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Should USA return to dueling? Should Bush b& Kerry fight it out with a duel? (LOL) Carl

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/opinion/11CHER.html?pagewanted=print&position=

NY TIMES

July 11, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Alexander Hamilton's Last Stand
By RON CHERNOW

Two hundred years ago today, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton squared off
in a sunrise duel on a wooded ledge in Weehawken, N.J., above the Hudson
River. Burr was vice president when he leveled his fatal shot at Hamilton,
the former Treasury secretary, who died the next day in what is now the
West Village of Manhattan. New Yorkers turned out en masse for Hamilton's
funeral, while Burr (rightly or wrongly) was branded an assassin and fled
south in anticipation of indictments in New York and New Jersey. To the
horror of Hamilton's admirers, the vice president, now a fugitive from
justice, officiated at an impeachment trial in the Senate of a Supreme
Court justice.
At first glance, the storied Hamilton-Burr duel seems an aberrant, if
fascinating, episode in early American history. We prefer to savor the
glorious deeds of the Revolution or the resonant words of the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution. But the truth is that the 1790's and
early 1800's were a period of glittering political malice and fierce
personal attacks. If political debate had an incomparable philosophic
richness, it was no less rabidly partisan than today - and even more
bruising. Our modern tabloid press seems almost tame by comparison. There
was no pretense of journalistic objectivity and editors flayed politicians
with impunity. Under classical pseudonyms, political operatives gleefully
murdered reputations - Washington was blasted as a would-be king,
Jefferson as a zealous atheist - leaving the founders somewhat scarred and
embittered men...

Hamilton was so accustomed to initiating such encounters, so geared to
counterattack, that he found compromise exceedingly difficult. It was
doubly difficult since he had denounced Burr as corrupt and unscrupulous
for years. At the same time, he had developed a "religious scruple"
against dueling after his eldest son, Philip, died on the "field of honor"
in November 1801. So Hamilton, at 49, decided to expose himself to Burr's
fire to prove his courage, but to throw away his own shot to express his
aversion to dueling. He gambled that Burr would prove a gentleman and
merely clip him in the arm or leg - a wager he lost. With Hamilton's
death, America also lost its most creative policymaker. (The murder
indictments against Burr petered out, and he died a reclusive old man in
1836.)
We like to picture the American Revolution as ushering in an egalitarian,
meritocratic society, but vestiges of an older social order remained.
Dueling was ubiquitous in the early republic among military men,
politicians and those who fancied themselves aristocrats. Forever insecure
about his social standing, Hamilton was a natural convert to this
patrician custom. It is a bitter paradox that the man who did so much to
balance the love of liberty with the rule of law in America lent credence
to a barbaric feudal code that was outlawed in New York and New Jersey. In
his political life, Hamilton always looked ahead and was the supreme
prophet of the urban, industrial society that we inhabit today. In his
personal life, Hamilton could never escape from the past.
Ron Chernow is the author, most recently, of "Alexander Hamilton."

From author: Bill Lyne:

the way I heard it, Hamilton went to Jefferson and informed him that Burr was an agent of Napoleon, who had promised him a dictatorship of everything west of the Mississippi. Burr was confronted by Jefferson about Hamilton's charges so challenged Hamilton to a duel. Being an Illuminati/Jacobin agent, Burr had Hamilton's pistol tampered with, making it "hair trigger" (Hamilton was a much better shot and Burr was a lousy shot, but at twenty paces even he could hit Hamilton). After the two paced off and turned to shoot, Hamilton's piston discharged prematurely just when he touched the trigger, so that his shot was wasted (that was the idea). Burr then had plenty of time to take his shot carefully and not under pressure and made a lucky shot and Hamilton was killed.

Afterwards, Burr actually fled the country, going straight to Paris, where he stayed in the apartment of John Vanderlyn, an American who had been awarded by Napoleon with the Gold Medal of the Paris Salon of 1808 for one of his paintings. One of Vanderlyn's later paintings hangs in the Capitol Rotunda, "The Landing of Columbus". This demonstrates that Napoleon, the Illuminati and the Jacobins succeeded in compromising Americans on a high level.

Hamilton had succeeded in revoking the unconstitutional charter of the First Bank of the United States---it was a private bank like the Federal Reserve---and Jackson got the charter of the Second Bank of the United States revoked---also an unconstitutional private bank. The same hereditary gang of bankers have been involved in all these unconstitutional banks which are connected to the Bank of England, the Rothschildts, and to the (Hapsburg) House of Hesse-Kassel.