MB Civic

By Anne Applebaum | Tuesday, December 30, 2008 | The Washington Post

“…Aren’t we lucky that our founding fathers were so eloquent, so quotable, and that their language belonged to the 18th-century Enlightenment tradition, which valued clarity, and not the 19th-century Hegelian tradition, which did not. More to the point, aren’t we lucky that the political rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as modified by Lincoln and King, has persisted; that the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — and not, say, the language of Jefferson Davis or the Ku Klux Klan — has remained mainstream; that it still sets the standard by which modern political speeches are judged….”…BS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/29/AR2008122901916_pf.html