them saying, “We belong to the resistance, we exist to undermine what he’s doing here and throw sand in the works of his agenda,” but there’s also just more compelling evidence of the problems that this causes. I cite, for instance, Sen. Ron Johnson, who runs a government committee in the Senate. His staff did an analysis of the first 125 days of the Trump administration. In that time period, there were 126 leaks, more than one a day, and many of them dealt with really sensitive national security information. These were not coming from Trump’s own appointees or people he brought in. These were coming from the bureaucracy at some point, or [from] former Obama officials, as well. This has not only harmed national security—and again, a lot of the book is trying to point out the destruction of this, the problems that come with this—but the American public, if you look out at the polls, they’ve lost enormous faith in federal government and in the bureaucracy and in their belief that the federal bureaucracy exists to do the right thing. (Read more.)