Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Tell us what you really think, Kevin....

Over at NRO, Kevin Williamson has an audacious take on the history of Presidential State of the Union addresses. He points out that Thomas Jefferson began the tradition of U.S. Presidents delivering the address in a written communication. Then he turns to an American President who is, as any reader of this blog knows, near and dear to my Presbyterian heart, as follows:

"It will come as no surprise that the imperial model was reinstated by Woodrow Wilson, Princeton’s answer to Benito Mussolini and the most dangerous man ever elected to the American presidency, a would-be dictator who attempted to criminalize the act of criticizing the state, dismissed the very idea of individual rights as “a lot of nonsense,” and described his vision of the presidency as effectively unlimited (“The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can”). A big man needs a big show, and it is to Wilson’s totalitarian tastes that we owe the modern pageant."

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