Majorities mandate miasmas

Miasma
1. An unwholesome atmosphere
2. Unhealthy vapours rising from the ground or other sources

After elections the unwholesome atmospheres usually come from ideologues who always know better (but are no better). One commentator saw the 2008 US general elections as “I've read that Obama doesn't have a mandate, but I don't know what planet you have to come from to draw that conclusion” – personally, I come from the planet Earth. Votes in elections may decide winning candidates, but votes in elections do not decide which were the winning ideas. The only tangible consequences of elections are the persons who were elected. The elected then act according to their intangible ideas of what should happen (their own personal mandates). These actions also have consequences, and certain self-confirming superior individuals have always feared the unintended consequences of actions resulting from misguided votes in majoritarian elections – miasmic assertions such as Mitt Romney’s remarks that Obama administration actions “were very generous in what they gave to those groups”, or James Madison’s worry that some groups would not act in the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community”.

The bad history boys

When Rick Santorum makes assertions based on a conservative political stance about the place of Christianity in US history, the relationship between the State and religion, and religious freedom, it is often bad history but history that needs more checking than cheap jibes at Barack Obama.  Was the USA always “a moral enterprise” as Santorum thinks?