Robert Parry: The Right’s Inside-Out Constitution

[marmar]

from Consortium News:



The Right’s Inside-Out Constitution
February 13, 2012

Exclusive: It has become an article of faith on the American Right that the Founders opposed a strong central government and that federal activism — from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to President Obama’s health-care reform — violates the nation’s first principles. But that’s not the real history, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry


In recent decades, the American Right has sought to rewrite the founding narrative of the United States through selective “scholarship,” by snatching a few quotes out of context and then relying on a vast propaganda machine (and much ignorance about U.S. history) to turn the Constitution inside out.

According to the Right’s revisionist narrative, the framers of the Constitution met in Philadelphia for the purpose of tightly restricting the powers of the national government and broadly empowering the states – when the actual intent of the Constitutional Convention was nearly the opposite.

The Right has now popularized this bogus version of history so much that it has become a rallying cry for the Tea Party and other poorly informed Americans, including that self-proclaimed historian Newt Gingrich, who declared recently, “I believe in the Constitution; I believe in the Federalist Papers. Obama believes in Saul Alinsky and secular European socialist bureaucracy.”

Yet, perhaps oddest of all, the Right has taken James Madison, one of the Constitutional Convention’s strongest advocates for a powerful central government, and made him the new godfather for the state supremacy movement. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2012/02/13/the-rights-inside-out-constitution/

[lastlib]

1. Their misunderstanding of our history knows no bounds

From Michelle Bachmann saying the Founding Fathers fought to end slavery to the New Deal as socialism to Newt Gingrich saying child labor laws need to be repealed, to this Constitutional confusion, these idiots just cannot get it straight.

I really believe that this is why the Republicans are so hostile to education--that if people learn the true history of our country, they will rebel against the right wing narrative and their power is gone. And for the Right, it's all about power over the rest of us. They want us beholden to them economically, and they want us all down on our knees in the church of their choice, as another form of control over us.

[Bozita]

2. imho, this is MUST READ stuff!