Topic: WorldNetDaily
You can't keep a good lie down, apparently. Burt Prelutsky writes in his Jan. 21 WorldNetDaily column:
After all, we have justices sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court today who have announced that they wouldn’t advise emerging nations to adopt our Constitution as their own. For that matter, Barack Obama has gone on record saying that the major flaw in our Constitution is that it doesn’t deal with the redistribution of wealth. Is it any wonder then that in spite of swearing his allegiance to the sacred document, he ignores what it says with unseemly regularity – things like states’ rights and the separation of powers – any damn time he feels like it?
As we first documented way back in 2008, Obama did not say that " the major flaw in our Constitution is that it doesn’t deal with the redistribution of wealth" -- he said that the fact that the Supreme Court under Earl Warren did not address wealth redistribution means it was not as radical a court as some people contend.
And Prelutsky's claim that a Supreme Court justice said she "wouldn’t advise emerging nations to adopt our Constitution as their own" is taken out of context. What Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, according to PolitiFact:
Ginsburg’s lengthy, nuanced responses repeatedly praised the values, concepts and language of the U.S. Constitution and called the people who wrote it "some of the most brilliant minds of the day "
Ginsburg warned that a constitution means "nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom." She emphasized the importance of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and of the separation of powers between Congress, the president and the judiciary that it created.
Ginsburg also pointed out that a long time had passed between the passage of the U.S. Constitution and Egypt’s current efforts.
"I can’t speak about what the Egyptian experience should be, because I’m operating under a rather old constitution," Ginsburg said early in the interview. "The United States in comparison to Egypt is a very new nation, and yet we have the oldest written constitution still enforced in the world. And it’s a constitution that starts out with three wonderful words: ‘We the people.’ "[...]
"You should certainly be aided by all the constitution writing that has gone on since the end of World War II. I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the constitution of South Africa.
"That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights [and] had an independent judiciary. It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done.
"Much more recently than the U.S. Constitution is Canada, [which] has a charter of rights and freedoms [and] dates from 1982. You would almost certainly look at the European Convention on Human Rights. … I'm a very strong believer in listening and learning from others.''
At no point during the interview did Ginsburg say that she prefers the South African Constitution to the U.S. one. Her point was that it’s better for Egypt to base its constitution on more recent ones written after Word War II.
Not that Prelutsky or WND care about the truth, mind you...
