President Donald Trump!

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It's unfortunate Trump's rallies have become so violent. We can play the blame game all day, however I think all sides are to blame. I forget what the article said exactly, but it was something like "Trump wants to ban all protestors from his rallies" which is a bit extreme. He's just an immature racist jerk that has tricked too many people so far, in my view.

I strongly feel more people need to look at Trump's past to get a clue and not side with him. He's very evil and shouldn't be in this presidential race. I get so frustrated reading the news, I try to avoid it but I also want to know whats going on

You need to ask why millions of people are so ignorant and willing to support Trump, rather than blaming him alone. There seems to be a great swathe of angry disaffected middle class white folk in the US of both republican and democrat persuasion who are willing to accept evil. That should be more of a concern than Trump running for office.

The Founders' religious views can be difficult to characterize. Most were Deists, believing that God created the world but had little to do with it thereafter, and this belief is not common today. Washington was one of the most devout, but even he was highly critical of organized religion. On the other extreme, Jefferson, Paine, Allen were quite skeptical, and may have been atheists, although it wasn't wise to say so explicitly. Were they all transported to today I'm sure most would be shocked and horrified by drag queens, pornography, Satanists, near-nudity on beaches, and so on – but still, I can't think of any well-known figures I would call "fundamentalist Puritans."

Racism, sexism, slavery had existed through all of history; the nascent USA did not create those problems, but inherited them. Many of the Founders recognized the contradictions between their lofty ideals and the realities of the time in which they lived. But they lacked the ability to make those problems go away with the wave of a wand. People's notions change gradually, over time.

Were it not for the Enlightenment, and the creation of a country explicitly founded upon Enlightenment ideals, we never would have arrived at this "modern context."

In my years I have not seen any good. All was some evil or another.

Any choice we make will have some down sides.

Everyone denies it, but it is.

Government managed economy ran up record debt and left it for the future generations. Clinton, Bush, Obama, kept the lights on in their time, at a high cost to the unborn.

"The evil men do lives on, while the good is often interred with their bones."

Ummm....Donald Trump has already responded to that and Carly has already come out and answered her accusations. Do you get your news from the liberal media? DONALD TRUMP has never gone bankrupt; his BUSINESS DID, something many, many successful CEOs have filed. As for Carly, the reason HP put as CEO was to try and FIX HP, bc it was ALREADY in the ground. She was fired bc of boardroom politics.

Btw, if you going to accuse false accusations, at least cite your sources.....

Citing source for Carly

Citation for Trump

I understand your explanation for moral relativity of the time and yes the US inherited it's vices from UK/Europe...

However it would be naive (and a little generous) to give the founding fathers leeway over the contradictions between their philosophy and the way they treated their fellow man. For instance the second paragraph in the Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Despite this "enlightened" way of thinking both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson kept slaves and indeed made a lot of money from slave labour on their plantations. Jefferson was a paedophile who raped his teenage house slave making her pregnant on numerous occasions. Neither Jefferson or Washington believed the declaration of independence applied to non-white people, women, homosexuals or people who were not christians. This indicates a level of hippocracy in what they believed a human being was in terms of civil/human rights. This is not really very enlightened at all...

I think it could be said that the founders were enlightened for their day.

i'd hate to think of what "unenlightened" meant back then.

Without addressing your specific charges, some of which I consider highly dubious: their vices were of their time, their virtues were specifically theirs. I prefer to honor them for their achievements – which indirectly includes much that is good about the history of civilization since their time, and our modern understanding of individual rights – rather than castigating them for not living up to 2016 standards in every respect.

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

- Samuel Johnson, 1775

This translates to; How is it that we hear the loudest crys for freedom from the slavers of blacks? Johnson was of course referring to the woeful double standards of Washington and Jefferson...Jefferson in particular was a highly intelligent individual could not have ignored this blatant conflict of interest. I put this down to personal greed, they simply relied too much on slaves to make a living but carried the prevailing prejudice of the time. In this respect the British are far more enlightened than the early American colonies given they outlawed the slave trade in 1807...

NOT TO EXCUSE SLAVERY

But slavery was an economic issue in 1807 in America; whereas it really wasn't as much of an economic issue to England during that same time.

I assume you are referring to the criminal conduct of Thomas Jefferson and the underaged slave girl working in his household. Plenty of African Americans who trace their ancestry to Sally Hemings carry the DNA markers for Jefferson's family. According to the 1998 article published in Nature demonstrate that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally Hemings's children, and quite probably all six. Jefferson started his relationship with Hemings when she was only 14 years old which makes him a paedophile.

Valid point, but the anti-slavery movement in Great Britain was more universally accepted across the empire except the United States and Caribbean colonies. Certainly economics might have been a pivotal reason.

More specifically, slavery was abolished in mainland Britain in 1772, 4 years before the American revolution. And slavery was completely abolished in the British empire in august 1835, more than 30 years before the adoption of the 13th amendment in the Unites States in December 1865.

As such, it is only fair to assume that the American Revolution prolonged the institution of slavery, thus undermining the claim that "their vices were of their time, their virtues were specifically theirs".

Oh, and Thomas Jefferson was a complete as*hole, and his sadism is even documented in his own private letters.

Even Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens - infamous for his "Cornerstone Speech" justifying Southern secession to preserve the "peculiar institution" - was known to treat his slaves fairly. Jefferson - who would publicly feign adherence to liberty - gleefully wrote privately about how he ordered a slave punished by selling him "down the river" to a fate which was - in Jefferson's *own* words - worse than death.

Finally, it was Thomas Jefferson - not Andrew Jackson - who as president invented the Indian removal plans, and James Madison joined him in committing the Federal Government to forcibly remove the Cherokee Nation from Georgia in 1802. As such, the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were thus jointly responsible for setting the stage for the infamous Trail of Tears in 1838.

"In this respect the British are far more enlightened than the early American colonies given they outlawed the slave trade in 1807..."

OUCH!! !! How many times have I heard this crip???

Please just take a moment or two to review Wikipedia (or other source) for an explanation of The British Raj (and other colonizing schemes). This is the system by which England held millions in slavery, forced drugs down their throats, and killed them indiscriminately, while British "noblemen" and "noble women" danced and starved the Irish and ETC!

These "far more enlightened" English learned it was cheaper to keep their slaves in the country they wanted them to work in, to grow and process (for example) molasses. Much cheaper just to ship the products home than move slaves around.

England, being relatively small, did a bang up job in their "colonialism" (read as slavery) efforts, killing many thousands, ALL OVER THE WORLD.

"far more enlightened" ???? I don't think so. In fact what comes to my mind when I think of this is an old movie clip shown on TV that showed Nazi men and women partying and dancing as though the husbands didn't go to work every day and kill Jews. These people partied as though it were the most natural and wonderful thing in the world. As did English during the vicious reign of colonialism, vestiges of which they attempt to preserve (and deny) even today.

rant: off