Partisan Fighting Forever??
:=8D

Don't ferget u can always e-mail the MooCow with cowments at MooCowMoo@aol.com!!!

Yes, Baby Bush remarked in his spech about the need for a spirit of cooperation to replace the bitter partisanship which charactorizes American politics these days - yeah, that's gonna happen....

:=8/

The MooCow, far wiser, predicts moore, and even bloodier, factional fighting between the sides, which cud very well lead to some unpleasant extremes. Let us remember Thucydides, who wrote about an-udder, older factional partisan struggle which tore apart a democracy(as edited by Donald Kagan):

"... Party membership and loyalty came to be regarded as the highest virtues, overshadowing all others and justifying the adandonment of all the restraints of traditional morality. Fanaticism and the treacherous intentions to plot the destruction of an enemy behind his back were regarded as equally admirable: to recoil from either of these was to disrupt the unity of the party out of fear of the enemy. Oathes lost their meaning and became tools of duplicity.
This state of terror arose as a result of the personal greed, ambition, and lust for power that typically emerge once factional war has broken out. While the leaders of each faction adapt a fine-sounding slogan - 'political equality for the people' for one, and 'the moderate rule of the best' for the other - they resorted to any evil trick available to them, and even murdered those who belonged to neither party 'either because they would not join them in the fight or out of jealousy that they should survive'. (3.82.8)
This new species of evil-doing spread throughout the various states of the Greek world along witht he revolutions.
'In general, the men of lower intelligence won out. Afraid of their own short-comings and of the intelligence of their opponants, so they would not lose out in reasoned argument or be taken by surprise by their quick-witted opponants, they boldly moved into action. Their enemies, on the contrary, contemptuous and confident in their ability to anticipate, thought there was no need to take by action what they could win by their brains'.(3.83.3-4)

Starting to sound familiar???

:=8/


- posted by The MooCow @ 10:24 PM