RUTHFULLY YOURS

Read these: FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook
By Andrew C. McCarthy — July 5, 2016
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/437479/print

There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.

Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.
In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.

I would point out, moreover, that there are other statutes that criminalize unlawfully removing and transmitting highly classified information with intent to harm the United States. Being not guilty (and, indeed, not even accused) of Offense B does not absolve a person of guilt on Offense A, which she has committed.

It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has not committed. The idea is that by knocking down a crime the prosecution does not allege and cannot prove, the defense may confuse the jury into believing the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged. Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration of the crimes that actually have been charged.

It seems to me that this is what the FBI has done today. It has told the public that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to harm the United States we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require proof of intent to harm the United States. Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we’ve decided she shouldn’t be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information.

I think highly of Jim Comey personally and professionally, but this makes no sense to me.

Finally, I was especially unpersuaded by Director Comey’s claim that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case based on the evidence uncovered by the FBI. To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton’s conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case.

Hillary’s Banana Republic FBI Director James Comey meticulously outlined Hillary Clinton’s wrongdoing and lies — before announcing she would face no consequences.
By David French — July 5, 2016

Tuesday morning, FBI Director James Comey stepped up to a podium and calmly and methodically demolished every single Hillary Clinton lie, spin, and evasion regarding her misuse of classified information. Months of deception blew up in her face. And then Comey decided to make her president of the United States.

Rarely have 30 minutes of television so perfectly encapsulated the decline and fall of the rule of law and the extraordinary privileges enjoyed by America’s liberal elite. After listing abuse after abuse — and detailing lie after lie — Comey declared that “no reasonable prosecutor” would prosecute Hillary for her obvious and manifest crimes. It’s good to be a Clinton.

As we ponder the magnitude of Hillary’s wrongdoing, consider the facts as uncovered by the FBI investigation. Begin with the stunning and sobering reality that Clinton sent and received Secret and Top Secret information from her unclassified, unsecured e-mail account. Here’s Comey:

Seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. (Emphasis mine.)

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey opened and closed his statement to the press Tuesday with expressions of gratitude and pride to be associated with the bureau. His description of FBI agents’ work on the Hillary Clinton email investigation showed why he feels that way. Whether the rest of his statement—explaining why he wasn’t recommending prosecution of Mrs. Clinton—should make the feeling mutual is an open question.

The agents had to reconstruct thousands of emails from a series of private servers used and abandoned over the years, some of them turned into confetti in the process. The FBI agents also had to tease out from the files of other government employees emails that they might have received from or sent to Mrs. Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state, and weigh their importance.

Unlike Mrs. Clinton’s own lawyers—who decided which emails to produce by reading just the headings—the agents read each of the many thousands of emails and fragments that passed through their hands. The job was made no easier by the decision of those lawyers to obliterate the email record they had examined, making it impenetrable to forensic examination. All in all, these tasks of the agents bear comparison with the labors of Hercules.
Moreover, that the FBI seems to have limited its inquiry to the two federal criminal statutes mentioned in Mr. Comey’s statement appears entirely reasonable. The level of intent and specificity necessary to prove purposeful intent to destroy government records, or intent to obstruct justice—even assuming such activity was afoot—would have required testimony by an actively cooperating participant. Plainly, no such cooperation was forthcoming.

That left the two statutes discussed in Mr. Comey’s statement—one a felony, the other a misdemeanor—and here the announced decision is harder to understand.

It is a felony for anyone entrusted with lawful possession of information relating to national defense to permit it, through “gross negligence,” to be removed from its proper place of custody and disclosed. “Gross negligence” rather than purposeful conduct is enough. Yet Mr. Comey appears to have based his recommendation not to prosecute on the absence of “clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information”—though he did say in the same sentence that there was “evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

As an example of the kind of information at stake, he described seven email chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level. These were the emails that the government had said earlier are so sensitive that they will never be disclosed publicly. Mr. Comey went further, citing “evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position . . . should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.” To be “extremely careless” in the handling of information that sensitive is synonymous with being grossly negligent.

And what of the finding that the investigation did not disclose “clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information”? Even the felony statute requires no such evidence, and no such intent.

The misdemeanor involves simply the knowing removal of classified documents to an unauthorized location. That is the statute to which David Petraeus, the former U.S. Army general and Central Intelligence Agency director, pleaded guilty in 2015. (He had disclosed classified documents to his biographer/mistress, who also had top-secret clearance, returned the information to him and never disclosed it in his biography or elsewhere.)

Mr. Comey mentioned three considerations prosecutors weigh in considering charges: the strength of the evidence, “especially regarding intent”; “the context of a person’s actions”; and “how similar situations have been handled in the past.”

Criminal intent of the usual sort, as noted, is not a requirement of either statute.

The only reference to context in the statement—other than repeated references to the extreme secrecy of the information—is the disclosure that the “security culture” of the State Department pertaining to email in particular was “generally lacking in the kind of care . . . found elsewhere in the government.” If that is meant to suggest that Mrs. Clinton was the victim of a bad culture, it seems fair to point out that she headed the agency where it existed.

The “similar situations in the past” in which prosecutions were brought were said to be limited to those involving “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information” or “vast quantities” of information disclosed with an inference of intent; or evidence of disloyalty or obstruction of justice. CONTINUE AT SITE

For our money, the most revealing words in FBI Director James Comey’s statement Tuesday explaining his decision not to recommend prosecuting Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information were these: “This is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions.”

So there it is in the political raw: One standard exists for a Democratic candidate for President and another for the hoi polloi. We’re not sure if Mr. Comey, the erstwhile Eliot Ness, intended to be so obvious, but what a depressing moment this is for the American rule of law. No wonder so many voters think Washington is rigged for the powerful.
***

Mr. Comey spent nearly all of his media appearance laying out the multiple ways in which Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server for official State Department business had violated official policy and jeopardized America’s secrets. Yet at the end he declined to recommend prosecution because her behavior was merely “extremely careless” rather than “grossly negligent” as the law requires. This is a rhetorical distinction without a difference that deserves to be mocked.

Mr. Comey’s facts grossly—if we may use that word—belie his conclusion. Of the 30,000 work-related emails Mrs. Clinton turned over to State, 110 contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight email chains contained information judged to be Top Secret. The FBI also found three emails containing classified information among emails that Mrs. Clinton had deleted (rather than turned over to State)—but which the FBI was able to find through forensic analysis.
The FBI chief’s statement also had the effect of exposing the many lies Mrs. Clinton has told about her emails.

• Mrs. Clinton claimed she “did not email any classified material” over her private email. Mr. Comey refuted this with precise numbers.

• She said her private server was permitted under State policy. Mr. Comey said “none of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system.”

• She said the emails she sent or received weren’t “marked” classified. Mr. Comey said that, marked or not, “participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”

• Mrs. Clinton said she used personal email merely for the “convenience” of using one device. Mr. Comey revealed that she had “used numerous mobile devices to view and send email on that personal domain” as well as numerous servers.

• Mrs. Clinton claimed she turned over all work-related email to State. Mr. Comey said the FBI found “several thousand” work-related emails that were not turned over. He also dropped the astonishing news that Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers hadn’t even read her emails when deciding what to turn in. They relied on “header information” and search terms, and then “cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.”

• Mrs. Clinton claimed her email was stored in a safe and secure manner, and not hacked. Mr. Comey said “hostile actors” had accessed the private account of “people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.” Her personal email was known about and “readily apparent.”

He said she “used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” Therefore, he added, “it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.”

Despite this list of indictable particulars, Mr. Comey concluded that none of it warrants a criminal prosecution. His justification is that her behavior didn’t meet the standard of “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice.” CONTINUE AT SITE

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion.

— T. S. Eliot

In Merced or Dayton, if an insurance agent, eager to help his wife facing indictment, barged into a restaurant where the local DA is known to lunch, he would almost certainly be told to get the hell out.

But among the Washington elite, the scenario is apparently quite different. The two parties, in supposedly serendipitous fashion, just happen to touch down at the same time on the Phoenix corporate tarmac, with their private planes pulling up nose to nose. Then the attorney general of the United States and her husband, in secrecy enforced by federal security details, welcome the ex-president onto her government plane. Afterward, and only when caught, the prosecutor and the husband of the person under investigation assure the world that they talked about everything except Hillary Clinton’s possible indictment, Loretta Lynch’s past appointment by Bill Clinton and likely judicial future, or the general quandary of 2016.

There has been a lot of talk since Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump of the corrosive power and influence of the “elite” and the “establishment.” But to quote Butch Cassidy to the Sundance Kid, “Who are those guys?”

In the case of the ancient Romans or of the traditional British ruling classes, land, birth, education, money, government service, and cultural notoriety were among the ingredients that made one an establishmentarian. But our modern American elite is a bit different.

Residence, either in the Boston–Washington, D.C., or the San Francisco–Los Angeles corridor, often is a requisite. Celebrity and public exposure count — e.g., access to traditional television outlets (as opposed to hoi polloi Internet blogging). So does education — again, most often a coastal-corridor thing: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, etc.

Net worth, whether made or inherited, helps. But lots of billionaires, especially Midwestern sorts, are not part of the elite, in that their money does not necessarily translate into much political or cultural influence — or influence of the right sort. (Exceptions are Chicago traders who bundle millions for Hillary.)

To hear the Democrat-media complex tell it, guns themselves are responsible for last month’s carnage at a gay nightclub in Orlando — not the jihadist (a registered Democrat) who pulled the triggers again and again while screaming “Allahu akbar” and pledging allegiance to ISIS. This “blame the guns” meme spearheads the Left’s latest campaign against the Second Amendment.

President Obama and his allies in Congress seek to deny the constitutional gun-ownership rights of Americans merely suspected of terror ties — even as the Left champions the non-existent immigration rights of aliens from regions notorious for terror ties. The backbone of the Democrats’ stratagem is a specious “constitutional” claim, one whose logic would empower the government to strip every civil right the Constitution is designed to protect against government encroachment.

As posited by Senator Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) at a Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Democrats claim that many constitutional liberties are routinely restricted in emergency circumstances — in particular, Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless search and arrest. Hence, the argument goes, Second Amendment rights, too, may be stripped away if Democrats can concoct an emergency — such as the ongoing crisis in which guns, apparently with minds of their own, mow down infidels.

At the hearing, Republicans, led by Senator John Cornyn (R., Tex.), made the point that the right to keep and bear arms is rooted in both self-defense and insurance against government’s propensity toward tyranny. The right pre-existed the Constitution. Thus, the Second Amendment is not its source. The right to keep and bear arms is natural and inalienable; the Second Amendment protects it, and Congress has no legitimate power to restrict it.

That does not mean the right is without limitations. As we shall see, like “the freedom of speech” safeguarded by the First Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms had well-known limitations at the time it was adopted. Unquestionably, Congress and state governments have the power to enforce those limitations. But those limitations are part and parcel of the right as originally enshrined in the Constitution. They do not imply a government power to enact additional restrictions in response to “emergencies” or other modern conditions.

RELATED: Democrats Abandon Due Process

I made the remark during a recent email discussion of my eviction by my former landlady because I was seen as a “risk” to my neighbors, and that it was more “pragmatic” to remove the “threat” by throwing me to the ISIS wolves. Rather than thank me for defending her rights, she wished to eliminate the potential “threat” to her tenants and property.
The situation, inaugurated when the FBI/NCIS paid me a visit on May 18th to inform me that my Rule of Reason site was on the radar of ISIS and other Islamic terrorist organizations, but the agent advised me that I was in no imminent danger. Thousands of Americans have been “targeted” by ISIS activists, or by wannabe terrorists. Their landlords or bankers have not told them to get lost. It is hard to ken the mentality of a person who would pretend that evicting me – an unprecedented event in my life – would somehow magically ward off any murderous Islamic mischief from her other tenants.

The best way, according to the landlady, to avoid any potential unpleasantness with Muslims and Islam, was to extinguish the red light that was Edward Cline. Get it off the property and as far away as possible. Deny that he existed.

I was instantly relegated to the status of a post WWII displaced person. I am currently “living out of a suitcase” in a dump of a motel. It has been a very stressful and costly experience for me. Not even several stories about the sheer irrationality of her actions have swayed the person I have not so fondly nicknamed, “The Bitch of Buchenwald.” As Daniel Greenfield noted in his article, the landlady acted, for all intents and purposes, and whether or not she knew it, as an agent of ISIS. There are scores, even thousands of her ilk in our federal, state, and local governments. Obsessed with not rocking the Islamic boat, though that boat has rocked with increasing frequency with hundreds of lives lost just in the West.

When an Independence Day visitor to New York City got his foot blown off by a bag of explosives left in Central Park, the first thing that the authorities did was to reassure us that this was not an act of terrorism.

The first version of the story, trumpeted on CNN and elsewhere, was risible: People try to make homemade fireworks around Independence Day, and that’s probably what this was. And, truly, who among us could fail to appreciate the rich tradition of lovable, ungovernable scamps growing up on Fifth Avenue and 61st Street mixing up explosive concoctions out in the cow barns behind their $15 million apartments? The same kids no doubt dreamt of running away to join the circus while their nannies shoved them off toward Dalton.

If it wasn’t the Huck Finns of the Upper East Side, then who might it have been? The news reports were almost unanimously scrupulous in declining to say.

Outside of the reach of Tom Wolfe’s “Victorian gentleman,” the reactions were rather different: “An IED has been exploded in Central Park,” I was informed. I don’t know that that was the case, with media coverage of the incident being maddeningly vague as of early afternoon on July 4.

I cannot say with any confidence at the moment what happened in Central Park. I can say with some confidence what will happen, if not in Central Park then in similar high-profile public locations, because it has happened already and there is no reason to believe that it will not happen in the future.

The Islamic State and its groupies have a great deal in common with al-Qaeda, but there is a tactical difference that is going to be very important to us in the coming years. It may be the case that al-Qaeda did not follow up the September 11 attacks with an equally terrifying string of less spectacular low-level attacks because its members were unable to, but it also is the case that al-Qaeda was organizationally disinclined to do so, believing, at an institutional level, that such dramatic, theatrical attacks should be followed only with larger, more dramatic, more theatrical attacks. The Islamic State, on the other hand, is satisfied if it can inspire some mentally unstable loser on Facebook to shoot up a gay club in Orlando, or a shopping mall somewhere, or a school bus somewhere else.

We should assume that such low-level attacks are going to become a regular part of our lives for the foreseeable future — unless something truly effective is done to counter them.

What would that look like?

We have, by this point, a great deal of experience with what doesn’t work.

Sofian Zakkout’s intense hatred of Israel has led him to apply the same bigotry towards Jews in general. Last month, under one of his postings on social media calling for the destruction of Israel, Zakkout showed his approval of a cartoon inviting a Muslim wielding a rifle to murder a Jew that was in his vicinity. This month and hereafter, Zakkout must be shunned from society, if not be called to account for incitement to commit violence.

Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout is the founder and President of the Miami, Florida-based American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA). Both Zakkout and his group regularly attack Israel on the internet and, once in a while, hold rallies to do the same. One AMANA rally in particular, held in July 2014 outside the Israeli Consulate in Downtown Miami, featured rally goers repeatedly shouting “We are Hamas” and “Let’s go Hamas.”

For Zakkout and his group to sponsor such a rally was no strange occurrence. Indeed, Zakkout has, for years, used social media to promote Hamas, its founders, its leaders and its militants. Zakkout has publicly stated, “Hamas is in my heart and on my head.”

Yet, following the rally, Zakkout took his bigoted rhetoric many steps forward by targeting not just Israelis, but Jews in general. Above photos he posted from the event, he wrote in Arabic, “Thank God, every day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!” He signed it, “Br. Sofian Zakkout.”

Zakkout’s rhetoric against Jews has gotten progressively worse. On a number of recent postings he made onto social media, he has referred to Jews as “apes and pigs.” This past February, he promoted a video on his Facebook page claiming “the Holocaust was faked.”

On June 1st, Zakkout posted a graphic on his Facebook page depicting the map of Israel draped in a Palestinian flag next to a militant holding a rocket launcher. Over the graphic, the caption reads, “As long as my heart beats, I believe PALESTINE will be FREE.” Under the graphic is written, “From the river to the sea in sha’a Allah,” which is a well-repeated calling for the destruction of the Jewish state from one side of Israel, which borders the Jordan River, to the other side bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

One of the most ancient parables in Western culture is the tale of Caesar’s wife. For those who have forgotten or escaped a classical education, the story goes that after the death of his first wife in childbirth [when he also lost his son], Caesar chose to marry again. Having reached the heights of the Roman Republic as Pontifex Maximus, the elected chief priest of the state religion,

Caesar’s new wife would play a collateral role.

To acquire the necessary helpmate, Caesar turned to Pompeia, whose family like his had fought on the losing side in the Roman civil war of the 80s B.C. Following protocol for the Roman gentry, Pompeia was honored with a banquet and celebration as the “grand goddess”, a celebration attended only by women of high ranking families.
But a young male patrician named Publius Clodius, apparently in an effort to seduce Pompeia, managed to enter the charmed circle disguised as a woman,. When he was discovered, he was put on trial. But he was not convicted despite all Caesar’s efforts.

However, Caesar refused to accept the verdict He divorced Pompeia, declaring publicly that “my wife ought not even to be under suspicion.” Caesar’s call on the appearance as well as the reality of stringent morality has given rise to the daily proverb, “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion!”

Leaving aide for the moment all the other accusations of corruption and perfidy thrown at Hillary Clinton, the fact that she is running for the highest office in the land requires the invocation of “Caesar’s law”. A corollary to Caesar’s law is that the higher an individual in public life reaches for office, the more stringent should be the requirements that he fulfill the appearance as well as the proof of incorruptibility. Public morality, even with all its inadequacies through the ages, remains the bulwark of democratic government.

There is no doubt that former Pres. Bill Clinton has further muddied the waters – whether with or without the collaboration of Attorney-General Loretta Lynch. Both as lawyers and current or former holders of high public office, would have had to know that any contact between them would be open not only to scrutiny but to condemnation. That Ms. Lynch now publicly acknowledges that it was a mistake to have met with the spouse of a subject of FBI investigation, and that she would not do it again [were she given the opportunity]. It is further complicated by the possibly Bill Clinton may become a co-defendant in the affair of the Clinton Foundation and its donors and, again, the appearance of their attempts at influence the affairs of government through the Clintons. It is more than conclusive that neither courted nor abided by Caesar’s Law.

It will take a Solomon, to invoke another icon of Western jurisprudence, to know where adequate and correct public policy now leads. As Ms. Lynch has said publicly, her meeting with Bill Clinton has cast a shadow over the whole process of investigation of Hillary Clinton’s activities. The refusal, thus far, of Ms. Lynch to exclude herself from participation in the whole investigation as a minimal step in the right direction, is incomprehensible. The Clintons’ defenders who point to the fact Ms. Lynch’s deputy is also an Obama appointee is beside the point.

Indeed, one of the first steps toward righting this sinking moral and legal ship is the appointment of a widely accepted public figure with a judicial background to take on the role of special prosecutor in this affair. Nothing less would remove it from the nest of intrigue and conflicting interest which this Administration has brought to it.

Today is my son’s first Independence Day.

He doesn’t know that, of course, because he’s only three-and-a-half months old. But my wife and I do, and we’ve attempted to mark the occasion nevertheless — in loco filius, if you will. As such, Jack will be dressed today in a special onesie (stylized picture of a milk bottle, “Come and Take It” tagline); he will wear his Old Glory sun hat; and he will be involved in all the festivities that the family has to offer. Naturally, none of this will make even the slightest bit of sense to him; as a matter of fact, today will be the same as is any other day in the life of a baby, just with more people around and a surfeit of BBQ. But you have to start somewhere, right?

Because Jack is three months old, it is acceptable for his parents to treat July Fourth as an excuse for the purchase of kitsch. But what about after that? What about when he is five? Or twelve? Or nineteen? As a native Brit, I am accustomed to the self-deprecating instincts that are the hallmark of British society, and I am acquainted, too, with the reflexive aversion to patriotism that is all-too customary in the birthplace of Western liberty. In consequence, I know that if I were to leave my son befuddled by America’s Independence Day proceedings, he would probably stay that way in perpetuity. And that would be a tremendous, unconscionable shame — a shame that, frankly, would reflect poorly on me.

Once they reach a certain age, we expect our children to know what is what. As soon as they start speaking, we begin to teach them right and wrong; once they are old enough to be trusted with responsibility, we monitor closely how it is being used; and, in a process that is hopefully never-ending, we make sure that they know as much about the world around them as they are capable of taking in. It is in pursuit of this lattermost goal that we designate national holidays. In May, we celebrate Memorial Day, lest we forget what we owe our ancestors. In January, we observe Martin Luther King Day, that we might bring to mind the most uncomfortable parts of our nation’s past. And on July Fourth we arrange an ostentatious display of patriotism, in resounding commemoration of the moment that a ragtag bunch of philosopher-king rebels set their revolutionary ideals before a candid world, and changed human history forever.

In certain quarters it is fashionable to disdain these occasions, and, in so doing, to treat the past as if it were wholly disconnected from the present. Indeed, staunch defenders of the American Founding are often told that to embrace modernity it is necessarily to jettison the antique. “Why,” it is asked, “do we celebrate these flawed men and their pieces of parchment? After all, John Adams couldn’t even have imagined Tinder.”

Though narrow, this critique is indisputably correct. John Adams could not have imagined Tinder, and I daresay that he had no conception of high-frequency trading, of synthetic fibers, or of advanced robots either. But, ultimately, that is irrelevant. The beauty of the American Founding was not that it provided a detailed roadmap that could predict the minutiae of the future in glorious perpetuity, but that it laid out for all people a set of timeless and universal ideals, the veracity and applicability of which are contingent upon neither the transient mood of the mob nor the present state of technology. Among those ideals are that “all men are created equal,” and that they “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”; that “Governments are instituted among Men” in order to “secure” their “rights”; that legitimate power derives “from the consent of the governed”; and that if any such government is seized or corrupted by tyrants, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” At times, the United States has failed disastrously to live up to these principles, and, on at least one occasion, significant forces within the union have rejected them outright. But that an ideal has been violated in no way undermines its value, and it seems patently obvious to me that the country has been blessed by having had an eloquent North star to which its downtrodden could point from their moments of need.