Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

T R E 4 5 O N

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Republicans in disarray!

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / 147 years ago…

147 years ago…

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I was reminded this morning by TeacherKen, one of my favorite Diarists over at GOS, that 147 years ago somebody said something that was important.

Gettysburg Address at LM

It is worth it today to take a few moments to reflect on Lincoln’s words and the work that remains to be done to perfect our Union.

This line:

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us…”

is still a call to action that is as strong now as it was when Lincoln first uttered them by the fresh graves of Gettysburg nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.

The battles of the Civil War are still in play. As Faulkner said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The Confederate Party had good number of victories this year. They firmly control the Republican Party, a majority of seats in the House and enough additional Senators to enhance their goals of protecting the oligarchs funding them, promoting policies of white supremacy and to continue their 150 year-old attack on the Constitution and the Federal Government of the United States of America.

We would do well to remember Lincoln’s words from 147 years ago (and the second Inaugural Address) as we work to deal with the coming waves of neo-Confederate extremism.

Cheers

Reader Interactions

55Comments

  2. 2.

    Mark S.

    Yeah, the Gettysburg Address is pretty good, but imagine how much better it would have been if Lincoln had today’s speechwriters. The secret is to make sure every third sentence has something for your lackeys to stand up and cheer for.

    /rant

  5. 5.

    walt

    What we had in 1863 was a nation where the simplicity of moral righteousness had not been overwhelmed by economic stratification. The Neo-confederacy depends, paradoxically, on moral righteousness to advance its own cause. But that cause is delusional nostalgia, an America that stopped existing many decades ago.

    There is no cure for our radical individualism that discounts the social compact and the necessary interdepedence of modern economic life. It’s this disease that’s killing us because it’s blind, greedy, dumb, and angry. There’s no cure here except the direct experience of this soul sickness. I wish it wasn’t so but we’re already too far gone.

  6. 6.

    MobiusKlein

    Majority ONLY in the House.

    Senate is not GOP majority, and should be a bit of a counterbalance to the House.

  7. 7.

    geg6

    Well, it’s always good to hear from ol’ Abe (and thanks for the shoutout for the second inaugural, one of the greatest speeches of all time, outshining the Gettysburg Address by miles IMHO). It never hurts to have that reminder that we are still fighting that goddam war.

  8. 8.

    Paula

    Hilarious, considering this paragraph from the 2nd Inaugural:

    “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.”

    would in this day and age be ripped apart for “false equivalence” and/or being “glib” and “aloof”.

    Sorry, but today’s rhetorical environment has no room for the likes of Lincoln.

  9. 9.

    Mark S.

    @geg6:

    and thanks for the shoutout for the second inaugural, one of the greatest speeches of all time, outshining the Gettysburg Address by miles IMHO

    I agree.

    ETA:

    Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether”

    Today’s media would have accused him of America-hating.

  10. 10.

    DonkeyKong

    Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

    Abraham Lincolns Inaugural Address 1861

  12. 12.

    Dennis SGMM

    I’m just an amateur historian. From that perspective, I’d say that of all of the issues that were bubbling up during Lincoln’s ascendancy, he saw states’ rights versus the primacy of central government as the foremost. The secession of South Carolina probably did much to validate his conclusion.

    Today, I would say that the issue of the concentration of wealth and the stacking of the deck to make certain that the concentration continues is the primary threat. I believe that Obama and his Cabinet were either unwilling or unable to rise to the occasion.

  13. 13.

    Brachiator

    It is worth it today to take a few moments to reflect on Lincoln’s words and the work that remains to be done to perfect our Union.

    Great stuff. Coincidentally, I ran across this blog about the Gettysburg Address this morning. I particularly like this part:

    That all men are created equal. — What a dangerous, exhilarating, revolutionary idea that is! It is an idea so audacious, so demanding, that over two hundred years after our founding we still struggle with it, and we always will. I think we were meant to. I don’t believe our founding fathers, when in liberty they conceived this new nation, meant the revolution they had begun to end with the drying of the ink on its first document. I think that radical idea was meant to challenge us in perpetuity. I think we were meant to keep exploring it, thinking and arguing about it, keep finding out where it would lead us.
    __
    All men? Does that include men of color? Does it include both genders? Not at first, but now, yes, certainly. I do not believe that expansion of our understanding of equality is a distortion of the founders’ intent, but rather a fulfillment of their plan. They started the revolution; it has always been ours to finish, each generation fighting for a little better understanding of that proposition’s meaning, a little better realization of it in the real world. America is, and always will be, a work in progress.
    __
    We are a nation bound up with the single most complicated and important ethical question which has ever faced mankind. What does equality mean, and what action does that meaning demand of us? And while every society on Earth must deal with this question out of political necessity, we do so out of duty to who we are, where we came from, and where we are bound.

    And it is left to us to challenge, and to oppose, those who would insist on a selfish, narrow, crabbed, fearful refudiation of the best of what America can be.

  14. 14.

    marcopolo

    Just want to point out that the Senate is currently preparing to vote on the Food Safety Modernization Act S.510. Advocates of small farms/local food production managed to get an amendment sponsored by Senators Tester & Hagen added to the bill yesterday and now big Ag is pulling out the stops to shoot the bill down. If you have 5 minutes today, please call your senators and ask them to support passage of the bill.

    If you are a resident of OK especially call up Coburn’s office as he is being his typical asshatted self about passage.

    And if any of y’all frontpagers see this, feel free to write a post on it. The way food safety legislation in the U.S. procedes is a Big Fucking Deal.

  17. 17.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    Does anybody have a book or set of books to recommend that do a good job of explaining how the party of Lincoln morphed into the party of McKinley over the course of the next four decades? I would love to find a reference for that era on par with say Nixonland.

  20. 20.

    J sub D

    The Confederate Party had good number of victories this year. They firmly control the Republican Party …

    Hyperbolize much? This is sports bar politics at its worst.

    The Dems are socialist and the GOP is racist. Stupid and stupid.

  21. 21.

    Bulworth

    Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether”

    Yeah, where’s the Murican Ceptionalism in this here graph? Is this guy saying America ain’t the greatest, Fock Yeah!?

  24. 24.

    ChrisB

    I visited the Lincoln Memorial earlier this year with my son and found it inspiring not just to read the words inscribed on the walls but also to see the many other people doing the same.

    Meanwhile, on a much more pedantic level:

    @Sentient Puddle:

    So…apparently Joe Scarborough has been handed a two-day suspension now.

    Really? Maybe I can watch Morning Joe those two days (oh, wait, I can deal with insipid Mika but do I really want to watch Mark Halperin and Pat Buchanan at all, let alone that early in the morning?). I think not.

  25. 25.

    Andy K

    @Dennis SGMM:

    Today, I would say that the issue of the concentration of wealth and the stacking of the deck to make certain that the concentration continues is the primary threat.

    Check out the podcasts here: The Death Throes of the Republic, addressing the last century and a half of the Roman Republic, is very relevant.

  26. 26.

    HyperIon

    I used to live in DC. Every time I go back, I make sure to visit the Lincoln memorial. It is a perfect place. Such an elegant monument with beautiful stone. And I never tire of reading the words on the walls.

  30. 30.

    Scott de B.

    And the response from the Confederate-sympathizing northern Democrats:

    “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”

  33. 33.

    HyperIon

    @Brachiator:

    Here’s a bit of fun, “Which Founder Are You?” Surprisingly, my results linked me to Jimmey Madison.

    So did mine and I’m getting a bit suspicious.
    Maybe Madison is the default case for folks who decline the obvious answers (for example, big library = TJ).

  34. 34.

    joeyess

    Speaking of Lincoln and our modern day Confederate Party, I thought this excerpt from Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union in New York is still prescient:

    Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation. The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them. These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

    What will ever satisfy them other than total capitulation to their beliefs?

  35. 35.

    Dennis SGMM

    @Andy K:
    Thank you! The end of the Roman republic and the subsequent rise of the Principate are one of the most interesting periods in Western history. I wouldn’t presume to invoke any historical parallel because the times and the circumstances were so different. I would note that, for me, the Principate was ascendant at first because it presented competence (By fostering the bureaucracy), stability, and security. The stability was onerous to all but the highest strata in Roman society but, it was taken as the price for personal security and for knowing one’s place in society while having someone else to look down upon.

  36. 36.

    Origuy

    @Scott de B.:

    And the response from the Confederate-sympathizing northern Democrats

    Back in the day, those were called Copperheads. I’m looking to revive the term.

  39. 39.

    Andy K

    @Dennis SGMM:

    I wouldn’t presume to invoke any historical parallel because the times and the circumstances were so different.

    Different, sure, but parallels nonetheless.

    Expansion of power beyond the borders? Check.

    Upper classes getting richer at the expense of the middle class? Check.

    Liberal populist reformers offset by conservatives in the Senate? Check.

    Conservative populist reformers pitting the upper middle class against the lower middle class, and playing the nativists against those who would extend the franchise outside of the traditional Italian borders? Check.

  40. 40.

    Emerald

    @HyperIon:

    Maybe Madison is the default case for folks who decline the obvious answers (for example, big library = TJ

    Nope. I picked big library and books books books all the way through and I’m George Washington.

  41. 41.

    Bob Loblaw

    Wow, another Confederacy post. At least it was topical this time. I’m just surprised you didn’t use your once clever/now trite elephant gif.

    After 97 of these with the exact same message every time, I’m not sure whether to call you persistent in the face of a great evil or just embarrassingly single minded…

  45. 45.

    lou

    Did you see this? Sure does sound like the Confederate Party.

    Arkansas state leg sees Confederate flag as symbol of Jesus Christ.

    And this little nuggets (the irony is rich that this guy is a “republican”):

    For seven years, Mauch was the commander of James M. Keller Camp 648 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He stepped down as commander last year. In 2004, angered by the city of Hot Springs’ refusal to remove a statue of Abraham Lincoln displayed in the Hot Springs Civic and Convention Center, the Keller Camp hosted a conference in Hot Springs called “Seminar on Abraham Lincoln — Truth vs. Myth,” with a keynote address called “Homage to John Wilkes Booth.”

    Read more at Wonkette: Secessionist Arkansas State Rep: Confed. Flag ‘Symbol of Jesus Christ’

  46. 46.

    dj spellchecka

    via benen

    Republican Loy Mauch, was recently elected to represent House District 26 near Hot Springs, Arkansas. A former head of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans post in Hot Springs, Mauch is a current member of The League of the South, a group which works toward the formation of an independent Southern nation.

    When asked what the Confederate flag symbolizes, Mauch said: “It’s a symbol of constitutional government. It’s a symbol of Jesus Christ above all else. It’s a symbol of Biblical government.”

    For seven years, Mauch was the commander of James M. Keller Camp 648 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He stepped down as commander last year. In 2004, angered by the city of Hot Springs’ refusal to remove a statue of Abraham Lincoln displayed in the Hot Springs Civic and Convention Center, the Keller Camp hosted a conference in Hot Springs called “Seminar on Abraham Lincoln — Truth vs. Myth,” with a keynote address called “Homage to John Wilkes Booth.”

    http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/the-south-shall-rise-again/Content?oid=1380685

  48. 48.

    J

    @walt: Spot on! May I respectfully suggest ‘moralistic self-righteousness’ instead of ‘moral righteousnes’? The Republican party’s public self-presentation is a grotesque parody of morality, righteouness, principle, decency and the like & all in bad faith.

  49. 49.

    dj spellchecka

    @lou…sorry, your comment wasn’t visible when i was writing mine

    time to add that elephant gif to the post, dennis

  50. 50.

    Dennis G.

    @J sub D:
    Not a close reader, but that’s OK.

    Whenever one talks about the lingering Confederate Party and that the current Republican Party that is controlled by these neo-Confederates it is never very long before somebody plays the ‘white victimhood–you-called-me/them-a-racist’ card.

    Control does not equal all and by no means does pointing out that the neo-Confederates controll the Republican also mean that all Republicans are racist. But it is a great way to try and change the subject.

    Congratulations on being the first to go there in this thread.

    And yet, the Republican Party is stilled in the control of the neo-Confederates and working for their policy goals.

    Cheers

  51. 51.

    Dennis G.

    @joeyess:
    Yep, these Confederates were experts at moving the goal posts long before the first game of football was played.

    The Cooper Union Speech is another great one.

    Cheers

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