Posted on 03/21/2009 6:26:13 AM PDT by cowboyway
ATLANTA — In a cultural war that has pitted Old South against new, defenders of the Confederate legacy have opened a fresh front in their campaign to polish an image tarnished, they said, by people who do not respect Southern values.
With the 150th anniversary of the War Between the States in 2011, efforts are under way in statehouses, small towns and counties across the South to push for proclamations or legislation promoting Confederate history.
(Excerpt) Read more at courant.com ...
For more than forty years, moderate Republicans from Everett Dirksen to George Bush have told us that the demographics of the electorate don't matter. Well, they do matter, as former Reagan Country California demonstrates.
These same Republicans didn't want to dirty their hands by getting involved in “divisive” social issues. This includes things like abortion and the homosexual agenda, but it also meant standing by and doing nothing while the educational system was dumbed down and turned into a leftist propaganda machine. “Oh, don't worry about what the kids are being taught, just keep talking about tax cuts and privatizing social security.” The result is an under-thirty population that supports “gay rights”, believes in global warming, thinks America's founders were racist and/or irrelevant, and worships “diversity”.
Then, there are the things I frankly don't know how to combat myself. No one addresses this much, but the rise of the internet (as wonderful as it is) and the destruction of young people's attention span via rapid fire music videos has erased their ability to think in a logical sequence. They can't read anything longer than a blurb or a short post. They can't watch anything and actually think it through. Even motion pictures are now filmed in that same rapid fire manner where no shot lasts more than a couple of seconds.
The effect of this over time is to undermine the ability of people to think in a logical sequence, to connect the dots, so to speak. They are only able to grasp something on an emotional level, or to respond to repetition and imprinting. And when the media they are surrounded with is overwhelmingly liberal and emotional, and when the mantras they repetitively hear (”diversity is our strength”, “War is not the answer”, “We have ten years to save the planet”) are all liberal, it has an effect.
Places like the South and the Heartland states are a bit more resistant to this programming because of greater church attendance and traditional social conservatism. But in much of the North and the West Coast the under-thirty population is as robotic as can be imagined. It's programmed, brainwashed, and imprinted. Even in my very conservative region in the South I can see it beginning to take hold.
And the response to these things from the GOP establishment isn't to combat them, but to capitulate. The main advice we're receiving is to move even further to the left, beyond the leftward drift that already occurred under Bush and with the McCain nomination. Our Republican leaders want to boot out Limbaugh, and gear the party towards winning minority votes (wait for the laughter to die down) and appealing to those imprinted and programmed young white voters by appearing gay-friendly and supporting “health care reform”.
This is a recipe for disaster, but nothing lasts forever and this may be the beginning of the end for this nation, at least as we have traditionally understood it. Freedom is not the normal state of mankind. It takes great vigilance and forethought to maintain it, and as much as it may infuriate some posters here, there are entire peoples who simply don't care much about liberty. George Bush can opine all day about how there's a universal desire for freedom and how the Muslim world is just like us in that regard. But they aren't.
Liberty as conservatives understand it is a phenomenon that arose in Europe (and its offspring colonies) and never arose anywhere else. And support for it wasn't universal even within those Western lands. Some Asian countries have adapted pretty well to liberty-based systems, but other parts of the world never have. This pie-in-the-sky idea that the whole world yearns for American style liberty is a fantasy. Yet, we're told that there's no reason why Pakistan can't be just like Nebraska. And we're told that we can import tens of millions of people from the Third World and it won't make any difference. They'll all fit right in and we'll rise to greater heights than ever based on the strength of this “diversity”.
Francis Fukuyama wrote a book back in the 90s that will surely go down in history as a laughing stock. It was called “The End of History”, and the gist of it was that the entire world would soon see that “democracy” was the best form of government, so all political conflicts would cease. No more big fights, no more international conflicts. Just a world full of democracies where we all got along. George Bush bought into that one completely, which is why he thought we could turn the Middle East into Wyoming and also why he didn't care who was flooding across our borders.
We're about to get a big lesson in something the Founding Fathers understood. Some people simply aren't interested in constitutional republican government, and couldn't maintain such a government even if they were.
But it would have been more honorable than sneaking up and shooting a man in the back.
You have no idea what kind of person I am.
Bit like the kid who will never learn regardless of how much or how many say it is wrong.
You always say that I'm wrong. But you never provide your evidence you back your claims up.
Are you saying there is no connection between slavery and the confederacy?
Who is forcing you to accept less pay? The government? Or your local businesses?
I'm not sure that I agree with this interpretation, but if it happened, I'm also not sure that there would be a remedy. It would be an interesting case.
In retrospect yes, the error is mine. The 1861 confederate tax was on property rather than income, so the first direct income tax was instituted by the Union. Ought-six was correct and I was wrong.
On the slavery issue, of course slavery is evil. It was inherited from the original British rule. It's that the Feds were saying to a very proud people - you have to dispense with this "pecular institution" now, no choice.
The reason why we can't understand each other's point is exactly why the war was fought. Nothing changes, do you think we are really any different the Sam Watkins, Sherman, Lee or (insert 19th century civil war participant name here). I guess what is truly depressing about you, and your side, is the only real way to solve our differences would be on the battlefield. That thought is not a good one. Words don't seem to work. I guess the one thing that we have accomplished is to prove that. Depressing.
I guess no further discussion is necessary. We will all get a real history lesson soon, i am afraid. The Fed monster is just starting to gear up and he is looking left. We will all feel like a Southerner in 1865 then, even you.
You don't fit the Yankee brainwashed cookie cutter view of history. You are a real problem! Some of the best defensive military earthworks ever built were constructed by black and white men working together around Petersburg. A true engineering marvel. It was a confusing time for everyone back then, for sure.
Ignorance or truth. That’s what made this thread maddening.
Booth was trying to be effective, not honorable.
My point is that he wasn’t a coward. He wasn’t.
“Wasn’t Lincoln under siege also when he imprisoned suspected bridge burners? How do you compare Lincoln’s imprisonment of the suspected with Davis’s hanging of the suspected?”
The Union was the aggressor. You are confusing the arsonist the the fire brigade.
You just don’t get it.
I agree with you slavery was wrong. What I disagree with is:
1. The method used to free them
2. Holding Lincoln up as the “Great Liberator”
Lincoln was a politician, who could not have given a d*mn abougt the slaves, except to use them as leverage. This man violated more parts of the Constitution than any man in History.
You deplore slavery, FINE. So do I. But other countries ended slavery without a war.
Well, I have read accounts where most Southerners would have rejoiced, except for the fact they feared retribution from the Yankee occupiers.
Booth was not crazy. He just got caught.
“The Republican Party have apparently found it necessary to do what they once accused the Soviet Union of doing: Rewriting history. No one, of course, has taken the worshipping of Abraham Lincoln to greater extremes than the Republican Party ‘Union Forever’”
The Republicans are guilty, but so are the Russians!
“In a letter to James Madison in 1816 Jefferson reiterated his support of the right of secession by saying, ‘If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation . . . to a continuance in union . . . I have no hesitation in saying, let us separate.’”
Many thanks for your notes on Jefferson’s support for secessionism. It shows him in a more favorable light than does his support for the Jacobins.
I think we can agree he failed on on both counts.
My point is that he wasn’t a coward. He wasn’t.
Depends on your definition of a coward I guess.
Why waste your time. A yankee is a yankee is a yankee. They will pee down your back and tell you it's raining. I hate slavery, you hate slavery, we all hate slavery. Can I get an AMEN!. Now can we discuss what the war was really about? Because it seems very relevent to today. UNCONTROLLED FEDERAL POWER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nonsense. Slavery was the fuel and the oxygen, and Lincoln's election was the spark. To dismiss slavery is to dismiss the single most important reason for the Southern rebellion. All other reasons you would care to name pale in comparison. Yet you all want to sweep it under the rug as if it never happened.
On the slavery issue, of course slavery is evil. It was inherited from the original British rule. It's that the Feds were saying to a very proud people - you have to dispense with this "pecular institution" now, no choice.
Again, nonsense. The feds said that you may keep slavery where it already existed but that further expansion into the territories would be opposed. The South could not live with that.
I guess what is truly depressing about you, and your side, is the only real way to solve our differences would be on the battlefield.
What annoys us is the extent to which your revisionism will go in order to avoid responsibility for your actions. You blame the war on Lincoln, the devestation in the South in Lincoln, Reconstruction on Lincoln, every single problem known to man on Lincoln. And accept none of the criticism for yourself.
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