News To Me

The best thing I've come across in a long time.

From HuffPo (hey - even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while):

A native Virginian, a railroad magnate, a slaveholder, and an ardent secessionist, Mahone served in the Confederate army throughout the war. He was one of the Army of Northern Virginia’s most able commanders, distinguishing himself particularly in the summer of 1864 at the Battle of the Crater outside Petersburg. After the war, Robert E. Lee recalled that, when contemplating a successor, he thought that Mahone “had developed the highest qualities for organization and command.”

How did such a high-ranking Confederate commander wind up missing in action in a Charleston gift shop? Not, I think, by accident.

By now, Americans interested in the Confederate monument removal project have had it drilled into them that the monuments were erected decades after the end of the Civil War as testimonies to white supremacy in all its various manifestations: segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, peonage, and second-class citizenship across the board. But the monuments were not merely commemorative. They were designed to conceal a past that their designers wanted to suppress. That past was the period after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow, years in which African Americans in the former Confederacy exercised political power, ran for public office, published newspapers, marched as militias, ran businesses, organized voluntary associations, built schools and churches: a time, in other words, when they participated as full members of society.

Maj Gen William Mahone, CSA

Some Hard Truth

The fight for what's right continues apace.

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic:

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.
--and--

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

To describe this man as American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility towards the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.

There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’ integrated police force in battle against white supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans; there are no statues of Longstreet anywhere in the American South. Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6’2” Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace.

The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.

The question is why anyone else would.

It's A Wonderment

When Paul Ryan says killing Obamacare is an act of mercy, why don't the rubes translate that as "the 9 most terrifying words in the English language"?

Rudy Needs Work

So, Rudy Giuliani went off again, peddling his new and improved 9/11 crap about how there were no Extreme Islamic Terrorism Attacks in the 8 years before Obama and Hillary.

BTW, here's not-a-picture of Rudy as he's not walking around lower Manhattan not on 9-11-2001 as he's not trying to reassure New Yorkers about what horrible things have not happened during a GOP president's administration because, of course, history won't actually begin until Jan 20, 2009.

Can't believe anybody hasta do this.  What the fuck is wrong with these people?

The American ISIS

...meets the Islamic Klan(?)

Whatever I'm doing on any given Saturday morning isn't more important or educational than listening to The Professional Left podcast from driftglass and BlueGal.

Starting at about 37:00, they get to the meat of something that sounds about right.  Even if it does end up seeming a little obvious, when somebody connects a coupla dots for me, and there's the sound of a click in the upper part of my brain, I know I've become aware of something worth learning about.

Anyway, listen to it and then tell me there's nothing to worry about with something like the Bullshit Revisionist History Curriculum in Colorado (eg) right now.

It's important to believe as many true things as possible, and to not believe as many false things as possible. (paraphrasing Matt Dillahunty)

Today's Bile Venting

I'm not crazy about every little thought-item that pops outa this guys head, but sometimes, ya just gotta lance that carbuncle and squeeze it all out.

Here's the rant from The Rude Pundit that got him kinda "censured" by a few of the more sensitive blog-izens:

6/18/2014

Father and Daughter Cheney Can Go Suck a Dick

Let's state this as plainly as possible: The Iraq "war" was a complete and total waste. It was completely and totally worthless. The United States and the rest of the world would be in better shape if Saddam Hussein were still in power. Every life lost was for nothing. Every limb, every scar was for nothing. Every veteran who faces the unending nightmare of PTSD does so for nothing. Let's just stop fucking pretending anything else. Let's grow up a little and face that fact. Let's look the families of the dead in the eyes and tell them the truth.

The invasion of Iraq was the heaving fuck of a bloated superpower dragging its gut over to pump away because it could. And most everyone just went along with it, applauding each "victory" like it was the motherfucking Battle of Gettysburg. All that's left behind is the giant cosmic fucking joke that is a United States made weaker by wasting trillions of dollars on the mad ego trip of acid-blinded utopians and an Iraq that is exploding like a bottle of soda shaken by a paint mixer and uncapped by a gun.

And we need to bring former Vice President Dick Cheney before those families and have him tell the truth: "We did it for the dollars. We went to war with Iraq because war profiteering was the easiest goddamn way to enrich already rich people, like my friends at Halliburton. It was robbery and we named it 'patriotism.' It was extortion and we called it 'honor.'" Then, we should let the families do what they want. Maybe they'd let him go. Maybe they'd tear him limb from hideous limb. Maybe they'd rip out his machine heart and fuck the hole left behind, jizzing into his sternum.

If nothing else, it would stop him from co-signing an editorial from him and his heinous daughter-beast, Liz, like the one that ran in the Wall Street Journal today. In it, Cheney and Cheney pretty much say that President Obama is an America-hating cocksucker who wants our enemies to win and who is too stupid to understand jackshit about the real world, the world that Cheney (Dick) understands is full of threats without understanding that they are threats he created.

Here, in one paragraph, is enough rage fuel to keep your house running for months: "Our president doesn't seem to [care]. Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing. He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America."

The first thing that comes to mind is "Golfing? Really, you fucking piece of frog shit and its daughter? You are criticizing a president for golfing?" But what the paragraph is really saying is that Obama doesn't care if the United States is attacked by "terrorists."

And then: "Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch. Indeed, the speed of the terrorists' takeover of territory in Iraq has been matched only by the speed of American decline on his watch." Dick Cheney bears no blame for the "decline" of America, oh, no. Not the vice president of an administration that wrecked the economy.

The Rude Pundit imagines Dick Cheney dictating this to Liz Cheney, his fingers too slickened by the viscous goo that comprises what we might call his skin, a gelatinous semi-human form that doesn't so much as move as undulate, that doesn't so much as eat as absorb, so that one can place, say, a kitten or a Pakistani child on his globular stomach and it will be digested immediately, without chewing, without swallowing. Liz Cheney, meanwhile, secretly turns the egg vibrator in her snatch up to "WMD," and she can barely pound out the words her father slurps out for need of crying out in orgasmic glee.

The two of them actually have the audacity to speak out and call Obama's policy toward Iraq "willfully blind," as if Obama is deliberately attempting to undermine some great and mighty victory in Iraq. That's as much living in a fantasy as those who say, "Well, at least we got rid of Saddam."

That Dick Cheney is still alive is a demonstration that either there is no God or that God said, "Fuck it" and walked away a long time ago.

- See more at: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com

Yesterday's History

Think IEDs and Ethnic/Sectarian Violence are either new or somehow run contrary to our glorious American heritage?  Think again.

Wikipedia:

In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton,[1] Herman Frank Cash, and Robert Chambliss, members of United Klans of America, aKu Klux Klan group, planted a box of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the church, near the basement.[2] At about 10:22 a.m., twenty-six children were walking into the basement assembly room to prepare for the sermon entitled “The Love That Forgives,” when the bomb exploded.[3][4] Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14), were killed in the attack,[5] and 22 additional people were injured, one of whom was Addie Mae Collins' younger sister, Sarah.[6] The explosion blew a hole in the church's rear wall, destroyed the back steps and all but one stained-glass window, which showed Christ leading a group of little children.[7]

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 2005

Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Birmingham was a violent city and was nicknamed “Bombingham”, because the city had experienced more than 50 bombings in black institutions and homes since World War I.[8] Only a week before the bombing Wallace had told The New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a "few first-class funerals."[9]

A witness identified Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested but only charged with possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. On October 8, 1963, Chambliss received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite.[10] At the time, no federal charges were filed on Chambliss.[11]

The case was unsolved until Bill Baxley was elected Attorney General of Alabama. He requested the original Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the case and discovered that the FBI had accumulated evidence against the named suspects that had not been revealed to the prosecutors by order of J. Edgar Hoover. The files were used to reopen the case in 1971.[12]

In November 1977, the seemingly forgotten case of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing was brought to Court, where Chambliss, now aged 73, was tried once again and was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.[13] Chambliss died in Lloyd Noland Hospital and Health Center on October 29, 1985.[14]

On May 18, 2000, the FBI announced that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing had been carried out by the Ku Klux Klan splinter group the Cahaba Boys. It was claimed that four men, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry had been responsible for the crime.[15] Cash was dead but Blanton and Cherry were arrested, and both have since been tried and convicted.[16]

It seems like the calendar is filling up with anniversaries of the incredibly shitty things we do to each other - mostly done in the name of something that's supposed to be holy or honorable or in our best interests as one "nation" or another.

Not That Anybody Noticed

It seems like we're so stuck in "Yay Us" mode, that we can't even acknowledge reality.

And sometimes it's like we don't have the confidence (or maybe the courage?) we need to cut thru the politics to get at the truth.

If I can't trust The Red Team or The Blue Team not to make it about nothing but politics, how are we supposed to hold people in the Junior Bush Administration accountable for the horrors of this last decade?  And how do we demand that Obama's Admin stop whatever they're doing to continue those horrors - making it even harder to put an end to it all?

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

I dunno - but i think refusing to acknowledge the reality of how fucked up we let ourselves get is actually what keeps us stuck in "Yay Us" mode.  And it appears we'll be there for a while longer.

Chris Hedges

Posted at truthdig:

The rewriting of history in the South is a retreat by beleaguered whites into a mythical self-glorification. I witnessed a similar retreat during the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As Yugoslavia’s economy deteriorated, ethnic groups built fantasies of a glorious past that became a substitute for history. They sought to remove, through exclusion and finally violence, competing ethnicities to restore this mythological past. The embrace by nationalist groups of a nonreality-based belief system made communication with other ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural language. There was no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth. A similar disconnect was illustrated last week in Memphis when the chairman of the city’s parks committee, William Boyd, informed the council that Forrest “promoted progress for black people in this country after the war.” Boyd argued that the KKK was “more of a social club” at its inception and didn’t begin carrying out “bad and horrific things” until it reconstituted itself with the rise of the modern civil rights movement. 

Modern Methods

Actually, I don't really know how modern it is, but Repubs have developed an extremely effective approach to convincing people of the "rightness" of their political views.

The one overarching objective of this process is to turn somebody into somebody he's not.

eg 1:
Sarah Palin had no real chops as a politician, and certainly no great knowledge as a citizen (or as a human being for that matter), but the GOP needed us to think she was ready to serve as VP so they mounted an all-out campaign to turn her into some kind of Statesman Savant.

eg 2:
John Kerry is a mostly honorable guy and (as much as possible, I think) a legitimate war hero, but the GOP couldn't afford direct comparisons between him and W, so in 2004 they set about turning Kerry into a French-ified flip-flopping coward who lied about his war record to get medals blah blah blah.

This shit works because too many of us just don't have the time or the inclination to try to sort it out and find what the truth really is.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."
Thomas Paine

Sounds good, doesn't it?  Now, maybe you trust me to verify the stuff I put in here and maybe you don't, but how many people are going to look at that quote and just accept it at face value, versus the ones who'll take 45 seconds to Google it and at least make a cursory effort to check it out?

Enter Thomas Jefferson.  Even the the jerkiest of "conservative" jerks know they're not gonna make it to where they wanna go by sliming Tommy Jeff, so there's an ongoing effort on the part of the Wingnuts to co-opt Jefferson, and turn him into a guy who said things that seem to support the Christianists' point of view.

Some of what Mr Jefferson actually had to say:

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purposes."

"The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind."

"Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."

 Some of the bullshit they want you to buy:

"Sir, no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man, and I as chief magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example." monticell.org

"Without God, liberty will not last." monticello.org

 "The Bible is the source of liberty" monticello.org

Take nothing for granted.  Always check, especially when it seems this or that "quotation" attributed to a "Founding Father" seems to be in near-perfect alignment with any particular ideology.  Let's be careful out there.

Nostalgia Warp

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR, and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes?  Yeah.. Me neither.

Say What?`

This is what passed for "thinking" in the Jr Bush administration.

"We were not there in Afghanistan to eradicate corruption, or to end poppy cultivation. We were not there to take ownership of Afghanistan’s problems, tempting though it was for Americans of goodwill. If, as some have contended, we never had a plan for full-fledged nation building, or that we under-resourced such a plan, they were certainly correct. We did not go there to bring prosperity to every corner of Afghanistan. Our more modest goal was to rid Afghanistan of al Qaeda, and replace their Taliban hosts with a government that would not harbor terrorists... " - Donald Rumsfeld; pg 682 of his memoir.

Look, Don - you really can't accomplish the 2 things you say we went there to do, without doing the things you say we didn't go there to do.

I think you should continue your service to this great country of ours by scheduling a nice long trip to Spain as soon as you can manage it.  They'll take really good care of you.

fuckin' putz