Honorless

Cowboy Confessional ^ | 5/28/2012 | Guy Smith

[guyshomenet]

“Honour was honour, it clothed a man better than a fine jacket before the eyes of his neighbors.”

This passage from John Prebble’s Culloden explains why Barack Obama has lost the south and may from that lose reelection.

Prebble was writing about Scottish Highlanders in the age of Jacobite revolution. Among the tribes of Scotland, and in their modern mindset, honor is elemental. In societies that rely on mutual trust to survive, honor is essential to commerce, neighborly relations and commitments. To live in a land where one protects his honor and demands honorable actions from all others, to forsake that substance means to lose human standing.

After The 45, once the English had raped and hung Scots, burned their homes and salted their fields, many Highlanders fled for the New World, settling largely in the south. The Smokey Mountains and Appalachian terrain suited them. Highlanders brought their families who were in taters and their honor which was still intact. This contributed to the widespread sense of honor that seeps into most southern men’s blood to this day (and with Dixiecrats occupying more and more terra firma, honor is rapidly solidifying). The Southern code of honor requires treating everyone with respect until they prove unworthy, and nothing makes a man more unworthy than to be dishonorable.

This explains why Obama has no traction below Washington D.C.

Honor requires many things, and in no small part is facilitated by leaving your neighbors alone while demanding the same. It is expected to insist others behave properly in public, but it is utterly inappropriate to tell them what to do in their homes or with their money. It is honorable to give generously to charity and loathsome to demand tribute to government run charities. It is honorable to stand for office on the promise to tame government and make it your servant, and vile to use government to enslave.

As is obvious, every Obama policy is repugnant to Southern honor, which explains that large swath of red in the latest Election Projection presidential polling map.

Southerners recognize government as necessary yet prone to abuse. Obama, in his election year vow to “make government cool again” did the opposite by force feeding it to an unwilling American public. Enacting Obamacare when as much as 69% of the public opposed it, reneging on his vow to use only public financing for his election, to spend nearly a trillion dollars promising economic revival but actually buying government union votes with the lucre, to squander taxes on energy policy “investments” with unworthy and dishonorable campaign donors … well, the pattern emerges. No action, regardless of how noble it was spun, masked Obama’s deeply dishonorable deeds.

In the age of the citizen media, such disreputable doings were instantly revealed, and people with honor abandoned Obama.

It is agonizing to write this on Memorial Day, when tribute is paid to those who proved they possessed the ultimate in honor. The contrast is too sharp, the divide too clear. Fallen warriors gave their very being to preserve a land dedicated to the most honorable notion, that people must be free. That their country is now oppressed by a man unfamiliar with honor, unacquainted with universal freedom, devoid of the character content that another Southerner deemed sacred – this situation is our collective moment of dishonor.

[Hieronymus]

“brought their families who were in taters”

---

I guess that makes them Scots-Irish, as this description fits them to a “t”.

[MHGinTN]

A man who is caught lying daily has no honor, and is nothing above despicable. Sadly, such is what democrats worship, the despicable with no honor. It is counted a plus by democrat voters that their little barry bastard commie can lie so openly and the media ignore it or infact honor the lies.

[James C. Bennett]

LOL!

[MHGinTN]

Leave out one “T” and ‘they’ never let you forget it! ... Now for a mug of tea, too.

[onona]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjZ3hxkgWhA

They call me “Tater Salad”

[MHGinTN]

My son's nickname in High School was ‘Tater’. In the South, that's not a pejorative.

[onona]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neUaSTSKFZc&feature=fvwrel

Actually, this is the real “Tater Salad” clip; the previous was just random Ron White :)

[I still care]

“Honor requires many things, and in no small part is facilitated by leaving your neighbors alone while demanding the same. It is expected to insist others behave properly in public, but it is utterly inappropriate to tell them what to do in their homes or with their money. It is honorable to give generously to charity and loathsome to demand tribute to government run charities. It is honorable to stand for office on the promise to tame government and make it your servant, and vile to use government to enslave.”

Like that part.

However, I keep getting this image of Scots buried in mounds of potatoes....

[Biggirl]

Learned a bit more about American history today.

[tumblindice]

From the film, “Rob Roy”:

Son: Father, will MacGregors ever be kings again?

Rob: All men with honor are kings, but not all kings have honor.

Son: What is honor?

Rob: Honor is what no man can give you and none can take away. Honor is a gift man gives himself.

Son: Do women have it?

Rob: Women are the heart of honor, and we cherish and protect it in them. You must never mistreat a woman or malign a man, nor stand by and see another do so.

Son: How do you know if you have it?

Rob: Never worry on the getting of it. It grows in you and speaks to you. All you need do is listen.

[Verginius Rufus]

There were some immigrants directly from Scotland in the colonies, but they were mainly "Scots-Irish" who were by origin from the Lowlands, not the Highlands. I remember reading about Ayrshire (Lowland Scotland) having suffered from occupation by the "Highland Host" during one period of conflict. Both groups had reason to be anti-English by the 1770s in the colonies.

The states where Obama has done poorly with Democrat primary voters have a lot of people of Scots-Irish descent. That's also true in Pennsylvania, where he struggled against Hillary in 2008. As Carville has said, Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle. The Democrats usually carry Pennsylvania in the presidential elections but only because of the two big cities.

Of course the Scots-Irish were also strong on the concept of honor.