There is history, facts and evidence, and then there is fantasy, role playing and just making shit up. One deals with the real world world, the other is all unicorns, stardust and magical thinking.
The Republican Confederate Party celebration of Confederate History Month is entering its final week, but for many in the Party the celebration will continue 24/7. These folks live in a rich fantasy world, which is OK until they try and force that fantasy life on reality.
As long as the impulse was all talk and fantasy based action, these efforts could be dismissed as funny, ironic, sad, pitiful and lame. And yet, sometimes these Confederate game players get so involved with the fantasy that they leave reality behind and go all reenactor geeky at best or psycho killer at worst. Over the last few decades, the Republican Party has allowed itself to be taken over by these game players and that has had disastrous consequences for our Nation and the world (raise your hand if you remember George W. Bush).
In the wake of America electing a Black Man as President, this fantasy world has completely taken control of the Republican Party. Everything is a game now, but some are playing for bigger stakes and the damage that they will do if given power again is on display weekly, if not daily.
Recent events in Arizona are an example. There, the white minority has passed a law to try and keep control of an evolving reality. Sure it is racist and unConstitutional, but if you’re playing fantasy America you can ignore all of that. The problems you define and the solutions to those imagined problems are all that matters. After all, is your world and if you think White makes right–then that’s alright.
In the course or the last few weeks of doing what I can to help the celebration of CHM along, I have stumbled across quite a few toxic racist sites and seen the thoughts promoted on those sites mainstreamed through the comments and actions of ‘Conservative’ pundits, politicians and Alaskan gadflies. Of all these sites, it is this one that is the furthest from reality and yet closest to the truth of the Teatard movement and the modern Republican Confederate Party.
The site is a call for Liberation of the Confederate States of America from the jack-booted control of those Yankee/Unionist thugs.
Their opening of their proposal for action could be in any TeaBagger fact sheet or GOP Party platform:
Our Constitutional Republic has been destructed by the powers that be a long time ago. The Federal Government is on a massive power grab that is putting us, and the nation in further peril. Our freedoms and liberties are being lost in the name of “national security”, the fruits of our labor continue to be taken in the name of taxes, our economy is in shambles. We have had enough, but what is our best course of action? With each protest, and each movement, we continue to see the Federal Government turn a blind eye and ignore our every word. Our elected officials talk the talk during election, but when in Washington are persuaded by the power and the lobbyists.
Of course a few lines later their framing might give some to pause for a moment:
The time has come for us as patriotic Confederate Americans to excercise the rights given to us in our first Declaration of Independence…
And their propose remedy is:
Our goal is to simply end the occupation of the Confederate States of America. We must act on both on the state and federal level and start over as our Founders intended. But why the state governments as well? The reason is simple, our current state governments were illegally, and illegitimately put into place by the United States government who forced out our rightfully elected officials at gunpoint. Since our occupation, our state governments have bowed to the might of the United States government. They have allowed unconstitutional laws passed within their borders, they have allowed federal agencies to operate within our state borders and continually harrass and jail our citizens based on outrageous laws and regulations. It is time to reverse these violations and return the Southern Confederacy to a nation as envisioned by our founders where we can all enjoy Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
The site is a treasure trove of crazy. The current action plan is to nominate and elect new delegates to a Confederate Congress that will be held later this year. Then they can begin the hard work of finally winning the Civil War, or as they say:
Ending the occupation of the Confederate States of America will allow us to start anew. We will be able to build up a nation as our founders envisioned. The Constitution will once again reign as law of the land with new safeguards in place so that the tyranny in place today will not be able to take place again. Confederate Americans will be able to once again live free as our ancestors did, and will be able to pursue their destiny in a nation full of good jobs, a higher standard of living, and most importantly without restricting every aspect of their lives.
All of this shit fuels a crazy fantasy about re-fighting the Civil War and–of course–the site is filled with fact free scholarship, plagiarism and magical thinking. And yet, if you remove the ‘Confederate’ and ‘Confederacy’ language, just about anything from the site could be from a speech by Mitch McConnell, John McCain and any number of Republicans in the chorus.
The ideas of the proposed second Confederate Congress come from the radical edge of the modern conservative movement, but that edge is not very far from the center of the modern GOP. In fact, these Confederates own the Party. Which is why even the craziest ideas from rebel deadenders can not be ignored. Arizona has proven that they can get their ideas enacted into law.
It would be great if we could just make fun of CHM, but we can’t. These fuckers are serious about making their hate filled fantasies our National reality. We laugh at them and ignore them at our peril.
Cheers
dengre
John Quixote
How long before somebody playing for the Arizona Diamondbacks gets arrested for ‘Driving While Hispanic”?
MLB Spring Training next year should be interesting.
HE Pennypacker, Wealthy Industrialist
We might ignore them at our peril, but it’s our sworn duty on BJ to laugh at them. Seriously.
electricgrendel
I really love this series. It’s a shame April’s almost over.
Linda Featheringill
Interesting. I went to the site and read their stuff. I didn’t see anything new there.
There are still a lot of people in Dixie that resent the Reconstruction. But occupation is what happens when you start a war and then lose it. That is one reason [and there are others] that you don’t take a group of children, give them guns, and tell them to fire on a federal military base.
Maybe I missed something. I didn’t see anything that bothered me as much as it apparently disturbed Dennis.
By the way, I am comparing the propaganda on that site with what I remember being said about a half century ago. That might or might not be a valid comparison.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
I don’t laugh at them much these days, but I also believe that we live in a much different world, where layers from onions get peeled away much faster with our digital media. The GOP is a dying party imo, and like most things that die slowly, there are gasps of something like revival. There is a fail safe point for reaching back into the bowels of history to resurrect something like southern pre civil war ideology and trying to dress it up in populist drab for current times.
It is dashing and flamboyant in an American fantasist way of days gone by, where self sufficiently was real in day to day survival, but with that kind of independence, also came equal hardship. It is romance we are seeing with the American myth of exceptionalism via hardscrabble ways.
But underneath the southern brand of this myth was once long ago a reality built on the sweat and blood of hatred and forced labor. And ultimately. great tragedy for the American soul. They are playing a game with desperation, Mitch the bitch and the others, riding one last wave of white power and supremacy, that when the sheets get pulled away and what’s underneath found out, the country will recoil, and drive the last nail into the GOP and their last dance with the devil.
What comes after that, who the fuck knows.
cmorenc
IF ONLY Lee had not ordered Pickett’s Charge, it all would have turned out different at Gettysburg and the Wah-wuh would very likely have not been lost.
LD50
Evidently they DO want slavery back. Otherwise I can’t imagine how they think an independent Southeast could keep their standard of living higher than, say, Puerto Rico.
Martin
@John Quixote: Black football players helped kill Limbaugh’s plan to buy the Rams. I wonder if latino baseball players could do the same. I can’t imagine they’d boycott travelling to Diamonback games, but there’s a lot of spring training in AZ that SoCal would love to have.
Cacti
@John Quixote:
It’s more than just the D-backs. 15 MLB franchises have spring training facilities in Arizona.
If these teams start withdrawing from the Cactus League, it will get the attention of the cowboy rednecks in the Legislature in a big hurry.
AZ had its come to Jesus moment about Martin Luther King Day when the NFL crossed Phoenix off its Super Bowl host list.
Debbie(aussie)
These guys can’t call themselves ‘patriots’ or ‘real amerkin’s’ can they? :)
Linda Featheringill
Dennis:
Yeah, there is a lot of fantasy out there. But I don’t know if these guys are any more dangerous than their fathers and grandfathers were.
It is getting late for children and little old ladies. I’m going to turn in.
John Quixote
@Martin: I think the courts will but the brakes on this before it goes into effect. If not, the pressure from MLB will be too much in the end. Spring Training brings in a shit-ton of cash every year, and the threat of losing that revenue to Florida or SoCal just might catch the attention of that state’s lawmakers.
It’s not high profile guys like Manny Ramirez that clubs have to worry about. It’s the young kids from the Caribbean that don’t speak a lick of english that clubs have to worry about. What would clubs think if the 19-year old Cuban lefthander they just invested millions of dollars in has to do six months in the can because he was picked up at McDonald’s without his Visa?
This may sound a bit odd, but MLB and the MLBPA has enough power to quash this. They generate enough tourism dollars, that is.
MinneapolisPipe
Dennis G., kudos for your tireless April blogging. I hope you relax in May with some fine alcohol.
If one were to believe the demographics of the recent NYT poll on TPers/Confederate Revivalists, the group tends to skew to being older, racially homogenous, stronger in the South, and male.
Sign o’ the Times: Two of the most powerful people in this country right now is a bi-racial colored president and a woman speaker of the house (healthcare would not have passed without the significant effort put in by those two).
Whether one likes it or not, America is changing. And that change will not stop. The genie is out of the bottle.
That is what infuriates the TPers/Confeds (and based on the footage I’ve seen, they most certainly are full of fury).
They used to take comfort in the fact that they had sole access to the levers of power. And now, that is slowly eroding. And it makes them angry.
They may have a little success in 2010, but the long-term arc does not bode well for them. They are part of a dying group. And they will not go without kicking and screaming.
Yutsano
@Debbie(aussie): HA! If you ask any of them they are the only real Merikans left. The rest are communists or sociaIists or dark or some other that doesn’t fit into their white straight Christian mold. They are the only ones worthy of the Constitution or full civil rights in their minds. That’s what they supposedly want to return to.
Admiral_Komack
Nuke ’em.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Ot
For anyone who might care, tomorrow night is a 90 minute documentary of PBS about My Lai. It is a new production.
aarrgghh
why not a confederate congress? we just had a constitutional congress.
more cowbell!
Tom
I guess the logical endpoint of the Southern Strategy is for the Republican Party to morph into George Wallace’s American Independent Party.
mai naem
There was kid at the Suns’ game yesterday with a sign that said something to the effect of “Nash(Steve Nash who’s Canadian), Joe(That’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio) is asking to see your papers”
Yutsano
@mai naem: I think they should carry signs like that to all the away games for the D-Backs. Or any Arizona sports team.
Liberty60(Veteran, Great war of Yankee Aggression)
There was a time when I would have laughed at the notion of the Birchers being a respected voice in the conservative movement.
But facts, as they say, are stubborn things. And as Alan Grayson said the other night, there is a segment of America that has never accepted the outcome of the Civil War; so yeah, Dennis’ warnings are timely- we need to take these fucks seriously.
Seanly
I’m assuming that they want to go back to the Confederate Constitution…
Mark S.
@Debbie(aussie):
Yutsano’s right, except he misspelled soshalism. For 27% of this great country, they are the only Real Americans, and the rest of us are deadbeat gay communist traitors. As Dennis G. said, if you take the shit about the Confederacy, that site could have been a Teabagger Manifesto.
Taobhan
The greatest fantasy these “confederates” have is that the rest of “right-thinking America” (excluding white liberals and all non-whites of course) is with them on their ideas. Having a loon from Minnesota and another one from Alaska who agree with them just sort of confirms it for them. I mean, those two won political office outside the “Confederate States of America,” right? So, that for sure means the rest of the good ole US of A is on-board with their beliefs! Yeah, keep thinking that way and see how it wins elections.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Liberty60(Veteran, Great war of Yankee Aggression): Well, the son of a prominent Bircher is the political reporter the WH wakes up to, if you believe the NYT.
Mike Kay
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Thanks. This interview is really good.
Mike Kay
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: that just proves how right wing Obama is, and what a shame it was not to nominate … gulp… sniffle… edwards.
profbacon
I love the fact that the Vietnamese were able to kick the Americans out of their homeland, but the Confederacy folded. So much for the Army of the South being one of the greats.
Mumphrey
Why do I have a weird feeling they didn’t have black people in mind when they wrote this: “Confederate Americans will be able to once again live free as our ancestors did, and will be able to pursue their destiny in a nation full of good jobs, a higher standard of living, and most importantly without restricting every aspect of their lives.”?
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@cmorenc:
Oh, that’s not the only way it could have happened. Dan Sickles taking his division out of the prepared line and creating an indefensible salient in the Peach Orchard came close enough to losing the battle.
Ironically enough, Dan Sickles survived to orchestrate the conspiracy that bought the electoral votes of the last three occupied states to steal the 1876 election and end Reconstruction. (We can see now how premature that end was.)
And when you hear one of these wingnuts screaming about criminals “getting off on a technicality,” remind them that that same Dan Sickles, before the Civil War, was the first person in America found “not guilty by reason of temporary insanity” in a murder case.
Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876, by Roy Morris, Jr. is a very entertaining treatment of the whole disaster.
GregB
One would think wingnut heads would be popping Scanner’s style over the vast amount of cognitive dissonance the modern righty must endure.
They boast about being the Party of Lincoln, yet they long for the good old days of the Confederacy.
Coo-coo banana time.
TenguPhule
Burn a path to Georgia, Again.
Only way they’ll learn.
West of the Cascades
Dennis is right that we ignore them at our peril. We must be vigilant and not commit again the fatal error Lincoln made in 1861: this time, we must let the fuckers leave the Union and not let the door hit them in the ass on the way out.
And build a 20′ high wall with concertina wire from the Potomac all the way down to where New Mexico meets Texas, with automated gun emplacements every 30 feet to keep Confederates from illegally crossing into the United States. And deport anyone left in the United States found with a Confederate flag on their vehicle. But allow any resident of a Confederate state to get a Green Card if they sign a statement saying “Barack Hussein Obama Jr. is a United States citizen who was born in the United States.”
I see no downside in this.
MinneapolisPipe
@West of the Cascades: Perhaps a penal colony much like Australia of yore, but in Montana instead?
They could all hang out together with the other militia types who don’t believe in taxes or license plates and walk around misquoting Thomas Jefferson.
Jeff Fecke
@cmorenc:
The 1st Minnesota says “You’re Welcome” for repelling it. What was left of the 1st, anyhow.
I’d be happy to let the former CSA go, but in a generation, we’d have to deal with the dixiebacks sneaking over the Mason-Dixon line to get into a country with a decent living wage.
asiangrrlMN
I can’t stand their masturbatory fantasies for much longer. Can’t they just cum all over each other and be done with it already?
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Eww. Not enough towels in existence to clean up after that mess. Not to mention part of the whole sexual repression schtick is no whacking off, so they’re technically not allowed to do even that. Though personally I think quite a few of them would be better off if they just chilled out and fucked without guilt for a change.
Where is FH #1? Is it another holiday in Australia again?
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I believe so. He was talking about it being a holiday for drinking and partying, so why that makes it different from any other day, I do not know.
I agree with you about the repression thing, but I have a sneaking hunch these guys do jack off–most likely to the image of R E Lee in full uniform. The whole CHM thing reads like an extended Penthouse Forum letter to me, anyway. I am just tired of having to give a shit about these idiots and the teabaggers and all the other batshitcrazy rightwingers. As I posted in an earlier thread, we may not have reached peak wingnut yet, but I have reached peak disgust for these asshats.
Brutus et tu
Ya, if the Confederates won, it would be sunshine and lollipops for all the white folks of the Confederate Slave States of America. With gold plated water fountains with Brawndo, because Brawndo’s got electrolytes.
Viva BrisVegas
@Yutsano:
It’s the ANZAC day holiday here, since ANZAC day fell on a Sunday this year.
Which celebrates the dead of an entirely different futile war.
asiangrrlMN
@Brutus et tu: Mmmmm, electrolytes. Brawndo would be Gatorade on steroids!
@Viva BrisVegas: Yes. That’s the one. He said it was an excuse to drink.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: I honestly have zero issue with letting them go, if it weren’t for the fact that we would have to pick up the pieces of what would be a tattered economy and a backwards society fifty years later. Think German unification without the benefit of a decent education system like the DDR had. It’s not going to come down to war mostly because the South doesn’t really have enough to fight with, so that leaves just the unresolved tensions that keep plaguing both sides. Me personally, I would start a massive re-education campaign emphasizing the fact that the South fought not only over slavery but was more than willing to spit on the Constitution to achieve their goals. The teabaggers can feel free to surrender their Social Security and Medicare at any time, then they can truly be free. Oh and die off faster.
@Viva BrisVegas: Thank you for the clarification. I thought there were rumblings along those lines.
Viva BrisVegas
@asiangrrlMN:
Lots and lots of beer. It’s a tradition.
Anne Laurie
@Debbie(aussie): I don’t know if Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi is much read in Australia — it isn’t nearly as well known in America as it should be — but Mr. Clemons had some excellent and prescient stories in that book about “the Glorious South” and the defenders, pre- and post-Civil War, of slavery, the society slavery supported, and the vicious soul-corrupting compromises required to defend human chattel slavery as anything beyond a form of parasitism that destroyed its ‘masters’ almost as effectively as its victims. Some things have not changed nearly enough in the century since Life was first published, and Twain wrote some of the best, most approachable commentary on the reasons behind that particular tragedy.
I am a member of a tribe (“ethnic heritage”) that calls itself Scots-Irish, here in America. Basically, we are the bastard descendants of the unfortunate Celts whose memories revolve around being kicked from the rich Indo-European heartland to the barren fringes of the North Sea (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, with a strong admixture of Viking berserker) — and then expelled from even those pathetic reaches of mountain valleys and rocky coastlines, sent as indentured servants and starving exiles to the Land of No Return. Tragically, America was fertile enough to make it profitable for a tiny percentage of the invading European population (including some of the ‘Scots-Irish’, as they would start calling themselves) to invent a new & improved system of apartheid based on importing human “chattel” from Africa. Those fortunate Plantation Aristocrats have busily deformed the ideals and the function of our mutual American republic since its very beginning, and the vast majority of the Scots-Irish defenders of the Confederacy are their victims second only to the African-Americans who couldn’t even hope, like Huck Finn, to “light out for the territory” and finally be allowed to live with some minimal self-respect on their own little patch of soil. The Scots-Irish are the human pit bulls of modern American culture… it’s not entirely our fault that we’ve been stigmatized as incurably vicious, stubborn, and untrustworthy, but far too many of our kinfolk keep showing up on the news in circumstances that make it difficult for the less street-hardened to regard us with anything other than wary suspicion.
Yutsano
@Viva BrisVegas: Heh. We have Las Vegas commercials here where the protagonist comes up with some crazy made-up holiday and uses that as an excuse to go to Vegas. They’re pretty stupid but you just reminded me of that for some reason. I’m pretty sure it’s the drugs.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I do have qualms because there are really good people in all the states that want to secede. And, while the thought of having an underground railroad for progressives is amusing, it’s not very practical. I more approve of more education (I have learned more about the civil war from TNC and dengre plus the commentariats of both blogs than I ever did in school) and with waiting for the bigoted asshole part of our country to die off. I know there will always be bigots and assholes, but I just want this particular strain to die a quick death.
@Anne Laurie: This is what I mean by learning something. I never knew that about the Scots-Irish. Fascinating.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: This is really why the Texas schoolboard revisions are so irritating to me. These kids think they know all there is to know about history, leave Texas to go to college (or for whatever reason), then suddenly find they’ve pretty much been lied to all their pre-secondary educational careers. It’s not going to really sink in unless colleges refuse to recognize a diploma issued from the state of Texas on the grounds of inadequate preparation for a baccalaureate education. That might wake some folks up.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Yes. I completely agree with this. I really hope that this is the impetus to stop using Texas-based textbooks in other states, but I do fear for the education of Texas kids (won’t someone think about the children?). It’s insane, it really is.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: We are, of course, stuck in the position of being able to do little about it at this point. I have to admit though nothing would tickle my fancy better than if Governor Goodhair got his ass handed to him by Bill White. That would truly be delicious to have a Dem be governor down there. I wonder if the secession talk would get nuttier after that.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I know. That’s the part that frustrates me. There’s so little I, personally, can do about any of this shit. Gov. Goodhair will win reelection. Sad, but true.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: I assume nothing until it happens. After all six months out no one thought a blackity blackity black man with a ferrin sounding name could get elected President, yet he ended up tarring the bitter old white guy rather handily. Elections are never sure things unless we give up on them, plus there is every possibility Perry could do something really stupid in the next few months that will tick off enough folks to put him out of a job.
Sheesh I’m such an optimist. And I have to write a cover letter tomorrow as well. Bah. I should get some sleep while I can.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: You are the optimist; I am the pessimist. Yin to your yang and all that. I need to crash, too. Night!
Va Highlander
@Anne Laurie:
I think you’re mostly correct about the Scots-Irish, as I understand our origins, but I don’t think we can blame them for institutionalized slavery. That system was put in place by the English, for the most part, and was well entrenched long before the Scots-Irish arrived.
For instance, the greatest concentration of Scots-Irish immigrants here in Virginia was in the Shenandoah Valley and the mountains west of there. The number of slaves in that geographic area was negligible, when compared to the Tidewater. The great slave plantations of Virginia were as English as tea and crumpets.
Phyllis
This discussion is occuring in SC, not so much because of the content of the textbooks (although many agree the content is tedious, many times inaccurate, and in some cases an excuse for a teacher to do little else in a classroom than start teaching from Chap 1 on Day 1 and move on from there) but cost. They are monumentally expensive.
So if we do away with a bad thing because it costs too much, my feelings won’t be too hurt.
In other news. today is a state holiday in GA, to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day. SC will commemorate the holiday on Monday, May 10th. FYI.
The Endless Sheriff
@Va Highlander:
This is true. West Virginia seceded from Virginia and East Tennessee was full of pro-Union folks. Lincoln himself was Scotch-Irish, as I understand it.
It seems to me that nearly all Civil War books are written with a strong East Coast bias with barely a peek at the western theater of fighting. The day after Gettysburg, Grant took Vicksburg and cut the South in two. Five months later he took Chattanooga, opening the way to Atlanta.
Cataphract
@TenguPhule:
You’re funny, dude. An undercurrent of angry, but you’re funny.
El Cid
This should piss off the neo-Confederates:
Obama’s approval rating in the South has swung waaaaaaay up from a norm of 27% or so up to 40%.
What’s funny is that this movement appears to come entirely from the “No Opinion” column.
Oh, and every where else he’s 57 – 67% approval.
Tee. Hee.
Linda Featheringill
@Anne Laurie: Excellent summation of the ethnic history! Loved it!
[me too]
Linda Featheringill
@El Cid: That whole table of approve/disapprove responses is a sight for sore eyes!
Thanks for providing it for us.
John Withheldjo
Squinting at the BJ tagline on my phone I read “A Drudge Ate My Baby.”
Little Dreamer
@West of the Cascades:
__
Uhh, some of us have family that live in that region, are you trying to recreate the Berlin Wall?
I have a daughter that is in that part of the country and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be separated by some fucking wall and military sharpshooters trying to stop her and I from seeing each other.
Take your hatred elsewhere, it’s not helpful at all.
I realize that having a bunch of crazy right-wingers in our country is a difficult situation, but the solution is not to break up families by isolating them, fuckwit!
Mumphrey
@Little Dreamer:
I’ll go along with that, too. I live in Virginia. So do a lot of liberals. And black people. And Hispanics. I don’t think they’d be too thrilled at being walled off with a bunch of violent, racist assholes.
There are many liberals all over the south, even in places like Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas. They’re doing all they can to make these places better. It’s hard, and they haven’t won a lot of the fights, so far, but if we give up and let these racist, fascist assholes secede, we’re leaving an awful lot of good people in an awful bind.
Nutella
At least the people on the Liberation website are reasonably honest about secession, unlike some Alaskans we know. They’ll also claim that being pro-secession is patriotic rather than seditious. (We have to destroy the
villagecountry in order to save it.)tomvox1
Shorter Confederate “Liberation” Congress: Back in chains, N***ers!
Awesome grammar, also too.
tesslibrarian
Thanks, Mumphrey. There are some of us in Georgia.
I’m lucky because I live on a pretty liberal street–almost every house had a Vote No sign for the anti-gay marriage provision in 2004. But we’re close to the university.
A friend lives in the very conservative neighboring county, and when her husband ran for school board, they couldn’t get the local paper to even cover his campaign or include any quotes from him in their stories. They did, however, stage photos (with children!) for the GOP candidate.
Currently, you still see more Obama stickers on pickups than McCain or anti-Obama. The conservative county my friend lives in only mustered about 150 people (by their count) for their tax day tea party, held in a public park w/o irony, of course. It’s the same number who showed up for the speech by the law school kid who is running against Paul Broun–and who knew that was even scheduled? He certainly didn’t have Fox News’ help or astroturf funding.
We’re not all crazy.
The Golux
@Little Dreamer, @Mumphrey, @tesslibrarian: Your snark detectors are malfunctioning.
liberty60(Veteran, Great War of Yankee Aggression)
@Mumphrey:
The Confederacy isn’t as geographically located as people think; due to the effects of industrialization and mobility, the Confederacy is a trans-state state tribe, that exists from Alaska to the inland areas of California, to downstate Illinois, Michigan…
Combine that with the stats posted by El Cid, and the NYT profile of the Tea Party, and what I see is the Confederacy is an overlapping set diagram of groups that have as their unifying theme the aching for a Lost Utopia, mingled with a seething fear of a Brown/Urban/Gay/Other America.
Glen Tomkins
Two suggestions
For one thing, I would strongly advise not dismissing these people as living in a fantasy world. Even if you’re right, and this body of opinion centering around the overall concept of states’ rights stands no chance of ever again having any influence on real-world events, the best that can be said for giving it any attention at all, is that you’re wasting your readers’ time. Any of us should spend any time on these people, and pointing out their existence is helpful at swaying swing voters, precisely to the extent that there is some chance of these opinions of theirs actually influencing the real world.
Right now we have four Federalist Society, original intentionalist, stooges on the SC, with one wobbly person, Kennedy, who can’t be counted on to vote against them with any certaintly. And original intention, if followed to its logical end, arguably does mean that state interposition is as Constitutional as church on Sunday. Madison and Jefferson thought that it was in 1798. Are you and I better authorities on what the original intention of the Founders might have been than the Architect of the Constitution himself? Can you be sure that interposition won’t get 5 votes in the SC as currently constituted?
If you review the filing of our AG here in VA to uphold the Commonwealth’s interposition law ref Obamacare, you will find an otherwise inexplicable reference to a dictum of Justice Samuel Chase from Calder v Bull, a 1798 case. In this dictum, Chase, speaking before we had an identified and accepted form of judicial review, proposes that one reasonable way to go about the task of reconciling conflicts between statues and the Constitution, is to skip any appeal to specific Constitutional provisions, at least in cases where the statute in question is felt by the judge to violate the social compact that underlies all “express compacts” like the Constitution. Hey, let’s add judicial nullification to the mix! That Chase! Just some wingnut from our harmlessly remote past, right? Except that very real, very current Justice Thomas cited the same passage from Calder v Bull in his amazing dissent in Kelo v City of New London. Read that disent. In it we discover that, not only is Thomas a believer in the Constitution in Exile, but he imagines that he, Thomas, has got the thing living in his basement as its place of exile. Our AG here in VA is paying attention to his wingnuts in highest office, even if you aren’t, and doing his best to get some action on the judicial nullification front
Which brings me ot my second suggestion, which is the practical take-home consequence of my first suggestion. Tie this radical, and radically foolish, ideology, to actual Republican policy makers. Don’t write a clever post about crazy wingnut Confederate re-enactors writing from their Moms’ basements, not when there are folks on the SC who articulate the full Monty of judicial and state nullification, not when they have state AGs in VA, and state legislatures in AZ, spouting this stuff.
Sure, the responsible Congressional response to AZ’s recent law is indeed to do what the Dem leadership is doing, and move immigration reform to the front burner. But what needs to be done in addition to that, what, unlike actual immigration reform, can be done quickly, and would be a clean political winner for our side, would be to propose a federal statute directly invalidating AZ’s statute. Don’t wait on the courts to throw out the AZ law. Make the Rs in Congress vote up or down on whether AZ can and should pre-empt federal law on this issue. Flush out the states’ rights people in the R Congressional delegation. Give them the choice between repudiating their base, or repudiating the Union.
Dennis G.
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
From your lips to the FSM’s ears…
Anne Laurie
@Va Highlander:
Oh, absolutely — the English invented it, may their ignominy live on forever. But there were enough of our people who bought into the bad system that for every Sons-of-the-Confederacy McClellan in America, there’s one (or more) at the Juneteenth family reunion. (Most of the people I’ve met who share my Scottish last name have been African-American.) And that’s always given the “Right People”, Twain’s Sir-Walter-Scott fantasists, the opportunity to blame those of us who were mostly hardscrabble hillbillies for the worst of their own sins… like naming the good girl in Gone with the Wind Burke, and the mean beyotch O’Hara. Twain called his prosperous future Rotarian (and probable Klansman) Sawyer — a good Anglo-Saxon name, and his ‘shiftless’ runaway son of an abusive drunk the very Irish Finn. It’s still the dumbfvck McVeighs who end up in the front lines, acting out the worst impulses of the “Lost Cause” monsters. As I said, it’s the profit-seeking fight promoters & drug dealers who torture dogs to make them unfit for polite society, but it’s the pit bulls themselves who get stigmatized as “born bad”.
Tom Fitz
@West of the Cascades, Yutsano, asiangrrl, Little Dreamer, tesslibrarian, Mumphry et al re secession: this discussion makes me think of the alternative history (and very dystopian) novels by Harry Turtledove. Maybe we make them an offer of negotiated secession, state by state: they have to adopt strong bills of rights in their constitutions, assume their part of the national debt (heh), etc. Let them pay for relocation of those “problem” residents in their midst they hate so much, etc. See how many takers we get….
Little Dreamer
@Tom Fitz:
Well, considering we have a lot of non-conventional family situations in our reality these days, there are personal situations that will be made more difficult if a secession occurs. I don’t want to go into my own personal situation, but, let’s just say that I’m not sure where my daughter would go, if I would ever find out where she went or if I would ever see her again.
I’m sure I’m not the only one in this situation. Families used to have more cohesion, I think. Not so much these days.
As a consequence of my daughter being apolitical in her thought processes, I don’t think she’d even really know that a secession was coming until just before the switch occurred, so, I don’t think she’d be prepared for the upheaval either. The last time we talked, she liked the locale she lived in and it’s all she’s known for quite a few years, I don’t think she’d survive personally.
@The Golux:
I didn’t see snark, and I don’t think it’s a joking matter. I snark a lot on this site, but secession is not an area that I take lightly.
Would you joke with a mother who is about to send her young adult son or daughter off to war in Iraq? This is the same kind of situation for me, I have a young adult daughter that is in SC and I can’t just call her on the phone and ask her to come and live with me. The situation is more serious than that and while it’s personal and I don’t want to get into it right now (I have written about it in the past, so a few here may remember) my ability to ever see my daughter again may be in peril if the south secedes. Please don’t tell me my snark meter is malfunctioning when I’m possibly looking at a life and death situation here (and if not life and death, at least a very good chance of permanently losing contact with my child).
Moreover, the others who echoed my sentiment are correct, there are a lot of good people who live in that area and creating upheaval (possibly detrimental and permanent upheaval) in their lives is NOT FUNNY in the least.