CHAPTER 4


Heckling the Right Wing: Their Top Ten Talking Points

and My Top Ten Comebacks

I

THEM: The Framers were all devout Christians.

ME: You think everyone was a devout Christian. You probably think Jesus was a devout Christian.

II

THEM: The Framers were opposed to taxation.

ME: The first day in office, Washington (as President) and Hamilton (as his Secretary of the Treasury) taxed carriages and whiskey, then opened a bank to put the money in.I

III

THEM: The greatest influence on the Constitution was the Bible.

ME: Then why doesn’t the Preamble read: “We the Chosen People . . .”?

IV

THEM: To understand the Constitution, you have to read The Federalist Papers.

ME: Nobody can read The Federalist Papers. Madison and Hamilton wrote the damn things, and they couldn’t read The Federalist Papers.

V

THEM: The Constitution gives everyone the right to own a gun.

ME: The Framers didn’t want everyone to have a vote, let alone a gun!

VI

THEM: The Constitution does not grant homosexuals the right to marry.

ME: The Constitution also does not grant the right of homosexuals to win all the Tonys. So what?

VII

THEM: The Framers were a diverse group.

ME: The Framers were as diverse a group as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

VIII

THEM: James Madison is the “author” of the Constitution.

ME: The Constitution is the greatest “cut-and-paste” job since the New Testament.

IX

THEM: The Framers believed in term limits.

ME: I’m with you on this: I figure if a congressman can’t steal enough money in three terms, he’s too dumb to hold the job in the first place.

X

THEM: The only way to interpret the Constitution is to determine what the Framers were thinking when they wrote it.

ME: You can’t even figure out how the Framers took a piss in pants without a fly. How do you expect to figure out what they were thinking?

I had teenagers. I never knew what they were thinking. And we lived in the same house.

Hell, I don’t even know what I’m thinking half the time.


I. Okay, maybe not the first day.