Reply #84: It Is Unlikely, Mr. Starr

[The Magistrate]

That your disregard of the bloody book as a guide to moral life exceeds mine: nonetheless, its pages do contain some apt expressions, of which that is one. People are properly to be held responsible for the wrong they do, not for the wrong another does: wherever that proposition is found, it does not strike me as likely you would disagree with it, and you are too intelligent and fair-minded to disagree with a truth expressed through a quarrel with the matrix in which it is found embedded.

Parlimentary procedure does not bring the fillibuster to bear against resolutions, but against bills. There was no mechanism available to require a super-majority for this vote. The vote of the minority was therefore meaningless, without some dissension in the majority. There was none, and therefore the thing was certain to carry. To have, at that time, cast a meaningless and forlorn vote against that resolution would have served as the text for the upcoming Congressional campaign, and brought unmitigated disaster in it. Those figures who voted for it who were based in Republican states gained nothing by it, of course; they were defeated, as the enemy is ruthless in its practice of politics, and concentrates in regard to the Congress on the votes for Majority Leader and Speaker, as these define the sessions of each body. But a much greater number of Democrats would have gone down to defeat in that election without that vote being made as it was, and no serious student of politics would quarrel with that proposition, though romantics and nihilists might, or might even urge that would have been a desireable result.

Again, the responsibility for the policy lays exclusively with the reptile who conceived it, and exercised his control of the majority party to put it into action, and then executed it as he desired. Any other proposition is mere apologism in the interests of this criminal wretch, and cannot be viewed as any other thing. Attempting to spread the blame to persons who were powerless to halt it is to be the man who is railed at by his boss at work and goes home to find some cause to smack the wife: it is to displace rage onto something powerless, because you feel powerless against the real object of your rage. But you are not powerless in this instance, Sir. It is more than possible to strike this vicious fool directly and sorely, by evicting him from the office he usurped: all that is necessary is to join in a Popular Front with all who are enraged at him, and devote your political efforts, and cast your ballot, against whoever takes the field to oppose him in the fall.

"LET'S GO GET THOSE BUSH BASTARDS!"