How Old IS America?

Interesting. Hadley Arkes has a friend who actually listened to Obama's victory speech in Chicago and he listened carefully.

The e-mail came the day after the election from my friend Jim Stoner, an accomplished professor of political philosophy: Did I notice that Obama, in his victory speech in Chicago, had used the number 221? Obama, on the night of his election, asked the nation to “to join in the work of remaking this nation the only way its been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years...

Yah, do the subtraction and you'll note that the O-and-Savior chose to ignore the Declaration of Independence (and the Revolution, and the Articles of Confederation....)

(!!!!) (Not mentioned by the MSM, of course....)

It was quite striking then that Barack Obama would look back and find the beginning of our nation only with the Constitution. He would conspicuously omit the Declaration, with its affirmation of natural rights, universal in their reach, and the equality of human beings...

Over the last 30 years it has become the fashion among academics on the left, and some notable black intellectuals, to reject the Declaration of Independence along with the American founding. The late Thurgood Marshall condemned the Founders for bringing forth a Constitution that cast protections around slavery.

...for the left, the Declaration has the deeper defect of claiming that the rights it proclaims rest on moral truths. “All men are created equal” was put forth as an axiomatic or “self-evident” truth, and the left will not brook such talk about moral truths. For the existence of moral truths establishes the ground for casting moral judgments on others, especially on those sexual freedoms that the left has come to regard now as the “first freedoms” in our inventory of rights. The left in our politics is always raising a moral cry over inequality, whether in the distribution of wealth, or in the disparities that affect women and racial minorities.

Let me guess...like, maybe, the immutable immorality of abortion?

And this guy claims to be a Con-Law professor? Educated at Ha'vahd? Cole-Ahm-beeYah??

We are not impressed.