Among the many voices raised in Europe over the disaster of secession, amid the groans of sorrow, cries of indignation and tones of sympathy which reach us from many lands beyond the sea, there is one neither loud nor mocking, but which, like the endless monotone in the poet’s description of the uproar in hell, is more tormenting than all the other sounds combined. We mean that complacent “We told you so” of the friends of the old order of things – of the men who have always predicted the downfall of the Republic – not from any knowledge of us, but from the arbitrary assumption that Democracy is a false principle, and that, therefore, every Republic must be a failure.

“In the course of a single conversation, I have been assured that Hillary is cunning and manipulative but also crass, clueless, and stunningly impolitic; that she is a hopelessly woolly-headed do-gooder and, at heart, a hardball litigator; that she is a base opportunist and a zealot convinced that God is on her side. What emerges is a cultural inventory of villainy rather than a plausible depiction of an actual person.” —Henry Louis Gates The quote above comes from a fascinating article called “Hating Hillary”, written by Gates for the New Yorker in 1996. Even now, 20 years after it was first published, it’s a fascinating and impressive piece, and if you have a few spare moments I strongly recommend it to you. (www.newyorker.com/…)

First of all — this is not my writing. It’s a Facebook post by someone I don’t even know, a man named Michael Arnovitz in Portland OR. But as a Facebook post it passes the fair use test and I’m quite certain he would not object that I share it here (he doesn’t). So without further ado, it’s truly worth the read: