Man Without a Country

A YouTube video: Still Report #823 - TNALC Analysis - Cruz is a Man Without a Country

What's up with the Jesuits?

Since when do 20th Century (*) Jesuits go around speaking truth?

Jihad Watch: Jesuit priest: Islam is “violent throughout its entire history” out of “obedience to the Law of Allah”

Jihad Watch: Jesuit astrophysicist Manuel Carreira: “Islam is the worst plague that humanity has seen in the past 2000 years”


(*) Yes, I realize that we are firmly into the 21st Century

Deus vult!

The TOF Spot: Deus vult! Part I: The Preludes

The TOF Spot: Deus vult! Part Two: On Your Marks

The TOF Spot: Deus vult! Part III: I have come in order to die

George Washington Adams

With respect to the unbridled ambition of Ted Cruz to illegally follow in the illegal footsteps of the Obamanation, consider George Washington Adams (lived 1801-1829) --

Could Ted Cruz, born Dec. 22, 1970 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, be constitutionally ineligible for the presidency? If he were alive today, one of America's most distinguished presidential historians, J.J. Perling, would say yes.

We know that because he made that very judgement about another very distinguished American who was in the pipeline for the White House. He made it in the book, "The Presidents' Sons: The Prestige of Name in a Democracy," published in 1947 by The Odyssey Press, New York.
...
Now, here is the tale. It is just one example from history, the story of another, would be president, who was disqualified over the so called "birther issue." ...

He was born on the 4th of July [Ilíon: I don't know whether the quoted author has made a factual error or is speaking metaphorically, as in "Yankee Doodle"]. He graduated from Harvard University and studied law under Daniel Webster. His name was George Washington Adams. Both his father and grandfather were presidents of the United States.

Yet, according to the belief of legal experts at the time he could never be president himself. Why? He was born in Berlin, Germany while his father served in the American diplomatic corps as the U.S. minister to Prussia.

Keep in mind, both his mother and father were U.S. citizens. His father would soon become ambassador to the court of St. James. He would become secretary of state and not just any secretary of state, but the one who would craft and conceive of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, the most enduring foreign policy position in American history.

H[is father] would later become the sixth president of the United States and his mother, Louisa Catherine Adams, would become one of our greatest first ladies.

John Quincy Adams ruled his son's life from a distance, sending letters ordering every moment of the day.

Louisa, the mother, took great solace in the fact that her firstborn, George, would not have the pressure of presidential expectations. He couldn't.

Their correspondence reveals their belief that the Constitution did not allow him to be president because of his birth in Germany.

...

Writes J.J. Perling, "George Washington Adams could never have been an occupant of the Presidential chair: the Constitution of the United States restricted that office to native born citizens, and George Washington Adams had been born in Germany."

Constitution Society Presidential Eligibility

1947, J.J. Perling, The Presidents' Sons: The Prestige of Name in a Democracy, Odyssey Press, New York — George Washington Adams could never have been an occupant of the Presidential chair: the Constitution of the United States restricted that office to native born citizens, and George Washington Adams had been born in Germany [on April 12, 1801 in Berlin, the son of John Quincy Adams, then on the diplomatic team to Prussia]. [Understanding of scholars at the time.]

So, I turns out that I was mistaken about how the Founders understood "natural born citizen"; that is, their understanding was far more restrictive than I had understood it to be. By the understanding of the Founders -- and after all, that *is* what matters with respect to understanding the US Constitution -- John McCain was *also* not a natural born US citizen, as I had previously believed.

And, even into the mid-20th Century, it was commonly understood, by everyone, that persons such as Barack Obama (and Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio) are not natural born US citizens -- when I was a child, I learned from my mother the core understanding that formed the basis of my rejection of Obama's, and now Cruz', (false) claim to be a natural born US citizen.

If the son and grandson of US presidents is not, and cannot be, a natural born US citizen because he was born in a foreign land -- while his father was serving as a minister in the US diplomatic corps -- then by what twisted logic does the bastard son of an alien (Obama) or the son of an alien born in a foreign land become a natural born US citizen? What? Because it's too much bother either to understand the truth of the matter or to uphold and enforce the US Constitution.

Have we not seen these past seven years what failure to uphold and enforce the US Constitution leads to?

Identifying the 'mark'

Canadian Cincinnatus: Why I don’t support Donald Trump -- "And then I realized, like I was shot with a diamond bullet, that there is no there there. Trump has no ideas, he has no philosophy, he has no governing principles. He is little more than a salesman selling himself. He is a hollow man, a stuffed man, headpiece filled with straw.

Not only doesn’t he know, he doesn’t care to find out - which is much worse."

Exactly.

"... There is an old adage that if you look around the card table and don’t see who the mark is, you’re the mark."

EDIT 2016/04/11 --

Edgestrow asks: "What does a voter like me do? I loathe Hillary, but fear Trump. Whichever way I jump, it's going to be against someone, not for anything."

There are multiple threads to untangle here; I certainly won't insist that I see them all, but let's see that we can untangle.

== Regardless of what precisely Edgestrow is thinking, there is this shallow and tendentious idea being pushed in the culture -- pushed: because when people let it rule their lives, they tend to surrender to things they ought to oppose -- that it is in some way wrong simply to oppose things, that you must always be for something rather than against the other thing.

Like so much else that is driving the current implosion of our civilization and of our polity, this idea goes back to the Progressive Era of a century ago (that is, to the intellectual-and-political ancestors of today's "Social Justice Warriors" and leftists in general).

This idea is promoted because it is a means to control people en masse: it is belovéd of marketing people -- which is to say, by people in whose interest it is to separate you from your money -- and by leftists -- which is to say, by people in whose interest it is to separate you from your liberty, and incidentally, from your money.

[As a side note: The "Pro-Life Movement" calls itself that, rather than the "Anti-Abortion Movement" or the "Anti-(Legalized) Murder Movement", because its leaders have succumbed to marketing. Imagine the absurdity of the old Abolitionist Movement -- the Anti-Slavery Movement -- calling itself the "Pro-Freedom Movement" or the "Pro-Economic Growth Movement".

For what it's worth, I am not "pro-life"; I am anti-abortion and anti-euthanasia ... because I am anti-murder]

== Sometimes, "the lesser of two evils" is still *just* evil -- I'm not myself convinced that Trump falls into that category, but if you believe that he does, then it seems that you should vote for no one for that office in the general election. Or, you could "throw away your vote" (as people like to put it) by voting for, say, the Constitution Party candidate in the general election.


== No one else has the right or the authority to demand that you draw the above line where they choose for you to draw it -- it is your right to refuse to participate or cooperate if you believe the even the "lesser evil" is still just morally evil.

Certainly, others have the right to attempt to persuade you to their position; just as you do toward them. Others have the right to (attempt to) show *others* that your position is untenable or false or irrational or even hypocritical; just as you do toward them. Others even have the freedom to heap scorn on you due to your thinking, or lack thereof, on whatever the matter is; just as you do toward them.

But, in the end, what you do is between you and God: we will all answer to God, and none of the little self-deceptions that people so love to hide behind will be able to withstand his presence. We will all be naked before God; so, the task we all have is to live so that we need not be ashamed of our nakedness.

== Trump as "dangerous" -- While it seems pretty clear that at least some of the Trumpkins hope that Trump will be the Second Coming of Obama, I don't see that as even a possibility. Obama is able to get away with behaving as though he were Ceasar because a powerful block of the people in Congress want the results he decrees, and large block of the people in Congress are indisposed to oppose his rule-by-decree.

But, I just don't see Trump as having that sort of institutional/establishment backing.

Conceivably, a Trump administration might even be a good thing in the long-run, for it might (let me stress the "might") result in the Congress re-asserting its primacy, and putting an end to the "imperial presidency".