…and his Portuguese subjects.
A political and social analogy from Sarah Hoyt:
Yesterday I was talking to my mom and she said the news from the States and the things “your funny critters” (pretty much how mom refers to governments in general!) are doing remind her of the Spanish occupation of Portugal.
Read the whole thing.
Our own “Phillip” has done more than give away our wealth. He has destroyed our constitutional system, and the trust of the people that the government a) is on the side of America, and b) will stay within the bounds of the Constitution and consent of the governed.
Whatever results from this not-yet-and-perhaps-never-finished “Usurpation”; be it tyranny or the birth of a new American Republic; will be very different from what we had before and will never get back.
Read the description this morning of the Wisconsin “John Doe” victims of an out-of-control “Special Prosecutor” and the DA who hired him. It’s a warning and, probably, an instructional for Democrats everywhere. Patrick Fitzgerald already began the process with the Scooter Libby prosecution.
The Philips did not flood Portugal with Spanish immigrants did they?
A. Mitchell Palmer was pretty instructive too, and John Adams. It isn’t new and it doesn’t last. Our system corrects well. I look forward to January 20, 2017.
The Sleeping King motif was the subject of one of the more inane exercises in moral equivalency from the Blameists, where the motivations of ISIS are supposed to resemble an imagined Catholic conversion of England. It’s an old argument, now recycled to de-legitamize our military actions against Islamic terrorists, but was always meant to destabilize the foundations of our way of life.
I’m not worried about falling into “the Portuguese trap”. I think these stories still have a lot of meaning, and the fact that they’ve lasted this long tells us something about their enduring value. What I worry about is people forgetting them, or worse, “the Philips” distorting them to be used against us.
From what little I have read, Philip was a detail-oriented, very hard-working king. Unfortunately, diplomacy was not his forte, to judge by his being the villain for at least three countries- Portugal, England/the UK, and the Netherlands- some four centuries after his death.