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Townhall
A Year of
Anniversaries
Thomas Sowell
Dec 31, 2014
2014 has been a year of anniversaries. It was the 100th anniversary of
the beginning of the First World War -- a war which many at the time
saw as madness, and predicted that it would be the harbinger of a
Second World War a generation later.
2014 was also the 70th anniversary of the fateful landing at Normandy
that marked the beginning of the end of World War II.
2014 was likewise the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of
Education Supreme Court decision that marked the beginning of the end
of racial segregation, the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and of the beginning of President Lyndon Johnson's "war on
poverty" programs.
Anniversaries are opportunities to look back at historic turning
points, compare the rhetoric of the time with the reality that we now
know unfolded -- and to learn hard lessons about the difference between
rhetoric and reality for our own time.
A hundred years ago, the President of the United States was Woodrow
Wilson -- the first president to openly claim that the Constitution of
the United States was outdated, and that courts should erode the limits
that the Constitution placed on the federal government.
Today, after a hundred years of courts' eroding the Constitution's
protections of personal freedom, we now have a president who has taken
us dangerously close to one-man rule, unilaterally changing laws passed
by Congress and refusing to enforce other laws -- on immigration
especially.
Like Woodrow Wilson, our current president is charismatic, vain, narrow
and headstrong. Someone said of Woodrow Wilson that he had no friends,
only devoted slaves and enemies. That description comes all too close
to describing Barack Obama, with his devoted political palace guard in
the White House that he listens to, in contrast to the generals he
ignores on military issues and the doctors he ignores on medical issues.
Both Wilson and Obama have been great phrase makers and crowd pleasers.
We are still trying to cope with the havoc left in the wake of Woodrow
Wilson's ringing phrase about "the self-determination of peoples...
Read the rest of the article at Townhall
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