From TPM, a “Flashback: Giffords Warned Of ‘Consequences’ To Palin’s Target Imagery“:
Scarily prescient part starts at about the 2.10 minute mark.
“You’ve Got to Realize, That There’s Consequences”Post + Comments (315)
This post is in: Enhanced Protest Techniques, Daydream Believers, DC Press Corpse
From TPM, a “Flashback: Giffords Warned Of ‘Consequences’ To Palin’s Target Imagery“:
Scarily prescient part starts at about the 2.10 minute mark.
“You’ve Got to Realize, That There’s Consequences”Post + Comments (315)
by Kay| 21 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Enhanced Protest Techniques, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It), Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell
Here locally, there are two former Republicans who contact me when they receive missives or screeds that they think I should see. One switched sides in 2003 and the other switched sides in 2007, but both are older men who were GOP donors for years, and they remain on every Republican list.
Both offer good, practical suggestions on how Democrats might respond locally to whatever the GOP is selling nationally, suggestions I find very helpful. I don’t know why they seem to be better at opposition than the local Democrats. You have to know your opponent, I guess.
Yesterday, one of the two received a fax at his workplace (he’s an auctioneer) from our House member, Robert Latta.
Latta ran as a moderate in a (then) poor environment for Republicans, but I have yet to see him break ranks with the GOP on any vote, so whatever he claims to believe is essentially immaterial. He is much an extremist as any random Tea Partier.
The fax is a Constituent Opinion Ballot. It asks whether Latta’s constituents want to repeal the Affordable Care Act. I have gotten communications from his office in the past, but no more. I guess I am no longer a constituent. I seem to have dropped off his list after I placed calls to his office last year, asking his support for the Affordable Care Act. That may well be a coincidence or an error, but, really, if it isn’t, what a coward. My polite phone calls merit removal from his list?
There are two interesting portions of the fake ballot. The first is a quote:
According to a study published last fall, by the time Obamacare is fully implemented in 2017, approximately 7.4 million seniors will have been forced out of their Medicare plan…
There’s the obligatory Medicare scare we’ve gotten used to from these fierce and principled opponents of government-run health care. Except Medicare Advantage. That particular government-run program they like because it costs more than the public program, and they’re deficit hawks, as we all know, because they say they are.
Incidentally, that’s a quote not from Rep. Latta but instead from Rep. Wally Herger (R, CA). Representative Latta apparently said nothing worth repeating on health care in his time in office, so he turned to his colleague Wally for the now-obligatory GOP fear-mongering on Medicare.
The second is this:
GOP leaders pledged to repeal and replace the health care law, but the House will not vote on a separate replacement bill next week. Instead, lawmakers will consider a resolution that instructs three committees to report health care legislation. The resolution sets 12 goals for the bill, including lowering health care costs and premiums, increasing the number of insured Americans and “to provide people with pre-existing conditions access to affordable health care coverage”.
Is that an admission that there are popular parts of the ACA, and Republicans are going to have to pretend they plan to address health care, if only through a vote on a resolution to do something or other, sometime?
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Open Threads
Last night I put up a post about the PBS documentary on Bobby Lee subtitle “At War with his Country… and himself“.
While the doc did touch on some of Lee’s shadow material (like being a violent slave owner quick to the lash) it mostly settled in on a lot of marble polishing. Once again, another opportunity to examine Lee’s feet of clay moves by. As bad as the PBS bow to the myth of Lee was, the discussion in the thread was great fun. I thought the idea from rickstersherpa to have a documentary comparing Robert E. Lee to George Henry Thomas was brilliant. That is something that I would like to see. I bet the story of these two Virginian Civil War Generals and the very different paths they took would make a great book as well. Thomas was by far a better General than Lee and there are many who argue that he was the best that either side produced during the war. That discussion was a fun part of the thread.
Now in my post I started this whole “who is the best general” when I said that Lee was the South’s best General and I further opened the door when I said of Lee that “he was not the best American General ever or even of his time–that honor would have to go to Grant.”.
I think that my praise of Lee as the South’s best General was more rhetorical than factual. A very strong case could be made for some of the others. Lee is the most over-rated figure in American history and I regret letting the myth of him seep into my prose. As for Grant, I still think he was the best General in the War, but the case for Thomas and Sherman are also strong. Sheridan and Farragut deserve a mention as do a few others, but I think that the North ended up with better leadership than the South ever had and that is why the traitors lost. And when one compares Lincoln and his Cabinet to Davis and his it is clear that the North just out thought and out fought the South on almost every level.
And yet, it is the Confederate traitors who are celebrated and the Union heroes who are dissed and forgotten. Such is the strength of the Lost Cause myth and white supremacy in American Culture. Perhaps the coming Sesquicentennial will offer fresh opportunities to relegate these myths to the dustbin of history where they belong. One can hope.
The “best General ever” thread of discussion brought in a few other names including an interesting discussion about Rommel. And if we want to discuss the whole “best General ever” thing–then I think the honors would have to go to Chinggis Khaan (or as he is known in the west, Genghis Khan). The introduction to Jack Weatherford’s excellent book on the Mongal leader (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World) describes Temujin’s accomplishments in American terms:
In American terms, the accomplishment of Genghis Khan might be understood if the United States, instead of being created by a group of educated merchants or wealthy planters, had been founded by one of its illiterate slaves, who, by the sheer force of personality, charisma, and determination, liberated America from foreign rule, united the people, created an alphabet, wrote the constitution, established universal religious freedom, invented a new system of warfare, marched an army from Canada to Brazil, and opened roads of commerce in a free-trade zone that stretched across the continents. On every level and from any perspective, the scale and scope of Genghis Khan’s accomplishments challenge the limits of imagination and tax the resources of scholarly explanation.
If one wants to open the field of play to all recorded human history, it would be hard to top Genghis Khan as a General.
All of this should make for a fine bit of over-night chatter.
Cheers
dengre
Generals and that wanker named Lee (cont.)Post + Comments (145)
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction
Tonight on PBS the American Experience series will debut a new documentary on Robert E. Lee subtitle “At War with his Country… and himself“. In my area it will be on at 9pm.
I’ve recently re-watched the Ken Burns series on the Civil Years from 20 years ago and I was amazed at how hard it worked to continue the mythical fiction of the great ‘Marse Robert’. I wonder if tonight’s take will be any better.
From where I stand, Lee is an extremely over-rated figure in American history. He is the benificiary of the myth of the Lost Cause and that Confederate need to create an icon of ‘honor’ to paper over an effort that was firmly rooted in white supremacy and the expansion of slavery. Lee was and is that icon. TNC a few month’s ago had a great post knocking down the myth of Lee’s opposition to slavery. One hopes that Booby Lee’s full embrace of the dark moral history of the Confederacy will be explored.
As for his leadership as a General, that is another area where the Lost Cause hucksters have stepped up to polish the marble and give it a shine. These carny barkers spun Lee’s early luck in facing a series of incompetent Union Generals–McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, etc.–into a myth of Lee’s military genius and super-duper exceptional skills in all things. Like everything to do with Lost Cause mythology, Lee’s military record does not live up to the hype.
Serious military historians who have examined his record have called it into question, but the myth of his shiny marble is strong. In the early part of the last century, British military historian J. F. C. Fuller wrote on the myths about Grant and Lee. In one book he wrote: “This, then, is their difference: Grant understood the meaning of grand strategy, Lee did not.”
Many others have ‘gone there’ as well. One is Civil War historian and author Edward H. Bonekemper who has been researching the military record of these two Generals for decades. This article, Why Grant Won and Lee Lost (excerpted from a recent book), lays out the basic case to call Lee’s Generalship into question. I wonder if these or any criticisms of Lee’s military accomplishments will be explore or even mentioned. I expect that the marble is just way too polished for that.
And as for Lee’s post-war honor, I think that one only has to look at the way that Lee hung Longstreet out to dry to call that myth into question. When Lost Causers were attacking Longstreet in the Reconstruction years Longstreet wrote Lee and asked him to publicly set the record straight, Lee kept silent and let the attacks continue. An honorable man would have gotten his old comrade’s back, Lee let him dangle.
Lee is a complicated figure. To be sure, he was the South’s best General, but he was never the Nation’s best General–and never will be. He is a man who committed treason. He is a man who fought for slavery and white supremacy. He is a man with the blood of tens of thousands of dead men splattered upon his hands, his honor and his name. Hero is the wrong word for such a figure in history.
Over the years he has been made into a demi-God of white supremacists. His myth has been effectively packaged and sold. And while Lee did have some skill, some great days, and a lot of luck in his early opponents, he was not the best American General ever or even of his time–that honor would have to go to Grant.
It will be interesting to see if his myth is examined in the documentary tonight or whether old Master Robert’s marble legend gets yet another polish.
Cheers
dengre
by Dennis G.| 43 Comments
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Assholes
A lot has already been written about Haley Barbour’s recollections of how the Civil Rights Era was not as bad as some folks make it out to be. Most comments have focused on the Old Nit Diddler’s praise of the very racist White Citizens’ Council of his home town. As the heat was turned up, Haley made a half-hearted effort to walk back of his statement–calling out the WCC as indefensible while still maintaining that the Yazoo, Mississippi of his youth wasn’t that bad.
And as Matthew Cooper points out today, that is the point. Haley Barbour is a smart political operator. He knows that any run he makes for the White House will be hampered by his long history as an old Southern White guy with a dubious–at best–record on race relations and his history of racist comments. If this issue is decided on facts that can be checked then Haley’s run for the White House is toast. Fortunately for Haley the modern so-called ‘Conservative’ movement has found a way to get around ‘facts’. You just change the narrative by replacing facts with freshly crafted memories designed to spin myths into partisan litmus tests.
We live in a Nation where to be a ‘good conservative’ now means that you take facts and reality as suspect until you get your talking points that give you the official Republican Confederate Party line. This is how 40% of Americans believe that the Flintstones was a documentary, or think the massive scientific evidence supporting climate change is a hoax. Haley knows that the propaganda of the Wingnutopia Wurlitzer is strong enough to get their gullible followers to believe absolute bullshit as fact. Hell, they just had their “Government Takeover” talking point named “Lie of the Year” (an award Haley and his Wing-nut pals seem to win every year).
So as Cooper astutely notes, Barbour is bringing up his recovered memories of his white privileged upbringing as a way to change the narrative:
Those who had opposed the Civil Rights Act at the time—figures ranging from Democrats like the late Sen. Robert Byrd to Republicans such as former President George H.W. Bush—later recanted their previous positions and embraced the landmark statute.
Ironically, at a time when the country has its first African-American president, that consensus is showing some signs of cracking. [snip]
But whatever political damage Barbour has or hasn’t suffered, his comments are part of a larger reexamination of the period by Republicans who deviate from the traditional civil-rights consensus.
The goal here is to change the National memory of the Civil Rights struggle to have been about something other than a fight against white supremacy in America. The goal is to muddy the memory and replace it with a new narrative. In Haley’s retelling of history, all folks in the South–black and white–worked together against the KKK and Northern Agitators to prevent violence. And if it wasn’t for those two groups everything would have been fine.
Next, I imagine the idea that the Civil Right struggles were just about State’s Rights and that segregation and racism had nothing to do with it will become one of those Republican articles of faith that one must swear by to get elected to anything.
The Old Nit Diddler is leading the effort to mainstream this revisionist history. If the Wingnutopia Wurlitzer comes to his aid we can expect by next December that 40% of Americans will believe that Whites were the real victims of the Civil Rights Era, that things were better before Dr. King got all uppity and that the entire issue was really about States Rights. Hell, 20% or more already believe that crap, but Haley’s effort is to move this radical belief to a ‘Fair and Balanced’ mainstream idea that is open to reasonable debate and various interpretations of fact memory.
This is an old Confederate play. This is how they changed the narrative of the Civil War and Reconstruction into the myth of the Lost Cause and the fable of States Rights. This is why slavery as the cause of the War is still questioned by the ignorant, the foolish and the cynical.
Barbour’s run for the White House isn’t toast and if he can succeed in making our memory of the Civil Rights Era into just another fantasy-based partisan shit fight, he might just rise to the top of the field as the last White Man standing.
Cheers
dengre
by Dennis G.| 19 Comments
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Assholes
That old Nit Diddler, Governor Haley Barbour, has had another day of folks reacting to his false memories of his life and times.
It seems that old Southern white guys can still pay a small price for whitewashing their personal history and downplaying the reaction by their fellow Southern white guys to the Civil Rights movement. Haley tried to walk it back today by saying that he now thinks the White Citizens’ Councils were “indefensible”. And Pravda on the Potomac is reporting that the Nit Diddler may give his own “Race Speech”. If this happens you can expect a symphony of dog whistles designed as a white counterpoint to Obama’s 2008 speech and fresh white victim-hood talking points for the 2012 campaign. I expect the press will lap that gruel up.
Still, I could be surprised.
What Haley needs is a history lesson.
TPM had one that explained how the WCC drove out the KKK because they did not want the competition for organizing white resistance.
But if Haley wants to remember or learn what his Yazoo City was really doing
during the Civil Rights era he could get a quick lessen from Cynic over at TNC’s place. This explains how the target of Yazoo’s white business leaders wasn’t the KKK but the NAACP and black folks trying to exercise their right to vote and get their children a decent education:
If Barbour wants to praise the good people of Yazoo City for their extraordinary restraint in not employing violence as they hounded from their community those black parents brave enough to demand a decent education for their children; to laud their public disavowal of the local Klan even as they turned a blind eye to its activities; or to extol their grudging cession of the inevitability of court-ordered integration after fifteen years of stalling, for its absence of lynchings or riots, that’s his prerogative. For the rest of us, though, Yazoo City should serve as a poignant reminder that the civil rights struggle really was “that bad.”
For context and a deeper understanding, Haley should read Ta-Nehisi Coates as he prepares for any ‘race speech’. He should memorize this post. I encourage you to read it as well. This snip gives one a brief idea of why:
He still proudly displays the flag of that cause, the same flag that authored the death of more American soldiers than Vietnam, World War I and World War II combined, the death of Lincoln, and the deaths of countless freedmen and descendants of freedman. In short, Barbour embraces the flag of America’s most prodigious white supremacists, and foremost home-grown terrorists. Of all the United States, Mississippi has the highest percentage of African-Americans. Haley Barbour, evidently, knows very little of their history. Indeed, there may not be a governor more ignorant of his constituents in all this great land.
This should encourage anybody to dig for the truth–even the old Nit Diddler himself. And if you dig, you find that Barbour if full of shit. He fondly remembers his days in Yazoo as being great. Of course he does, but it is a false memory. The real reason life in old Yazoo was good for Haley was–in the words of one J. Cole–“BECAUSE YOU’RE FUCKING WHITE, ASSHOLE.”
Cheers
dengre
ps, it looks like some folks pissed on last night’s Celebration of Treason. Good for them.
by Dennis G.| 80 Comments
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Assholes
So tonight, the Sons of Confederate Veterans are celebrating slavery, racism and their culture of white supremacy down in South Carolina. The NAACP will be protesting the SCV’s celebration of a hate-filled ideology and as the local Charleston paper pointed out the Civil War is nothing to celebrate. But the SCV is an organization dedicated to celebrating North American terrorists and American traitors–so their embrace of racism, slavery and hate is just part of their initiation rites.
Still, it is decidedly unAmerican.
Now, we can be sure that the SCV and other Confederate Party dead-enders will deny the connection and continue their spinning of the reasons that they started the Civil War. For over 146 years, they have been selling the idea that slavery and racism were just minor factors inspiring the treason of their Confederate ancestors. That is, of course, bullshit.
And so, to help the SCV with their dance of hate this evening, I offer the following graphic:
Cheers
dengre
[Hat tip to Joe from Lowell for the idea and Sly for inspiration]