Winefred's Well

Sunday, February 12, 2012

THOSE WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY,
THEY FIRST MAKE MAD

The origin of this little Greeky proverb is mysterious and misattributed -- we can at least give this English version to Longfellow. But there's something incredibly comic about the fact that one Latinized rendering is 'Quem deus vult perdere, dementat pri

us.' That looks vaguely like bad Latin to me [I await correction] but what better title for an article on the overreaching arrogance of the sitting President than a line that contains the words 'Prius' and 'dementat'.

And indeed, up until the past couple of weeks one might have mistaken President O's flushing of untold millions down the plug-hole of so-called 'green energy' (you remember green energy and green jobs -- the grand scheme that has brought Spain to 24% unemployment) to be his craziest of all extreme crazy programs perpetrated under his administration.

But now, after a full-on assault against Freedom of Religion under the First Amendment to the Constitution, Mr. Obama has earned this well-written proclamation nailed to the door of today's American Thinker, by J.R. Dunn.

Money quotes:

...he has struck what was surely intended to be a lethal blow against the oldest organization on earth -- an organization with something on the order of a billion members, with a cadre of hundreds of thousands of highly trained and dedicated personnel, and a history of overcoming political threats that make Obama look like a kindergartner.

...a man of vast though superficial sophistication and little insight who has punched all the tickets available to him in his epoch and culture and truly believes there is nothing else. And now this man, afraid of revealing his own college transcripts, thinks he can take on the Church of Peter, founded a millennium before the appearance of any nation now existing on this earth...

History has its own rules that are not our rules. One of them appears to state that a man who overreaches himself will fall in proportion to the extent that he has overreached. Obama has overreached himself as far as any political figure in the American record, and his fall will be proportionate. He cannot avoid this or mitigate it. His action against the Church is an example of that small class of acts that cannot be uncommitted.