Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

~~~

~~~

Friday, August 18, 2017

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."

[skip]


 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."

6 comments:

Shaw Kenawe said...

Trump has even lost The Federalist, a conservative and libertarian publication:

Donald Trump Needs To Not Be President Yesterday

We're done with the 'take what we can get' phase of Donald Trump's administration. It's time for the 'he's a disaster and needs to go' phase.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Newsweek:

IMPEACHING TRUMP MAY NOT BE NECESSARY TO REMOVE HIM FROM THE WHITE HOUSE

Shaw Kenawe said...

Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall:

Every president has these industry councils like the ones we’ve been talking about in recent days. They range from meaningless to not terribly important. They’re mainly symbolic. With everything that’s happened in recent days, I don’t want to make it out like the decisions of a small number of CEOs is the biggest news. Still, we should recognize that it is entirely unprecedented to have a sitting president become so toxic that corporate America feels unable to publicly associate with him. That is totally, totally new territory.

A second point is that we seem to be moving rapidly toward a public consensus, or rather a consensus among prominent Republicans, that the President needs to apologize or at least clearly contradict his earlier statements. That’s the gist of what Mitt Romney is saying this morning, though I don’t want to overestimate how much significance Romney has in the current GOP and certainly not in Trump’s part of it. But of course Trump is constitutionally, psychologically incapable of apologizing. He may be willing to read out a statement through gritted teeth. But no more than that.

That kind of true shift of direction is beyond impossible for Trump. People are who they are. They don’t change.

In other words, it’s hard to see quite where this goes. Adam Smith said there’s a lot of ruin in a nation. There’s a lot of ruin in a presidency too. Somehow this will keep moving forward. But it does seem like this has driven damage of a kind we have not seen to date during Trump’s presidency.

Lady Pinkbottom said...

STEVE BANNON IS OUT. Could that help Trump FINALLY at least start acting dignified? Not to be confused with losing his ideology or platform, of course, which is being a Nazi sympathizer!

We wouldn't want the "Going To Be Dignified" Trump to lose that! Also, we don't want him to lose the way he mocks disabled people, POWs, Purple Heart recipients, and of course, the most dignified thing of all: Saying he likes to grab ladies' genitals because he's a STAR! We don't want to lose the POTUS who makes my beating heart flutter everytime he encourages Nazis by saying they're very fine people!

Steve Bannon may be gone, but his loyalty to his White Supremacist fans will never be forgotten. Godspeed, Mr. Bannon. Your exceptionally lovely looks and influence on President Trump's excellent presidency will be missed!

President Trump is now, finally, and at last, going to be great. No. Really. He's going to be so dignified!

Now excuse me while I go back to reading the part in the Bible where Jesus blesses the seven loaves of delicious Nazi bread.

Paula said...

The president this morning, on Twitter, is bitching and man-baby crying about how every time a Confederate monument comes down, a Nazi angel gets punched in the dick. SAD!

Anonymous said...

I wonder who Trump will replace Bannon with. David Duke?