On November 30, 1804, the United States House of Representatives began impeachment hearings against Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. The House thought he was too partisan, too “Federalist.”
The Senate later acquitted Chase.
On 1835 on this date, Samuel Clemens was born, later to achieve world fame as author and humorist Mark Twain (pictured above). His most beloved books include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). He died in 1910.
This is true liberty, when free-born men,
Having to advise the public, may speak free,
Which he who can, and will, deserves high praise;
Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace:
What can be juster in a state than this?
Euripides, The Suppliant Women (c. 420-415 BC), as used by John Milton as epigraph to his Areopagitica (1644). A modern translation of this passage, and a few lines immediately preceding, by Frank William Jones, runs as follows:
Nothing . . .
Is worse for a city than an absolute ruler.
In earliest days, before the laws are common,
One man has power and makes the law his own:
Equality is not yet. With written laws,
People of small resources and the rich
Both have the same recourse to justice. Now
A man of means, if badly spoken of,
Will have no better standing than the weak;
And if the little man is right, he wins
Against the great. This is the call of freedom:
“what man has good advice to give the city,
And wishes to make it known?” He who responds
Gains glory; the reluctant hold their peace.
For the city, what can be more fair than that?
“Donald Trump’s election has really undermined America’s democratic prestige in China,” offered Claremont McKenna College Professor Minxin Pei on a recent hour of The Diane Rehm Show, public radio from our nation’s capital. When Pei added that it has “set back the prospect of democracy in China for years,” Mrs. Rehm let out an audible moan.
Then Diane asked her guests, “as members of the press” what they “make” of President-Elect Trump’s “rejection of his meeting with The New York Times.”
“It seems,” bemoaned James Fallows, the Atlantic’s national correspondent, “a continuation of his not having any normal press conferences, dealing entirely outside normal press channels and seeming not to recognize the legitimacy of this part of the democratic fabric.”
“I don’t know anything about the specific details about the New York Times meeting,” admitted the Financial Times’ Geoff Dyer. Still, that didn’t stop Dyer from announcing that, “But it’s part of a pattern . . . to a much more conflict-ual, antagonistic, almost bullying relationship with the media.”
Elizabeth Economy, with the Council on Foreign Relations, found it “disturbing” that Donald Trump thinks “he can be his own media, he can simply tweet out whatever he wants, he can make his homegrown videos and sort of impart his information directly to the American public, without the mediating influence of the media.”
Let’s welcome Elizabeth to America.
“We are all recognizing we’re on new terrain now and need to find some way to keep telling the truth, or our best approximation of it, in very different circumstances,” concluded Fallows ominously.
Trump, as you’ll recall, did wind up attending that meeting at The Times.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Irish-English medievalist, theologian, and novelist Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898. Among his best known works are Out of the Silent Planet, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and the “Narnia” fantasies for children. His retelling of the Psyche myth, Till We Have Faces, and political essays such as “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” and The Abolition of Man, will almost certainly stand the test of time.
. . . as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.
John Milton, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (1644).
Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator for half a century, died Friday night.
“Although Castro was beloved by a legion of followers,” The Washington Post acknowledged, “detractors saw him as a repressive leader who turned Cuba into a de facto gulag.”
Many on the American left — especially in Hollywood — have been surprisingly enamored of Castro, and the supposed “accomplishments” of better education and healthcare delivery in his socialist paradise.
I guess we must all weigh whatever policy advances were made against Mr. Castro’s faults.
As the New York Times detailed: “Foreign-born priests were exiled, and local clergy were harassed so much that many closed their churches. . . . a sinister system of local Committees for the Defense of the Revolution that set neighbors to informing on neighbors. Thousands of dissidents and homosexuals were rounded up and sentenced to either prison or forced labor. . . . jailing anyone who dared to call for free elections. . . . imprisoning or harassing Cuban reporters and editors.”
Fidel Castro’s death reminds me of Irving Berlin’s jazz tune about Adolf Hitler, When That Man is Dead and Gone:
What a day to wake up on
What a way to greet the dawn
Some fine day the news’ll flash
Satan with a small mustache
Is asleep beneath the lawn
When that man is dead and gone
Saturday morning, that news finally flashed for Cuban Americans in south Florida. Followed by jubilation. Horns honking. Smiles, cheers and songs. Jigs were danced.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz — that dictator, the person who imprisoned and murdered many seeking freedom — is dead and gone.
For now, sadly, his brand of tyranny continues through brother, Raúl Castro. But its days, too, are numbered.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
In 1894, on November 28, economics journalist Henry Hazlitt was born. Halitt went on to write Economics in One Lesson, Time Will Run Back, and several books criticizing Keynesianism. He was the main proponent of the work of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek in America during the 1940s and 1950s.
Exactly one year earlier, women voted in a national election for the first time . . . in New Zealand. On the same date in 1917, the Estonian Provincial Assembly declared itself the sovereign power of Estonia. November 28 also marks the independence of Mauritania from France (1960), and East Timor from Portugal.
Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.
C. S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (1966).
Start carving the headstone, inscribe the death date: The dictator is dead. Long live his opposition. Bury the man in the ground. And click on over to Townhall for the obit, coming back here for more dirt:
November 27, 1295, the first elected representatives from Lancashire were called to Westminster by King Edward I to attend what later became known as “The Model Parliament.”
On the same date in 1895, Alfred Nobel (pictured) signed his last will and testament, thereby establishing the Nobel Prizes.