There was a time when a young college freshman who had paid a disproportionate amount of time to following the exploits of baseball and football teams and was now seeking to play catch up and learn something about American history and politics received a Christmas gift that he found practical and intellectually stimulating.

This college freshman's father idolized President Franklin Delano Roosevelt among all other political leaders and gifted the young man just beginning his trek into the realm of knowledge with a copy of The Politics of Upheaval, the latest in the series of works on the only president in American history to be elected four times, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

To provide an illustration of the importance of this work as a developmental tool on this young student's mind, it is necessary to move forward to when this same person's first historical work was published.

I know this individual well since it happens to be me.  I learned how absorbing I found Schlesinger's book, as well as the influence it had on me, when I was living in Cape Cod and was being interviewed about my first historical work, Struggle for the Holy Land, by a local radio personality, Rob Morris.

The diary below was originally posted earlier today in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

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Remember Senator Orrin Hatch's great performance during the Clarence Thomas confirmation proceedings?  

In between pouting and childish tantrums he managed, with help from Arlen Spector, to trash Anita Hill when it was later confirmed by David Brock, who was helping lead the smear brigade and later turned on the radical right, that the law professor was telling the truth.

It was Hatch who hatched a booby hatch theory that Hill's testimony describing devout rightist Thomas's penchant for pornography stemmed from plagiarizing the famous seventies' book and later film, The Exorcist.  Hatch ultimately got his wish to have Thomas confirmed, where he has become a reliable rubber stamp marching to the tune of the patriarch of judicial reaction, Antonin Scalia.

Cross Hatch's path by daring to take an opposing view and he is quick to label you a "propagandist", a classic case of being called ugly by a frog.  He is currently singing his familiar tune again pertaining to Samuel Alito, Jr.  

"Under any reasonable, objective or traditional standard, the Senate would overwhelmingly confirm this exceptional nominee," the Utah solon declared in his traditional holier than thou fashion.