Page 4A • Thursday, July 12, 2012
The Daily Citizen
OPINIONS
State View
Lessons from Mayberry eruns of “The Andy Griffith Show” were a staple in my house growing up. The lessons learned while laughing at Andy, Barney, Opie, Aunt Bee, Floyd, Gomer, and Goober have stuck with me through the years. JASON TOLBERT That is why fans of shows mourned last week when Andy Griffith died at the age of 86. It was as if we lost a member of our own family - the sheriff of the fictional town of Mayberry where everyone looked out for each other and did what was right. The lessons were numerous and everyone has their own takeaways but here are some of my favorites: ■ Bigger is not always better. Floyd the barber learned this lesson when he tried to expand his shop to “two chairs — no waitin’.” He had “the magazines to swing it” but it all ended up falling apart when the new partner turned out to be running an illegal gambling operation with his barber shop as a front. That might be a lesson the government could learn. ■ Believe in your children. Opie came home one day telling Andy about Mr. McBeevee — a man who has 12 extra hands, walks in the tree tops, and can make smoke come out of his ears. Andy is torn about how Opie could be telling the truth but ends up believing him because he “believes in Opie.” He finally meets Mr. McBeevee — a telephone lineman — and realizes Opie was telling the truth after all. ■ Sometimes it is better to lead from behind. A reccurring theme was Barney’s desire to rise from deputy to high sheriff. One episode he finally got his wish only to learn it is not as great as he thought. Sometimes we can lead best from second chair. On the same note, the original plan for the show was for Andy Griffith to be the funny guy but they quickly figured Don Knotts was more suited for that role with Andy as the straight man. Know your role. ■ Take responsibility for your actions. In one of the most memorable episodes, Opie killed a mother bird with his sling shot. Andy told Opie that the baby birds were now his responsibility. He nursed them back to health until it was time to let them fly. “The cage sure looks awful empty, don’t it, Pa,” comments Opie after letting them go. “Yes son, it sure does. But don’t the trees seem nice and full,” replies Andy. As much as we would like to believe it does, Mayberry does not really exist. But that does not keep us from believing in it. Once my dad was traveling through North Carolina and passed by Mt. Airy — the town upon which Mayberry is loosely based. He planned to stop but decided at the last minute to pass it by. The real town could never live up to the Mayberry he imagined, he explained to me later. But in a way, all of us can live in Mayberry — just by choosing to put into practice the lessons we learned. Wouldn’t that be nice?
R
Jason Tolbert is an accountant and conservative political blogger. His blog — The Tolbert Report — is linked at ArkansasNews.com.
Today in History
Today is Thursday, July 12, the 194th day of 2012. There are 172 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History On July 12, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill passed by Congress authorizing the Medal of Honor.
On this date In 1543, England’s King Henry VIII married his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr. In 1690, forces led by William of Orange defeated the army of James II at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland. In 1812, U.S. forces led by Gen. William Hull invaded Canada during the War of 1812 against Britain. (However, Hull retreated shortly thereafter to Detroit.) In 1909, the House of Representatives joined the Senate in passing the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, allowing for a federal income tax, and submitted it to the states. (It was declared ratified in February 1913.) In 1912, the silent film “Queen Elizabeth,” starring Sarah Bernhardt, opened in New York. In 1948, the Democratic national convention, which nominated President Harry S. Truman for a second term of office, opened in Philadelphia. In 1962, The Rolling Stones played their firstever gig at The Marquee in London.
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter defended Supreme Court limits on government payments for poor women’s abortions, saying, “There are many things in life that are not fair.” In 1984, Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale announced he’d chosen U.S. Rep. Geraldine A. Ferraro of New York to be his running-mate; Ferraro was the first woman to run for vice president on a majorparty ticket. In 1988, Democratic presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis tapped Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas as his running-mate. In 1991, a Japanese professor (Hitoshi Igarashi) who had translated Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” was found stabbed to death, nine days after the novel’s Italian translator was attacked in Milan. In 2001, Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant tortured in a New York City police station, agreed to an $8.7 million settlement with the city and its police union.
Ten years ago The Senate adopted a ban on personal loans from companies to their top officials, a practice that had benefited executives from Enron to WorldCom. The U.N. Security Council agreed to exempt U.S. peacekeepers from war crimes prosecution for a year, ending a threat to U.N. peacekeeping operations.
National Views
Obama-Holder make war on the constitution For the first time in our turbulent history, a sitting member of a presidential Cabinet, Attorney General Eric Holder, has been held in criminal contempt of Congress by the House of Representatives for failing, when subpoenaed, to provide key documents in an aborted gun-trafficking investigation. Stripping that historic contempt of any meaning, the Justice Department, of which Holder is the boss, refuses to prosecute him. That’s because Holder’s boss, President Barack Obama, has characteristically invoked executive privilege to keep those documents sealed. Since 9/11, we have become a nation in which the president frequently acts as a king, without acknowledging the legislature and the courts. So, in the wake of the huge attention being paid to the Supreme Court’s upholding of Obamacare, Eric Holder remains our chief law enforcement officer — and Obama’s regal role in keeping Holder out of court as a defendant has been almost entirely overlooked. With the presidential election fast approaching in November, voters on both sides have almost entirely lost sight of the high crimes committed by Holder and Obama against one of the most profound constitutional rights guaranteed to every one of us in the Fifth Amendment: Nor shall any person “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” As King George III and his British troops found out, there is no place for a king in the United States of America. Yet, on March 5, before students at the Northwestern University School of Law, Attorney General Holder loftily explained why President Obama was well within the Constitution in assassinating three American citizens as terrorism suspects in Yemen without a trace of due process. The
king had spoken. As George Washington University Law professor Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law sharpshooter, puts it: “He insisted that a ‘careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to “due process”’” (”Obama’s Kill Policy,” jonathanturley. org, March 7). Turley then spears Holder by saying that his “new definition of ‘due process’ was perfectly Orwellian.” And I urge any of you intending to vote to continue the rule of King Obama to dig this warning from Turley: “What Holder is describing is a model of an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. If the president can kill a citizen, there are a host of other powers that fall short of killing that the president might claim, including indefinite detention of citizens.” The president already has that power in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. Turley continues: “Thus, by asserting the right to kill citizens without charge or judicial review, Holder (and Obama) has effectively made all of the Constitution’s individual protections of accused persons matters of presidential discretion.” As if that weren’t frightening enough to those of us whom the Declaration of Independence speaks for, Turley emphasizes how zealously the administration keeps these royal killings classified: “Already, the administration has successfully blocked efforts of citizens to gain review of such national security (assassination) powers or orders. Not only is the list of citizens targeted with death kept secret, but the administration has insisted that courts do not play a role in the creation of or basis for such a list.” As Turley writes, even when the family of one of the assassination targets “tried to challenge Obama’s kill order, the federal court declared that (the target) would have to file for himself — a difficult task when you are on a presidential hit
NAT HENTOFF SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY list.” Entering this grim conversation is Tom Engelhardt, an author and a Fellow at the Nation Institute: “Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they — and the vast nationalsecurity structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self — are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against” (”Praying at the Church of St. Drone,” tomdispatch.com, June 5). Mitt Romney, why aren’t you saying anything about our presidents having metamorphosed themselves into killing machines of the Constitution? At the very least, shouldn’t the voters know how you would disarm the presidency of the power to unilaterally kill Americans who are suspected of “asso-
ciation” with terrorism — and have no chance of defending themselves in court? To accomplish this, sir, you need to educate the citizenry on specifically how the Constitution forbids this. Because of your seemingly inadequate education in this area, I suggest you invite Ron and Rand Paul — the two members of Congress who consistently and insistently refer to constitutional liberties — to discuss with you those parts of the Constitution that have been forgotten by the previous two administrations. In this way, you can promise the electorate that the time of a president as assassination-inchief is over, and you can assure the nation that, if elected, your office will no longer indefinitely imprison Americans. Also, during your education from Ron and Rand Paul, you might become engaged in other parts of the Constitution that will considerably improve your choices of nominees for newly available Supreme Court vacancies. Your place in history will then far excel those of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.
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