***
Via the comments, this:
“What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression,” Stevenson said, R-Webb City, referring what Southern states called the North’s attempt to end slavery in the 1860s.
The remark caused a sudden gasp heard throughout the House’s chamber.
This is excellent news for John McCain.
Fencedude
He’s aware his state wasn’t part of the Confederacy, right?
Laura W
Arrrgggghhhhhhhhhhh!
Gus is thwarted. That is too damn funny.
And what a rapid response from our host. Impressive.
Mike S
I’m hurt. Usually you say who made the comment.
I blame the Democrats.
Michael
Dammit, this proves to me, once again, that the Reconstruction was way too mild. Lee, Stevens and Davis should have been publicly hung as criminals, every goddamn plantation burned and the symbols and men of Southern gentility should have been reviled for the entire century following the Civil War.
Gone is the happy go lucky image of the flinty Southern colonel that we had when I was in high school, way too long ago. Now, thanks to the SCV and the LOS, we’ve got a laundry list of horrid faux grievances against White Southern Christian manhood and a trailer trash constituency ready to bitch about it.
Makes me want to set a Confederate flag on fire, then to put it out by bodily function.
Wile E. Quixote
I love the idea of burning a Confederate flag and then pissing on it. And what are the wingnuts going to do in response? Burn the US flag?
Mnemosyne
I see someone else has an escape artist cat. When Keaton had to have his kidneys flushed out (twice), they had to tie the collar onto him, too. He was not a happy kitty.
Andre
@Laura W: I swear to FSM, he kept trying for the food, too. Even when he ended up with biscuits in his ears.
And yet, he’s still smarter than most Republicans.
Laura W
@Andre: and certainly better looking.
SpotWeld
Okay… have all the smart Republicans just.. left?
Seriously, they must have existed at some point.
TenguPhule
This should be a nationally mandated morning ritual at every State’s Capitol.
Mike S
@Michael:
That deserves to be posted twice.
Annie
See, what did I just say in another post about values. The more the Democrats push, the true meaning of Republican "values" raises its ugly head. And, it does get ugly.
Poor kitty. Try giving a cat medicine every day for six weeks. After that experience, it is amazing that my husband and I are not attacking each other’s feet.
AnotherBruce
Really, when did stupidity become a desirable thing for so many people?
Jeffro
Speaking of John McCain, he did a heckuva job inserting himself and his comments into the bailout debate. That worked about as well as suspending his campaign, which is to say, not at all.
Xanthippas
Well clearly, some Southerners have not accepted yet that they lost that little war. I vote for another Reconstruction. I’m sure we can slip that into the stimulus package somewhere.
R. Schmidt-Ohren
It’s a kitty martini.
DougJ
I’m sure that would have made things a lot better. Come on.
DonkeyKong
cue banjo music!!!
Bob In Pacifica
"I was at this party with all these other cool cats, and there was a whole bowl of catnip, and I was dancing around with a lampshade on my head and then I fell off the table and the next thing you know, I woke up like this."
pattonbt
Moar reepublickin marginalization pleze!
Church Lady
I am going seriously off topic here, but I just watched the Dateline show on Nadya Suleman, the mother of the octuplets. I can say, without any doubt, that after watching the entire show, that chick is seriously deranged. Who has six children, much less fourteen, when they are single, unemployed and living with their parents? Not only that, but IVF is very expensive. She’s been unemployed for a number of years, living off of disability payments (which have now expired) from a workplace accident and student loans (now tapped out) and $490 a month in food stamps. How the hell did she pay for repeated IVF procedures? For that matter, how did she pay for her nose job and blown up lips? I know I am ranting, but the entire situation is completely bizarre.
I have a question to anyone living in California. Can you really get disability payments for a child having ADHD? Or a speech delay? I can understand the state providing special education programs, but actual cash??? She is collecting disability payments for three of her children – one that is autistic, one with ADHD, and one that has a speech delay and shows possible signs of autism. This was directly from her, during the interview. Is this the norm? If California really provides cash disability payments to parents of children with these types of problems, I am not surprised that the state is broke.
I have two kids, both diagnosed with ADHD when they were fairly young. We never asked, nor received, anything from the state of Tennessee, other than a seat at the front of the classroom to cut down on distractions. My sister has two kids with ADHD and her youngest son has some mild form of autism and has speech deveolpmental delays. The only thing Texas has provided for him is early childhood education for special needs children. Asking the states we live in for disability payments for our children is something that never crossed our minds. It just boggles the mind. Do any other states do what California does?
Joshua Norton
Obama’s been in office 3 weeks and the repiggies can’t keep a lid on their inbred racist innuendos in any longer. I gave them at least 2 months.
So-called economist Arnold Kling’s made a scatter-brained contention that the Obama stimulus plan was actually "reparations" in disguise.
It’s a pretty sure bet that they intend to fan the anxiety and animosity of those who think Obama’s presidency represents black grievance backed up by the iron fist of the state (and out to punish whitey). No wonder so many Wolverine wanna-be’s in the wingnut blogs are talking about stocking up on assault rifles and ammo – they’ve got evil bogey men running wild in their imaginations.
KG
@9: there are a few of us left, but we’re either thinking of leaving or just sitting back, mouth agape wondering, "wtf?" Then again, I’m not exactly what you’d call a "good Republican" having voted a couple of times for Feinstein, and third party for president this year, and well, most every other office this year.
Comrade Jake
@Jeffro:
At one point I did think that McCain would return to the Senate, realize he lost to the better man, and simply decide to work with the new administration. Instead he seems determined to become completely irrelevant.
JGabriel
Wow. Talk about bringin’ the crazy.
Beyond parody, beyond sanity, beyond comedy, beyond your wildest dreams: The Modern GOP.
.
JGabriel
Michael:
So… what should we do with the guys who approved torture?
.
Indylib
@Church Lady:
My oldest son was diagnosed with high-functioning autisism and speech delay while we lived in Cali and we were never told by anyone that we qualified for disability. The only people we had any contact with was the crappy school system, however, so I suppose if we had contacted some state agency we might have been told differently.
Annie
"I tried for a power grab, and all I got was this funny hat," John McCain and the Palins — "Wow, if I tilt my head to the right I can see Russia from here…."
Redhand
No kidding, the stimulus package as the ultimate revenge of the angry black President. Unfreakin’ believable.
wb
@ church lady
There is a program here in Kentucky that will provide direct cash payments through Medicare to parents of autistic children. This program is designed for children who would otherwise need to be institutionalized. The payments are intended to assist parents with obtaining professional assistance. The idea being that the cost of maintaining these children in state run institutions is much higher than the cash payments. There are wage and income requirements that have to be met to receive these payments.
I suspect, but don’t really know, that other states have similar programs.
JGabriel
opium4themasses
@Joshua Norton: So the author of the article now claims that he was referring to the Treaty of Versailles Reparations. Given his reference to Belgium this seems plausible, but I don’t know if that reference was added later.
Still, with the juxtaposition of the earlier "War of Northern Aggression" comment it just feels nutty as opposed to actually being insane. Then again, it could be a dog-whistle tactic. I’d have to read more of that site to be able to tell.
Gemina13
My maternal roots are in Kentucky, so you’d think I’d have heard about this. I would actually love to know who pushes this "War of Northern Aggression" bullshit. I’ve got racist morons in my family as well, but my mother certainly never filled my head with this crap, and my grandfather didn’t go on about how that bastard Lincoln robbed his granddad of the right to own slaves.
(Actually, his granddad is one of the family’s more "colorful" characters, and wouldn’t have been admitted to any army, let alone so grand and illustrious a cause as the preservation of the Beautiful South.)
On the other hand, every time a Republican speaks, 10 more Americans associate the GOP with Rush Limbaugh. I say, we need more Republicans to continue in this great tradition, the better to spread the light
shining off his idiot moon faceof Rush’s wisdom and satirical humor across the land. Really.MNPundit
I would have shouted "You mean the War of Southern Rebellion right?"
Calouste
@opium4themasses:
France didn’t exactly demand reparation payments from Germany because they were so upset about the Germans invading Belgium. They did it because 20% of the males of military age were killed during the war and a part of the country was laid to waste due to trench warfare, minefields and mustard gas. So even if the Belgium reference was there originally, it was still epic fail.
Joshua Norton
It may have worked, but Kling surrendered to the heat of hyperbole again today at a Heritage Foundation confab and claimed, "Barack Obama is destroying my daughter’s future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs."
Now if Kling and his piggie pals can’t comprehend the implication of racial menace encoded in daughter-gang-thugs/home invasion, he’s either enormously clueless and much too innocent for this wicked world, or weaselly disingenuous, but a raging drama queen either way.
Wile E. Quixote
I love that they’re calling Nadya Suleman "Octopussy". But then again I have a juvenile sense of humor.
How long before a Republican slips and uses the N word in public in reference to Obama?
Johnny Pez
@MNPundit:
Fixed.
Conservatively Liberal
This should be a mandatory paid holiday every year, optional in the south of course. Nothing like a paid holiday dedicated to pissing on a burning pile of Confederate flags. Where’s the line start?
Walker
You do understand how the Treaty of Versailles led to undesirable nationalist movements in Germany, right? That is how Southerners view The Reconstruction, and is exactly why they still talk that war about it to this day. I know people that are still sore about land unfairly (at least in their opinion) taken from some great-great-grandparents.
Are they justified in their complaints? Rarely. But making the Reconstruction an even bigger f-up than it was would not have made things any better than they are today. Many of these problems are not unique to the South; while Missouri (where this speaker is from) fought on both sides, Ohio (an incredibly racist state today) was decidely Union. Heck, I have seen worse racism living now in upstate NY than I did growing up in rural NC.
DRD 1812
Feb. 6 comment at Confederate Wanker:
Where do I sign up to support this wonderful solution?
opium4themasses
@Calouste: You may be right in their motivation, but as far as I remember Belgium was their wedge. That’s how they go the rest of the participants to go along with the folly.
As far as doubling down on the Reconstruction, perhaps if they had focused on something like the Marshall plan they could have succeeded. However, that wasn’t a lesson we learned until after WWI. As it was, the Reconstruction was far more like Iraqi Freedom than dollar diplomacy. (Though to be fair, many slaves did greet the Union army as liberators.)
Joshua Norton
Oh I agree. And wait ’til they discover that the blue states carry the red states with their tax money.
They can have their gonzo fantasy of a "free market" of below poverty wages, full of strip mining, clear cutting, polluted water and air and what ever irreligious hoo-doo they want to lay on each other. They’re free to go anytime.
Conservatively Liberal
If the south secedes they have to take Texas, otherwise no deal. Tell the south that if they need money they can sell Texas to Mexico. Of course, Mexico would be stupid to buy it but at least it gets Texas off of our hands. I might sweeten the deal and toss in Oklahoma too.
Zuzu's Petals
@DRD 1812:
Looking at some of the insane postings/comments over there and elsewhere …. geeze, I’m actually getting concerned for the POTUS’s safety.
Anoniminous
@DRD 1812:
Over the years I’ve started thinking the worst political mistake in US history was the compromise at the Constitutional Convention over slavery. The Civil War was the price paid to end that abomination and the modern GOP is the price we’re paying for the Founders failure to deal with the problem.
J. Michael Neal
Uhm, no. There are a lot of problems with the conventional wisdom regarding Versailles, but I’ll just point out one. Stop and compare the peace treaty Germany signed after World War One, and the peace treaty they signed after World War Two. Now, explain to me how the second one was less punitive than the first one. Let’s see:
Which one involved the country being split in half?
Which one involved being occupied by the Soviets for 45 years?
Which one involved the complete dismantling of the entire German political system?
Which one involved international trials that resulted in the hanging of German leaders?
Which one involved greater reparations being demanded?*
Which one involved the Germans being denied political participation and civil liberties for eight years, even in the half that wasn’t occupied by the Soviets?
Honestly, the Versailles Treaty has to be among the top ten subjects to prompt a lot of sloppy thinking.
*Hint: It wasn’t the first one. The Soviets carted a lot of German industry back home.
Joshua Norton
Hell, Cheveron would buy it with one financial quarter’s profits and dump all their toxic waste there. (I doubt if anyone would really notice any difference.)
J. Michael Neal
@opium4themasses: Calouste is correct. The Germans didn’t develop grievances because of the Versailles Treaty. They developed grievances because they didn’t really believe that they’d lost the war, and the treaty was just their excuse. They would have been intransigent no matter what the treaty had said. Short of occupying the whole country and burning their political system to the ground, it was inevitable.
Jim
@DRD 1812:
As someone who lives in one red state, and has relatives from Kentucky, and has some idea how the federal monies are redistributed from the blue states to the red states, I would love it for the red states to secede. I’d make an immediate bee-line for the West coast, and have fun watching the Southeast Jesusland rapidly become a third-world country.
Mnemosyne
Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?
I realize right-wingers are all about delusional thinking, but I do love the fact that Bobby thinks you can run a whole country without agriculture or an industrial base.
Have fun starving in the dark, kids!
Zuzu's Petals
@Mnemosyne:
Not to mention those silicon chip thingies. Oops, no blogs.
Calouste
@opium4themasses:
It wasn’t really the invasion of Belgium in itself, because Great Powers don’t really care about small states (see the Congress of Vienna, 1815 and the Congress of Berlin, 1878 for some examples), as well that Germany, as the successor state to Prussia, was a signatory to the Treaty of London of 1839 and as such, together with Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia, was an actual guarantor of the independence and neutrality of Belgium. That kind of blatant disregard for international treaties between Great Powers invited punishment.
And J.Micheal Neal has a good point as well. Germany didn’t as much lose the war as collapse internally. And of course that whole story has been copied by certain elements in the US to "explain" why they lost in Vietnam.
gaucho
1. I love how this blog takes this topic and turns it into a discussion of early 20th century european diplomatic history.
2. To the comment re: hangings I agree with the sentiment. However, my understanding as a lowly, uninvolved Californian has always been that Lee was something of a mercenary general. He fought for the Confederacy, in part, simply because the Union didn’t want him. Granted, in most civil war situations he still would’ve been hung up on the gallows. Still, I think his case was still in that eternal grey area of practical/ideological.
J. Michael Neal
No, they lost the war. They convinced themselves that they hadn’t, but they did. The British beat them fair and square. They solved the problems of trench warfare, and flattened the Germans under an immense mass of artillery fire.
That’s not to minimize the role the French played. It’s just that they exhausted themselves keeping the Germans from winning during the first two years while the British built an army from scratch. Considering how much larger and more industrialized the Germans were, that was pretty impressive.
There are a lot of incorrect myths about World War One, before, during, and after, that drive me crazy.
J. Michael Neal
This is unfair to Lee. He picked the wrong side, and I think it showed a lack of moral character, but he wasn’t any sort of mercenary. He just considered himself a Virginian before he considered himself an American.
George Thomas was the admirable Virginian.
Calouste
@J. Michael Neal:
I don’t think we disagree on that point. What I meant to say was that the actual capitulation of Germany was brought on by mutiny and political upheaval rather than by foreign troops occupying the country (from a military perspective, the war had already been lost since late summer).
Blue Raven
What the hell? Claiming the carpetbaggers weren’t harsh enough?? For sweet fuck’s sake, any idiot should realize that after the rebels saw bluecoats mow down half the state of Georgia just because they could and then proceeded to rip their precious social structure into teeny little pieces, the WRONG action was to rub their noses in it. Lincoln would not have let that happen. John Wilkes Booth was an even bigger moron than he looks like at first glance.
(Family history side note: I am the direct descendant of a MA regiment veteran of the Civil War who married a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee’s grandfather. Talk to me about how it feels to look at Arlington.)
AnneLaurie
Effin’ Tom Jefferson and his plantation-party cronies inserted that particular poison pill so that the sane people in the prototype blue states wouldn’t be able to keep the dooks of hazard from their favorite occupations — theft, incest, property destruction, and starting fights with the neighbors. Sound familar?
Conservatively Liberal
Good idea! Oh, and all sane Texans get to leave if they want to. ;) I say ‘if they want’ only because someone might want to stay just to enjoy the transition. :)
It sure would make for good entertainment!
I would open trade with them but I would limit technology transfers for the safety of the rest of the world. So when it comes to computer products I would allow the new nation to have, I would start with the Mattel See & Say product line to see how they handle it.
I wouldn’t want the new nation to accidentally cut themselves.
liberal
@Walker:
Screw them. The Union should have given ex-slaves land.
liberal
@Blue Raven:
The issue wasn’t "rubbing their noses in it." The issue was justice for the ex-slaves, economic and otherwise, of which there was precious little once Reconstruction was terminated prematurely.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Oh great. Now he’ll never shut up about being a POW during the Civil War.
douglasfactors
@J. Michael Neal:
You neglect even to mention what was clearly the decisive factor, even if British and French historians don’t care to admit it.
bob h
If you saw your Party at the precipice of extinction as a national player, you would be hysterical, too. Democratic success on the economy, which is merely a matter of throwing enough money at the problem, will doom the Republicans further.
Jackmormon
The remark caused a sudden gasp heard throughout the House chamber
This is oddly reassuring.
Comrade Darkness
What I love is how the same people who think Iraq should be just thrilled and grateful for an invasion and occupation are still pissy about something similar that happened a 150 years ago when they weren’t even alive.
Betsy
@Jackmormon: I like this way of looking at it. Thanks for that little dose of optimism; I can use it this morning.
@Blue Raven:
"rubbing their noses in it" = "giving ex-slaves political rights and punishing treason" As I once said in my high school American history class that was taught by a woman rumored to be a member of the Klan – "But…if someone decides to secede and starts a war to do it, wouldn’t they anticipate that if they failed, there would be consequences?" Her response: "Isn’t that a northern perspective?" Me: Um…
John PM
Actually, Lee was recognized as one of the best generals in the US Army. Lincoln offered him command of all Union forces, which Lee turned down to return to Virginia to lead the Army of Northern Virginia. As J. Michael Neal said, Lee picked the wrong side. It is fascinating to think what would have happened had Lee been in charge of the Union forces at the outset of the Civil War instead of McClellan. The Civil War probably would have been as short as everyone in the North thought it was going to be. On the flip side, a short war also would have meant that slavery would have continued to exist, since it was the length of the Civil War that eventually allowed Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Conservatively Liberal:
Fuck you. We’re not all mouth-breathing morons down here, and Texas isn’t the hillbilly hell it’s often portrayed as on this blog. Yeah, we gots problems. So does every other goddamned state in the union.
Knock it off.
Yeah, we gave you W and Joel Osteen. We also gave you LBJ, Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Doug Sahm, Willie Nelson, Carol Burnett, and Tommy Lee Jones.
I think we come out on the positive side of that balance sheet.
Church Lady
Let me stick up for the Southern red states a little, since some are so anxious to kick us out. Arkansas gave us Bill Clinton and J. William Fulbright, Tennessee gave us Al Gore and Shelby Foote, and Mississippi has always been a hot bed of talented and award winning authors such as Tennessee Williams, Willie Morris, Eudora Welty and William Faulkner.
Dumb, ignorant and racist isn’t reserved just for this region. Remember the riots in Boston over school busing? We have our bad, but we also have our good, and we have contributed to the nation.
zzyzx
You know, for all of the focus on the stupid comment, no one has asked the more basic question: why exactly is MO’s state legislature wasting its time discussing the ramifications of a potential bill that Obama might sign if it gets out of Congress? Seems like a bit of a digression…
Michael
I’ve come to marvel at the screaming double standard of the whole "heritage, not hate" cowplop.
When the guy who gets all teary-eyed over a "painter of light" style painting of a Confederate officer kneeling in prayer next to a horse starts yelling about African Americans "getting over it" and that he is "honoring his ancestors", he is demanding that:
1. They abandon their own ancestors to the Southern partisan’s hero worship of people who fought so that they didn’t even have to think about discussing ending slavery, all for the benefit of the local plutocrats.
2. That everybody should conveniently forget the continuation of legal discrimination and economic oppression into living memory – all the way into the 60s, and that victims are still living. This, of course, excuses all those courageous Southern Christians from doing anything or refraining to prevent oppression, and damns their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and beloved mentors for having continued to reap either material or emotional benefit from the system as it was.
Wile E. Quixote
In addition to J. Michael Neal’s excellent post at #47 describing the dismantling of Germany at the end of World War II and comparing it to the Treaty of Versailles there’s also the fact that at the end of World War II Germany was immeasurably worse off than they had been at the end of World War I. German cities had been flattened by five years of strategic bombing. Berlin was so hammered by Allied bombs that after the war they took all of the rubble in the city, piled it into one huge pile, covered it with dirt and called it "Der Teufelsberg" which means "The Devil’s Mountain". It’s the highest point in Berlin, in fact if you were to make a list of the ten highest hills in Berlin I think that at least seven of them would be the rubble piles that they covered over with dirt after the war. Berlin isn’t the only city with one of these. If you go to Berlin today you can see bullet pock marks on the marble base of Der Siegessäule, the tower that the Germans built to commemorate their victory in the Franco-Prussian war and when I was last there in 2000 you could see damage from the war on buildings down in Potsdam (Mostly buildings that had been patched up after something had punched large circular holes in them.
As it is Germany got off easy. The would have divided Germany into three parts, stripped the country of all heavy industry and turned it into an agricultural state.After the war the US started implementing the Morgenthau plan but had to stop after reality set in and it was realized that the only way to fully implement Morgenthau’s plan was to let several million Germans starve to death. It wasn’t so much the prospect of several million Germans starving that led to the abandonment of the plan, it was the fear that the Germans would become communists in reaction to this treatment by the Allies.
J. Michael Neal
No, I’m not omitting any key factors in determining who won World War One. If you want factors that led to the end coming in 1918, as opposed to 1919 or 1920, then the American entrance into the war was very important. The British and the French would have defeated Germany even without it, but it changed the timing, and, perhaps, the nature.
Wile E. Quixote
Blue Raven @59
Get the goddamned fuck over it you slimy little poseur. Jesus, my maternal grandfather was in the Army in World War II, he spent three years traipsing all over New Guinea and various Pacific Islands and wouldn’t talk about it, even sixty years later, but in the 1970s befriended a Japanese lady. My step-grandfather spent four years in the Navy in World War II in the submarine service having the Imperial Japanese Navy do their level best to kill him. Despite this he doesn’t have any hard feelings about the Japanese today. Listening to you talk about your ancestors and how you feel when you look at Arlington strikes me as nothing more than attention seeking wankery.
pseudonymous in nc
"State representative dumb as dogshit" is, alas, not a news story.
douglasfactors
@J. Michael Neal:
By the spring of 1919 Pershing would have been in Berlin.
douglasfactors
More to the point–supposing the U.S. had not entered the war, do you really think Allied morale would have held out until 1919 or 1920?