Monday, February 23, 2015

The Unreal American

Pundit Glenn Harlen Reynolds loves this country or, more accurately, loves to fuck with this country. He love this country so much he wants to scrap the constitution and write a new one. He believes the biggest problem facing the United States is that the majority of Americans don't think exactly like him.
Glenn Reynolds manifesto.

He's come up with a solution which I'm certain he will write into his new, improved constitution. Require people pass a Patriotism Test before they are allowed to vote. He contends that Obama was elected president by unpatriotic citizens. His solution to prevent such a horror from ever reoccurring is to prevent unpatriotic Americans from voting at all.

He references a work of fiction where "the right to vote came only after some kind of dangerous public service." Oddly, by this rule Reynold himself would be disenfranchised as in his life he has never served the public in any way, dangerous or passive. So, I suspect when Reynolds writes that constitutional clause he will use the 1918 Soviet Union constitution as a template. In that constitution, only members of the Communist Party were allowed to vote, thereby excluding unpatriotic democrats. 

At the risk of giving Reynolds ideas, he might find subsequent versions of the Soviet constitution more to his liking. They granted universal suffrage but all candidates had to be nominated from patriotic branches of the Communist Party. This insured that no matter how unpatriotic the electorate was they were required to elect only Communist patriots.  I'm sure Reynolds could draft a text that requires all nominees be approved by the Tea Party.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This is why I am glad it's hard to get a constitutional amendment through...

I hear mutterings on the right a lot about a new constitutional convention (I believe Palin was touting one a few weeks back) and I think about what changes I would make if I could wave a wand, but...

I really don't trust people, for many of the same reasons you mention here about Reynolds. We just got lucky the first time around...