Posted on 10/14/2013 10:04:52 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Nothing says “patriot” like waving around the Battle Flag of the Confederacy in front of the White House.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around this scene: Yesterday, in Washington, a group of angry white people—it was billed as the “Million Vet March” but numbered in the hundreds, maybe the thousands, and who knows how many were actual veterans—led by Tea Party-aligned Texas senator Ted Cruz and former half-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin, marched on the Lincoln and World War II memorials, tearing down the barricades and demanding that President Obama reopen these sites, which, of course, are closed because of the shutdown that Cruz initiated two weeks ago. As Henry Blodget, the CEO of Business Insider, tweeted:
Henry Blodget @hblodget
Do I have this right? The Republicans closed a war
memorial so they could heroically break into it?
4:54 PM - 13 Oct 2013
677 Retweets 236 favorites
And then Larry Klayman, a right-wing activist best known as a merciless gadfly during the Clinton administration, got up and said this:
I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.
Klayman, the CNN story fails to note, has convened—in Florida, no less!—what he calls a “citizens grand jury” that “convicted” Barack Obama and “sentenced” him to 10 years in prison for forging his birth certificate.
Ted Cruz speaking in front of a flag for the militia group Oath Keepers.
And then Ted Cruz, an actual elected official thought to be campaigning for the presidency of the United States of America, speaking in front of a flag for the radical right-wing militia group Oath Keepers, said this:
Why is the federal government spending so much money to erect barricades to keep veterans out of this memorial?
And then Sarah Palin, the Alaska snowbilly grifter, said this as protesters yelled at horseback police:
You look around though and you see these barricades and you have to ask yourself, is this any way that a commander in chief would show his respect, his gratitude to our military? This is a matter of shutdown priorities.
And then the lot of them, having knocked over the barricades and chanted at Barack Obama to “tear down this wall” because they’re incurable dupes who’ve been spoon-fed this horseshit by Cruz and Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and the rest of those Tea Party charlatans, decided to march down to the White House, where they waved Gadsden flags (and in one case a Confederate flag) and demanded that Obama resign or be impeached for the high crime of … eff it, does it really matter anymore?
A few caveats before we proceed: 1) One jackass waving a rebel flag or an Oath Keepers flag doesn’t mean that all these demonstrators are racists and/or right-wing militia members. 2) That these memorials have been closed because of the shutdown is of course unfortunate, but no less unfortunate than kids kicked out of Head Start or poor people’s food stamps being cut off or vital scientific research being abandoned or the veterans’ benefits that may run out at month’s end or any of the real, deleterious consequences of the Tea Party’s temper tantrum. 3) Make no mistake: This is a Republican shutdown. In fact, just before the government ran out of funds, House Republicans quietly changed the rules to ensure that a shutdown happened—and that any proposal to reopen the government would come directly from their leaders.
We’re now entering Week 3 of the shutdown. This Thursday the government will run out of borrowing ability and begin to default on its debts, with potentially cataclysmic repercussions around the world, unless Congress raises the debt ceiling. (This is true whether Ted Yoho believes it or not.)
All of this started, if you’ll recall, because a subset of radical conservatives were unwilling to abide by the judgment of the American people—who just last year elected a center-left, pro-Obamacare, pro–higher taxes, pro–higher spending president over a conservative who campaigned against all those things; it’s worth noting, too, that the Democratic Party won seats in the Senate and 1.5 million more votes in the House than the Republicans did—and threatened to blow up the government, and perhaps the world economy, if they didn’t get their way.
This all sounds very familiar.
I’ve been reading Year of Meteors, a very excellent history of the election of 1860—the one that produced Abraham Lincoln and led to the Civil War. And in there is the story of former Alabama congressman William Lowndes Yancey, the man perhaps most singularly responsible for the Civil War. He only served four years in Congress, from 1844 to 1848, but in that congressional career he “eschewed all compromise in favor of absolute southern privilege. His rigid positions won him few allies in Washington…” (Ahem, Mr. Cruz.)
Back in Alabama, Yancey—who once killed an unarmed man in a bar fight, only to be pardoned after serving three months—remained a Democratic Party power-player, “the prince of the fire-eaters,” an extremist who wanted to expand slavery to the West, as well as to reopen the Atlantic slave trade that had been shut down in 1807. By 1858 he had embraced secession full-bore, having (probably correctly) decided that the North would eventually outnumber the South and the abolitionists and those who wanted to restrain the planter class’s “peculiar institution” to its current geography would, in time, prevail, slowly depriving slavery of oxygen and leading to its demise.
Southern fire-eaters were a minority of the Democratic Party back then. The Democratic president was a northerner, albeit from the border state of Pennsylvania. The Democratic frontrunner heading into the election was a northerner, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. These men catered to the southerners’ demands—much the way that John Boehner today caters to the Tea Party’s demands—but (also similarly) the southerners’ didn’t trust their total commitment.
Long story short: Yancey decided that democracy was no longer working for him, so he sabotaged his own party to prevent Douglas from receiving the nomination and ensure that a hated Republican would win the election—which, as he figured, would presage secession. (He and other secessionists did not anticipate the Union fighting a war to bring them back.) So the Alabama delegation to the national committee insisted that the party stake out a radical pro-slavery platform. He also—in a move reminiscent of Cruz’s assertion that Republicans had “compromised” by only insisting on the defunding of Obamacare and not its repeal—told the Democratic National Committee that this platform “[was] not even all that Alabama ask[ed].”
(If anyone ever tells you the Civil War was not about slavery, read him this quote from Yancey’s 90-minute speech: “We want negroes cheap, and we want a sufficiency of them, so as to supply the cotton demand of the whole world.”)
Douglas was the candidate backed by the majority of delegates, but under party rules he needed two-thirds support to be the nominee. The South, led by Yancey and the fire-eaters, would not relent, and in the end, they got what they wanted: The party split, Lincoln won the election and the South quickly seceded. Democracy didn’t work they way the liked, so they took their ball and went home.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The issues are different today, of course. I suspect even that guy waving the Confederate flag in front of the White House yesterday doesn’t want a return to slavery and secession, and none of even the most radical Tea Partiers have publicly gone down that road (that I’m aware of). We’ll leave the undertones of racism in the Tea Party movement for another time.
It’s the underlying attitude in both of these stories that is so striking: The disrespect for democratic norms, the willingness to assert that you will burn the government to the ground if your demands go unmet—demands that you cannot achieve through the normal order of things. And so we see the same sort of flailing anger, the same absolutism, the same arrogance, the same denunciations of those who seek moderation or compromise.
This week that attitude has taken us to the precipice of the abyss. And once again, its epicenter is firmly within the Deep South, within a political party that celebrates its own radicalism and ignorance. Check out this interview with Norm Ornstein, a scholar with the quite-conservative American Enterprise Institute who has been critical of congressional Republicans:
But even there, you know, another piece that I wrote a couple of weeks back now on how there are five Republican parties, a House and Senate and presidential one, but also a Southern and non-Southern party. The bottom line was that it’s the House party and the Southern party, which are the dominant forces out there; they are the ones driving the dialogue. And the fact is that in the House party you’ve got people who come from homogeneous echo chambers in their districts and are concerned, most of them, only about primaries. The Southern party has a very different worldview from the rest of the country, and is not moved by broader national opinion. It is much more overtly hostile to Obama, and I suspect that race is a part of it.
Almost all of the people from those areas come from districts with at best a trace element of minority voters. If you look, even within the House, at all of those votes where Boehner tried to get bipartisan majorities, the ones at the end of last year and the beginning of this year: the fiscal cliff, Hurricane Sandy, Violence Against Women Act, the ones who voted against him consistently, the vast number of them, were from the South.
These are not people moved so much by presidential politics or presidential elections, so it’s going to be a tough nut to crack. And it’s tough as well because what incentive is there for Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin or a local radio talk show host to suddenly say, “Oh my God we’ve got to move back to the center.” The best way to get your audience larger and more consistent is to be more divisive and more radical and criticize those who cater to or kowtow to other forces. And the money is still much more driven over on that side, from multibillionaires and others, who themselves are more ideological, so it’s hard to see in the short run how we come out of this.
As I write this, there’s new talk of a deal in the Senate to open the government and raise the debt ceiling through January. How the Tea Party faction in the House of Representatives responds, and whether Boehner yet again bends to its will, remains to be seen. However it plays out, until this particular fever is broken, until the attitudes that propelled the South to secede 153 years ago are again placed in check, our democracy is imperiled.
And while this new civil war is, for now, a cold one, at least one guy in Missouri is thinking about secession again. Sometimes I wonder if maybe he’s not onto something. I would miss New Orleans, though.
Why is the federal government spending so much money to erect barricades to keep veterans out of this memorial?
And then Sarah Palin, the Alaska snowbilly grifter, said this as protesters yelled at horseback police:
You look around though and you see these barricades and you have to ask yourself, is this any way that a commander in chief would show his respect, his gratitude to our military? This is a matter of shutdown priorities.
And then the lot of them, having knocked over the barricades and chanted at Barack Obama to “tear down this wall” because they’re incurable dupes who’ve been spoon-fed this horseshit by Cruz and Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and the rest of those Tea Party charlatans, decided to march down to the White House, where they waved Gadsden flags (and in one case a Confederate flag) and demanded that Obama resign or be impeached for the high crime of … eff it, does it really matter anymore?
A few caveats before we proceed: 1) One jackass waving a rebel flag or an Oath Keepers flag doesn’t mean that all these demonstrators are racists and/or right-wing militia members. 2) That these memorials have been closed because of the shutdown is of course unfortunate, but no less unfortunate than kids kicked out of Head Start or poor people’s food stamps being cut off or vital scientific research being abandoned or the veterans’ benefits that may run out at month’s end or any of the real, deleterious consequences of the Tea Party’s temper tantrum. 3) Make no mistake: This is a Republican shutdown. In fact, just before the government ran out of funds, House Republicans quietly changed the rules to ensure that a shutdown happened—and that any proposal to reopen the government would come directly from their leaders.
We’re now entering Week 3 of the shutdown. This Thursday the government will run out of borrowing ability and begin to default on its debts, with potentially cataclysmic repercussions around the world, unless Congress raises the debt ceiling. (This is true whether Ted Yoho believes it or not.)
All of this started, if you’ll recall, because a subset of radical conservatives were unwilling to abide by the judgment of the American people—who just last year elected a center-left, pro-Obamacare, pro–higher taxes, pro–higher spending president over a conservative who campaigned against all those things; it’s worth noting, too, that the Democratic Party won seats in the Senate and 1.5 million more votes in the House than the Republicans did—and threatened to blow up the government, and perhaps the world economy, if they didn’t get their way.
This all sounds very familiar.
I’ve been reading Year of Meteors, a very excellent history of the election of 1860—the one that produced Abraham Lincoln and led to the Civil War. And in there is the story of former Alabama congressman William Lowndes Yancey, the man perhaps most singularly responsible for the Civil War. He only served four years in Congress, from 1844 to 1848, but in that congressional career he “eschewed all compromise in favor of absolute southern privilege. His rigid positions won him few allies in Washington…” (Ahem, Mr. Cruz.)
Back in Alabama, Yancey—who once killed an unarmed man in a bar fight, only to be pardoned after serving three months—remained a Democratic Party power-player, “the prince of the fire-eaters,” an extremist who wanted to expand slavery to the West, as well as to reopen the Atlantic slave trade that had been shut down in 1807. By 1858 he had embraced secession full-bore, having (probably correctly) decided that the North would eventually outnumber the South and the abolitionists and those who wanted to restrain the planter class’s “peculiar institution” to its current geography would, in time, prevail, slowly depriving slavery of oxygen and leading to its demise.
Southern fire-eaters were a minority of the Democratic Party back then. The Democratic president was a northerner, albeit from the border state of Pennsylvania. The Democratic frontrunner heading into the election was a northerner, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. These men catered to the southerners’ demands—much the way that John Boehner today caters to the Tea Party’s demands—but (also similarly) the southerners’ didn’t trust their total commitment.
Long story short: Yancey decided that democracy was no longer working for him, so he sabotaged his own party to prevent Douglas from receiving the nomination and ensure that a hated Republican would win the election—which, as he figured, would presage secession. (He and other secessionists did not anticipate the Union fighting a war to bring them back.) So the Alabama delegation to the national committee insisted that the party stake out a radical pro-slavery platform. He also—in a move reminiscent of Cruz’s assertion that Republicans had “compromised” by only insisting on the defunding of Obamacare and not its repeal—told the Democratic National Committee that this platform “[was] not even all that Alabama ask[ed].”
(If anyone ever tells you the Civil War was not about slavery, read him this quote from Yancey’s 90-minute speech: “We want negroes cheap, and we want a sufficiency of them, so as to supply the cotton demand of the whole world.”)
Douglas was the candidate backed by the majority of delegates, but under party rules he needed two-thirds support to be the nominee. The South, led by Yancey and the fire-eaters, would not relent, and in the end, they got what they wanted: The party split, Lincoln won the election and the South quickly seceded. Democracy didn’t work they way the liked, so they took their ball and went home.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The issues are different today, of course. I suspect even that guy waving the Confederate flag in front of the White House yesterday doesn’t want a return to slavery and secession, and none of even the most radical Tea Partiers have publicly gone down that road (that I’m aware of). We’ll leave the undertones of racism in the Tea Party movement for another time.
It’s the underlying attitude in both of these stories that is so striking: The disrespect for democratic norms, the willingness to assert that you will burn the government to the ground if your demands go unmet—demands that you cannot achieve through the normal order of things. And so we see the same sort of flailing anger, the same absolutism, the same arrogance, the same denunciations of those who seek moderation or compromise.
This week that attitude has taken us to the precipice of the abyss. And once again, its epicenter is firmly within the Deep South, within a political party that celebrates its own radicalism and ignorance. Check out this interview with Norm Ornstein, a scholar with the quite-conservative American Enterprise Institute who has been critical of congressional Republicans:
But even there, you know, another piece that I wrote a couple of weeks back now on how there are five Republican parties, a House and Senate and presidential one, but also a Southern and non-Southern party. The bottom line was that it’s the House party and the Southern party, which are the dominant forces out there; they are the ones driving the dialogue. And the fact is that in the House party you’ve got people who come from homogeneous echo chambers in their districts and are concerned, most of them, only about primaries. The Southern party has a very different worldview from the rest of the country, and is not moved by broader national opinion. It is much more overtly hostile to Obama, and I suspect that race is a part of it.
Almost all of the people from those areas come from districts with at best a trace element of minority voters. If you look, even within the House, at all of those votes where Boehner tried to get bipartisan majorities, the ones at the end of last year and the beginning of this year: the fiscal cliff, Hurricane Sandy, Violence Against Women Act, the ones who voted against him consistently, the vast number of them, were from the South.
These are not people moved so much by presidential politics or presidential elections, so it’s going to be a tough nut to crack. And it’s tough as well because what incentive is there for Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin or a local radio talk show host to suddenly say, “Oh my God we’ve got to move back to the center.” The best way to get your audience larger and more consistent is to be more divisive and more radical and criticize those who cater to or kowtow to other forces. And the money is still much more driven over on that side, from multibillionaires and others, who themselves are more ideological, so it’s hard to see in the short run how we come out of this.
As I write this, there’s new talk of a deal in the Senate to open the government and raise the debt ceiling through January. How the Tea Party faction in the House of Representatives responds, and whether Boehner yet again bends to its will, remains to be seen. However it plays out, until this particular fever is broken, until the attitudes that propelled the South to secede 153 years ago are again placed in check, our democracy is imperiled.
And while this new civil war is, for now, a cold one, at least one guy in Missouri is thinking about secession again. Sometimes I wonder if maybe he’s not onto something. I would miss New Orleans, though.
(2DV note: Mississippi is abbreviated "MS" not "MI")
95% Confederate guy was an OWS plant.
Or just a guy just signaling his “rebelliousness” which that has been a symbol of for many years. Probably no racial implications whatsoever.
Who'll pay for Detroit then?
CC
For reasons unbeknownst to me, I turnedo n the late showing of the ‘Kelly File’, and as expected, not only is she Sharpton pimping for affirmative action, but she’s also bringing up this non-story as an example of racism among conservatives.
THAT is never gracing my screen again. In some ways, worse than Queen Shep.
The Orlando Weekly is a left wing rag written and run by the decadent gay community. Sorry for the redundancy.
95% Confederate guy was an OWS plant.
98% in my opinion...
These lefty guys are spooked.
I kind of figured that out by their ads. Seems like every city above 20,000 population has one of those now. Dallas and Fort Worth have more than one each.
The length of a Marxist rant is proportional to the number of lies contained therein...and also proportional to the level of fear experienced by the miscreant writer.
Let’s assume the Confederate flag guy was not a plant; ok, so he was less than 1% of the crowd. But how many OWS or anti-Bush protestors, were self-proclaimed anarchists or communists or socialists ? Much more than 1%. But that was simply ignored.
About what we expected from her though, right? I had her on auto record, but no more. I tried to watch a couple of her shows to get a feel for it, but even with fast forward she was a little to much for me to take. Her absolute worship of Judge Judy that tough as nails Obama lover was a little over the top as well.
Henry Blodget
In 2002, then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer published Merrill Lynch e-mails in which Blodget gave assessments about stocks which allegedly conflicted with what was publicly published.
In 2003, he was charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and paid a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement.
<....”so he was less than 1% of the crowd”....>
Hello Steve...noted your post and you are right. They will always frame their opeds on whatever sliver they can find.
Just like they zeroed in on Cruz, Lee and Palin showing up and using the vets for Political clout......when they should have been saying.. ‘where were all the OTHER members of congress’ who should have been there supporting the vets!!!
The changes Fox is making I would not be surprised at all to see them bring Oprah on board soon.
A recent article in the Philadelphia City Paper by Jeffrey Billman depicting an untruthful and bias representation of a Constitution class has upset many locals who attended the event as well as others who saw the article as giving a false depiction of the event.
First off, Billman did not successfully pull off the “journalist spy” tactic as seen in this article about infiltrating a Tea Party meeting. Michael Badnarik, class presenter and Libertarian Party presidential candidate of 2004, even said in the beginning of the class that “he keeps the doors open because he wants everyone to be welcome and to hear what he is saying.” Billman was seen coming into the class for about five minutes and then left. He expected to find a bunch of “domestic terrorists” shacked up making, as he would say, “Obama to Hitler references.” He mentioned that Badnarik “had a chalk board like Glenn Beck” — the class was in a college classroom and he used the chalk board once to post important historical dates. Personally, I despise Glenn Beck and so would any other well informed, principled person. I would love to know how Billman made such inferences from sitting in an 8 hour long class for five minutes — he must be a fortune teller to know of the overall class experience. And complaining about the $100 fee? For an 8 hour class, a book and free lunch? Billman also argues that all the information from the class is readily available on the internet for free, but it can be argued that the context of the classroom is different. The Constitution, for example, is not taught in substance in public schools to the effect that the rule of law and individual liberty have been decimated.
http://www.examiner.com/article/locals-angry-with-untruthful-article-city-paper
>>who knows how many were actual veterans<<
What would it take to convince this DNC parrot? Does he want them marching in formation, with weapons? I’m willing to bet that the Veterans March increased the number of real Americans in Versailles on the Potomac by 1,000,000%
The Battle Flag wasn’t about being “racist” then & it isn’t about being racist now.
Believe it or not, there are Southerners who happen to be Black who hold the flag near their hearts, too. They, too, have Southern ancestors.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I believe this is the majority point of view.
It’s about our heritage & definitely about our resistance to federal overreach & oppression, though.
Heh. The left is having a hissy fit & trying to say that the flags being in front of the WH had some “threatening” implication. I strongly doubt that. If our president was White & had been pulling the crap 0bama has pulled, the flags would have been there just the same.
We’re sick of Washington DC. And the South isn’t unique for that right now.
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