Palin shows off mastery of history
by TedSeptember 1st, 2008
One really can’t improve on this, so I will just paste in her answer to a 2006 policy questionnaire:
Q: Are you offended by the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
PALIN: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.
Wowsa.
*em headdesk*
That’s not an uncommon mistake, and I expect them to try and polish it describing the rather deist viewpoints of the Founding Fathers, but still a foolish one.
For those that don’t know, the Pledge itself is only a little over a century, and wasn’t change to have “under god” involved until the mid 1950s.
Oh, and since I ranted about someone else not linking to copyrighted data, I should say the same here. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the (poorly defined and applied) law.
I was not aware the questionnaire was copyrighted material. I believe it is available to all under the Freedom if Information Act. But your concern is duly noted.
Notwithstanding FOIA, how does it even make sense to copyright the answers given on a questionaire to a public official?
It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s copyright law, after all. Anything anyone publishes gets an automatic copyright, thankyousoverymuch Berne Convention.
FOIA (a) applies only to the Federal government, and (b) does not apply to private or non-profit groups such as EagleAlaska.
You picked a short enough selection that it’d almost certainly be considered Fair Use (and certainly not worth getting judges involved), but citations or at least making the origin clear tends to help the purpose and character prong of the test.
10-4. Good point about FOIA.
Not to overstate the obvious, but the words “under God” were added by supporters of Joe McCarthy during the ’50’s. Given his distinctly un-democratic and un-American positions, the words should be deleted from the pledge as a repudiation of his views and actions.
I agree Janusz, but I would say there is no chance it will happen any time soon.
Sad, isn’t it, Ted. With all the talk of whether or not “under God” violates the “separation of church and state”, I really think the Joe McCarthy connection is the more compelling argument.
I wouldn’t call either the Knights of Columbus or Docherty particular supporters of McCarthy. They were religious and relatively conservative, but that’s taking guilt by association to a rather impressive degree.
Docherty is known to have remarked that “Without the phrase ‘under God,’” the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag might have been recited with similar sincerity by Muscovite children.” I think the reference makes clear that he is trying to distinguish between genuine Americans and godless communists, and seems to me a product of the witch-hunting McCarthy era.
Not particularly surprising, given that he (and the Knights of Columbus, and a lot of other conservatives) opposed godless communists for a good while before McCarthy, and godless anarchists before communism was cool.
If you really want to start a discussion posing all anticommunist individuals in 1954 — the year after Stalin died and the resulting liberalization of that particular hellhole resulted in the first truly clear picture of what fascist Communism could result in — as evil and all their actions as inherently flawed, be my guest… but I really would not consider it a good policy.
And, of course, it’s also worth noting that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist. (Link included, to avoid the wrath of the suddenly self-appointed copyright police…)
I have disagree vehemently. Failure to reputiate McCarthyism is bad policy, while repudiating secularism is bad jurisprudence. It’s Congress’s job to make (bad) policy, but not their job to make jurisprudence.
I keep hoping Newdow wins one of his cases, but SCotUS will probably just hide again.