Adventures in Progressive Movement Rhetoric

This is how you kick it old school style:

"In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs the cup of infamy. We have vile officials, we have dad rotten newspapers. We have men who have sold there birthright. We have dipped into every infamy. Every form of wickedness has been ours in the past. Every debased passion and every sin has flourished.

But we have nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing  so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. ….  He sits there in senile dementia, with gangrened heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent; frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy.  This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of Southern California; …. he is the one thing that all California looks at when in looking at Southern California they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked and putrescent-that is Harrison Gray Otis.” 

Hiram Johnson, 102nd anniversary  Edition, discussing organized labor's public enemy number 1. Johnson, it is alleged, riffed out this rhetoric off the cuff - free association style. Man he's good.

This quote recently came to mind while pondering what Chief Judge Roberts had in mind for Obamacare. I also find myself thinking about it when reading unpleasant invective found on right wing blogs.  You would just the delete the "Harrison Gray Otis" line and replace it with a 21st century equivalent.  Ad homonym can feel good at times.

Now it seems that it was mean spirited of me to be thinking such things as Roberts has stuck to his pledge of incrementalism over reactionary activism and upheld decades of precedence and the law. Of course this is what he should have done.  Nevertheless he will be applauded for doing the right thing as doing the right thing is not always the easiest path to take.  Playing along with his confederates would have been the easier road to take - in the short term.

This type of rhetoric, it seems, is misplaced on Roberts.  Besides he smiles too much.  Scalia on the other hand fits the bill more and more every week. I can dig that. Just delete the "Harrison Gray Otis" line and let Johnson do the rest.