Dunno. They weren’t showing it on the jumbo-tron at Bronco’s pre-season game I was watching, instead.
Though I’m sure our team talked a lot about liberty. Which, yay, liberty! Yay, team! Yay, celebrities and minorities supporting our team! And liberty!
Yay!
Rubio gave a very moving speech.
Hightlight, on Obama: “These are the ideas that people come to America to get away from.”
Lowlight: “Our national motto is “In God we Trust,” reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all.”
I think a lot of ill-named progressives were very worried after Rubio’s speech.
btw molehill, I disagree with your lowlight. As Rubio pointed out more than once, and something Ryan has said with his ‘rights from Nature and God’ line, if Man grants you rights Man can take them away.
It is part of, as Dennis Prager has put it, our American Trinity : In God We Trust, E Pluribus Unum & Liberty
Actually I got emails by a couple of lefty friends after Marco Rubio who said: Who was that guy who introduced Romney? He was really good. I replied: “He will be President someday.”
Not that Rubio is some great conservative/classical liberal hope (I think Ryan would be better than him on issues), but he is hands down better than Obama (and Mitt).
My highlight remains Michael Moore. I am sure they did not show that at the game, but Michael Moore on the Jumbotron would be disturbing. Especially with him wearing shorts.
Ryan affirming that rights come from God and Nature, and not government, was great and has unambiguously positive implications. Rubio asserting that the most fundamental American value is belief in the Creator has rather different implications. Consider both statements from the perspective of a respectful non-believer, if you will.
Rubio:
Is it fairly clear that Romney is not comfortable speaking at length and in depth of the details of a distinctly American political philosophy, where in contrast Paul Ryan is not only comfortable doing so, but given his druthers, would rather prefer that sort of conversation to having of necessity to dwell on the particulars of exigent necessity? Seems so to me, anyhow. And that in a sense, it is in this light that Romney made his decision to supplement his own lack by choosing Paul Ryan. Which in itself may be a good thing, to the extent that Romney can recognize his own deficiencies and look to repair them. But could also be a very bad thing, insofar as Romney lacks not simply a grounding in the unique American political philosophy as such, but lacks the love for that pursuit that not only Ryan, but the founders themselves possessed.
The ratio of substance to froth in this convention, in other words, was appalling.
Rubio IS the anti-obama
That is all!
re Darleen says August 31, 2012 at 10:00 am:
and if Rubio had said that, but not the part about belief in the Creator being the most fundamental American value, that would have been a different matter.
mt_molehill
I guess at this point we are going to have to agree to disagree
I don’t believe it was just an accident that ‘freedom of religion’ is the first freedom listed in the 1st amendment.
YMMV
sdferr
I don’t think Romney is comfortable speaking about a lot of things. e.g. his long personal history of directly helping people
it just not the way he was raised
If Obama had ANY personal stories of, say, shutting down his business to help someone find their missing daughter, there’d have been monuments erected to His Oneness over it in the past 3 years.
The ratio of substance to froth in this convention, in other words, was appalling.
I agree with this.
Meanwhile, Romney is in Louisiana comforting the afflicted.
The presidential candidate doing the work the president won’t do.
sdferr
I don’t mean to pick a fight, but can you point to a convention, either party, in the past that had a better ratio of ‘substance to froth’?
In questions of adherence to a distinct political order set out in a Constitution now long abused, how Mitt Romney behaved with his fellows doesn’t go the nub, I think. Our current national crises may require in part that Gov. Romney be honest and forthright, and may be aided in some respects by his personal charities and the like, but require in much greater measure his understanding of the grounds on which he will build his policies and seek means to implement them. The people want help too, even more perhaps than Gov. Romney himself wants help, to re-learn, or learn for the first time what the meaning of their political order is, of what it consists, how it came to be made, how it ought to be applied, and so on.
Chicago, 1860, that silly splinter party that nominated that gangly bumpkin lawyer from Springfield. Abe something.
how Mitt Romney behaved with his fellows doesn’t go the nub,
Actually, I think it does. Either one believes individuals do the yeoman’s work of taking care of their families/self/neighbors or the State does.
Is “goodness” a function of the individual or a State monopoly?
How did Barack Obama come to be elected Darleen? How has the United States come to embrace a set of policies socialist at their core, and now finds itself unable, incapable of facing the destructiveness of those policies head on, but instead having to gently sidle up to them, projecting that if they’re ever to be abandoned as the destructive entities that they are, it will only be over a decade from now?
Certainly the smaat fellows like Gov. Romney (and Rep. Ryan) know they’re not going to succeed at the preliminary step (election) with jarring “slash and burn” proposals. Rather, like Clint Eastwood last night, they’ll tell the people that the people “are the best”, instead of something less, something that would elect a walking disaster like Barack Obama for instance. Or tolerate a catastrophe like the CJ Roberts’ ruling on the ACA.
Still, at bottom, what is their aim? To gradually change the picture, slowly, carefully, pragmatically in the best sense, winningly at every step along the way. Way to what?
Offered without comment.
(?)
“. . . that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved . . .”
Not union in the communion of the Holy Spirit is dissolved, we might note, but merely political connection. This runs in a number of directions. For one, who determines what.
I guess maybe I should have commented.
They’re not appealing to the General Will or Historical Necessity is the point sdferr, belief in the Creator is there at the founding.
i.e. fundamental.
I only intend that they see their religion as fundamentally separable from their politics.
How did Barack Obama come to be elected Darleen?
Because too many people wanted to believe Obama’s words not his behavior.
WHAT in his background, including his short career as a Senator ever gave substance to his bloviating?
If Obama had ANY personal stories of, say, shutting down his business to help someone find their missing daughter, there’d have been monuments erected to His Oneness over it in the past 3 years.
And if Obama had his way, he’d go straight to the monument erecting and skip over having to do any actual work.
We could ask a related but different question from the question how Obama came to be elected in order to make clearer the significance of what I mean by substance over against froth.
If we were to characterize the worst aspects of the educational problems confronting the United States today, wouldn’t we be justified to be concerned primarily with a serious lack of substance in primary through high school education?
I think we would.
And this is especially the case where we are educating young people, who after all are not born with a shallow understanding of the political order we seek to preserve, let alone a deep understanding, but are, as we well know, vulnerable to propagandization on behalf of political dead-ends utterly alien to American political philosophy.
Not fundamentally separable at all. The Founders actually believed, as good Englishmen, that their separation from King George was a fulfillment of the what Nature/God had endowed in Man, as the King himself had betrayed their God-given rights
In all honesty sdferr, I don’t see that as anything even remotely resembling a cause for concern on our side of the political spectrum. Or, for that matter, a problem for religious people.
The only people I’m aware of who have a problem seperating religion from politics are those for whom politics is their religion.
Well, we do now have the Shrine of the Holy Kiss.
Governments are instituted among Men, it says. By whom? By God? By the ecclesia? No. By men, deriving is powers from [men] the consent of the governed.
When the form of government becomes destructive, does the blame lie with God? Or the Church? No. The blame lies with men.
But what about men? Do men hold any wide variety of religious beliefs which beliefs are themselves are or may be fundamentally incompatible one with another as regards the highest things?
Indeed. Rubio saying “faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all” is problematic not only for the few agnostics or atheists out there, but to a variety of religious people who may have beliefs about the “highest things” incompatible with mainline notions of the Creator.
I’m glad that most people seem not to have noticed or care too much because it was an otherwise powerful speech. But it’s a bit of a red flag regarding Rubio’s understanding of American values.
You live up to your chosen moniker exemplarily.
mt_molehill
Has individual morality gotten better or worse with the lessening societal influence of faith?
Fundamentals — and man’s relation to his God is one of those, though here, how that particular fundamental element of life pertains to the formation of our government happens to be the question — may be made to appear molehills at times, though I think we ought to be suspicious whenever we witness that happening. However that may be, . . .
. . . the fundaments, the foundations, “the grounds upon which” [legitimacy is built] are in some respects the hardest of all parts of government to dwell on, and the most readily departed from both in urge to speed on to the “good stuff”, the “accomplishing stuff”, and later, it often happens, in departure of the breach.
They’re easy to make seem simple too, as the concrete foundation of a building from which the metaphor derives is simple, a big dumb lump of immovability, so to speak. But no less important for all that. Or rather, primarily important for all the complexity and contingency which will later be piled on top of them teetering at the sky.
Stop trying to oppress him with your chister God-botheryness!
Everyone knows social disfuntion is the fault of…
of…
of…
GREEDY SEXIST RACIST HOMOPHOBE WHITE CHRISTIAN MEN!
that’s the ticket.
Well, duh Ernst. ; )
GREEDY SEXIST RACIST HOMOPHOBE WHITE CHRISTIAN MEN!
(Who need not have white skin or penises to qualify for the designation. In fact they can be homosexual, of any race or racial mixture, or whatever the shit people call that these enlightened days, poor, agnostic, and female and still somehow qualify as a GREEDY SEXIST RACIST HOMOPHOBE WHITE CHRISTIAN MEN )