My previous post, Tell Scott Brown To Stop Attacking Women’s Health Care, leads me to coin this new law.
Principles are not great because a revered person spoke of them. A person is revered because she or he spoke of great principles.
Referring to this law allows you to avoid having to defend stupid remarks by that revered person.
The Elizabeth Warren campaign sent me an email titled, “Stop Distorting Ted Kennedy’s Record”, that wants me to sign onto a letter shown below. However, I think they are taking the wrong approach. Even though I signed the letter, I attached the following comment:
As a volunteer for Elizabeth Warren and a collector of signatures for her primary ballot access, I must tell you that you are taking the wrong approach.
Politicians distort other politician’s records all the time. The public does not care that much, they are used to it.
This approach to what Brown is doing plays right into Brown’s bit about this is not being the Kennedy seat. It also sounds a little whiny. What famous politician got nowhere by asking, “Tell him to stop lying about my record?”
Instead, attack Brown’s policy because it is the wrong policy.
Previous accommodations for religious reasons to allow personal non-compliance with legal mandates were an attempt to be reasonable. Give these Republicans an inch, and they want to take a mile. They cannot use the granting of previous accommodations which were granted out of the goodness of people’s hearts to ask for even more accommodations. The previous accommodations were a stretch to grant in the first place.
Granting an accommodation so a person can block the right of someone else to get health care is not a reasonable (or perhaps not even a Constitutionally permissible) thing to do.
I suppose you could mention that even with his Catholic principles firmly intact, Senator Kennedy understood the limits of granting accommodations.
In referring to Senator Kennedy, we might wish to remember Greenberg’s Law of Reverence.
We do not quote a revered historical figure because of our reverence for that person, we revere that historical figure because of what he or she said that is worth quoting.
I am being a little weaselly in this post because I used the Warren campaign’s headline, “Stop Distorting Ted Kennedy’s Record” to attract your attention. Let me know what you think of that. Would you have read the post if the headline had been “Tell Scott Brown To Stop Attacking Women’s Health Care?” [Without waiting for feedback, I changed the headline.]