Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

From WaPo via Political Wire:

"Bashing" Thomas Jefferson "is an easy game," a Washington Post book review notes. "Among some historians, it's fashionable to denigrate the founder who spoke out the most passionately for democracy, equality, religious tolerance, separation of church and state and freedom of expression and conscience. But Andrew Burstein's Jefferson's Secrets takes a different tack, one that is more subtle, more penetrating and ultimately more rewarding. Focusing on the 17 intellectually rich years Jefferson had after he retired from public life, Burstein asks what Jefferson's life looked like to him. How did Jefferson make moral sense of his world? What roles did family, women, sex, slavery, health, religion and politics play in his life?"

You know, while Franklin is still my favorite "founding father" I still find myself drawn to Jefferson in very compelling ways. With now some 250 years worth of American politics centering around the division between Hamilton and Jefferson, it is hard not to be. Still, it is sad when even those two ideals, even ideologies have been dragged through the mud by the petty and the mean in the political world until they are at the very best, shadows of what they were.