Statues, Kings, and Presidents

The Founding Fathers of the American Revolution knew that if they lost, they would be hanged for treason, for rebelling against the British. They were British subjects in a British colony ruled by a British king. Our Founding Fathers, led by General George Washington, won the Revolutionary War against, at the time, the most powerful country in the world. Therefore, they were not hanged for committing treason against Britain. The American rebels were victorious and won. America was then no longer part of the British Empire.

The ignorant Americans who are making specious arguments against pulling down Civil War statues -- statues of the men who committed treason against the United States, even Robt. E. Lee -- apparently don't understand much about their own American history. Pulling down the statues of the rebel forces, the Confederates who made war against the United States of America, has nothing to do with punishing slavers or people who are anti-gay, or US senators who once were part of the KKK, or any other foolish comparison. The statues of the military men who fought against the USA and with the CSA committed treason. I don't know of any other country in the world where it glorifies military men who rebelled against it in a war and then lost that war.

Another fact that the aggrieved people making those argument need to know is that those statues were erected not after the South lost the Civil War, but during the Jim Crow era as a way of keeping African-Americans who won emancipation in their place and reminded of their status as second class citizens who would be hunted down and murdered by the KKK for any breach of those Jim Crow laws, real or imagined.

We know that the people who instituted those laws were Southern Democrats, but we also know that as soon as the Civil Right Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed during LBJ's administration, those very same Dixicrats/Democrats abandoned the party and were welcomed into the Republican Party and have been there ever since. Same bigotries, different party name.

Tearing down Confederate military statues will not wipe out anyone's history, as our ignorant POTUS suggested. Getting rid of those monuments will stop doing honor to the people who committed treason against the United States of America.

From PM Carpenter:



Trump's ground is shifting 

 "Something is changing. There are shifts all around, portending an enlightened permanency. They're in the air, on the air, in print and in polling — and they're screaming that this country has just about had it with Trump. Irrevocably. A small core of the fanatically loyal will hang on till the bitter end, of course, but an end there shall be, in either resignation or impeachment. Trump's party is already disgraced beyond redemption, but ultimately his loyal core will shrink to a stat of dismissibility — and then the GOP will pretend it's a party of noble indignation and inviolable standards. After all of Trump's lies and outrages and ineptitude and obstructions Screen Shot 2017-08-18 at 4.45.15 AMof justice, one would have thought that Charlottesville would have been the end. It was instead just another beginning, but this beginning appears to be one of permanent shifts."

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 What is Trump's response to all the bleakness contained in all these shifts? Why, it's to tweet about the "beauty" of memorials to 19th-century traitors. He has reduced himself to the further irreducible: His freshly emphasized platform is that of neo-Confederacy and paeans to blood-and-soil nationalism. As noted, the 20s are beckoning — because his shtick of perpetual outrage is getting old to all those beyond the psychologically diseased and deliriously loyal. Except in the most scarlet of congressional districts, Trump's support will wither to the point of diminishing returns for Republican congressfolk. And then the beginning will morph into the end; in fact, the portentous shifts are already in progress."