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He may have written the Declaration of Independence, but were he around today Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t have a prayer of winning the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. It wouldn’t be
his liaison with the teenage daughter of one of his slaves nor
the love children she bore him that would be the stumbling block. Nor would it be Jefferson’s suspicious possession of an
English translation of the Quran that might doom him to fail the Newt Gingrich loyalty test. No, it would be
the Jesus problem that would do him in.
For Thomas Jefferson denied that Jesus was the son of God. Worse, he refused to believe that Jesus ever made any claim that he was. While he was at it, Jefferson also rejected as self-evidently absurd the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection.
Instead of knowledge, we have tricorn hats. Staring at a copy of the Constitution in the National Archives and making promotional pilgrimages to revolutionary New England didn’t prevent Sarah Palin from butchering the truth of Paul Revere’s ride, turning it into some sort of NRA advisory to the British to keep their gosh-darned hands off American firearms.
Facts, as
John Adams insisted when defending British redcoats after the Boston Massacre, “are stubborn things.”
He would be horrified by the regularity with which American history is mangled in the interests of confirming prejudices. It matters when Glenn Beck’s guest Andrew Napolitano pins the responsibility for the 17th Amendment, instituting direct election of senators, on a Wilsonian plot against American liberties, rather than the proposal of a Republican senator in 1911 that was approved by Congress before Wilson ever set foot in the White House. It matters when Bachmann mischaracterizes the Founding Fathers as working “tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” What made the Constitution
acceptable throughout the Union was a Faustian bargain that counted slaves as three fifths of a citizen, thus
artificially bloating the political representation of the slaveholding South."