Trump: 'Robert E. Lee was a great general'

The Hill ^ | 10/12/18 | CHRIS MILLS RODRIGO

[yesthatjallen]

President Trump praised Confederate Geader Robert E. Lee as "a great general" on Friday during a campaign rally in Lebanon, Ohio.

"So Robert E. Lee was a great general. And Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia. He couldn’t beat Robert E. Lee," Trump said before launching into a monologue about Lee, Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

"He was going crazy. I don’t know if you know this story. But Robert E. Lee was winning battle after battle after battle. And Abraham Lincoln came home, he said, 'I can’t beat Robert E. Lee,'" Trump said.

"And he had all of his generals, they looked great, they were the top of their class at West Point. They were the greatest people. There’s only one problem — they didn’t know how the hell to win. They didn’t know how to fight. They didn’t know how," he continued.

Trump went on to say, multiple times, that Grant had a drinking problem, saying that the former president "knocked the hell out of everyone" as a Union general.

"Man was he a good general. And he’s finally being recognized as a great general," Trump added.

— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 13, 2018 Trump has drawn criticism for his defense of Confederate statues, including those of Robert E. Lee.

He drew widespread condemnation last year following a deadly rally in Charlottesville, Va., saying that white nationalist protesters were there to oppose the removal of a "very, very important" statue.

"They were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said at the time. “This week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

Trump, speaking at another rally in Ohio last year, said that he can be one of the “most presidential” presidents to hold office. "…With the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office,” he said to a crowd in Youngstown.

[DiogenesLamp]

In fact, everyone in late 1860 and early 1861 acknowledged that Federal government had no authority to stop states from declaring secession, and no efforts were made to either stop secession or punish it.

Now we are getting somewhere.

The issue was whether Federal government could continue to enforce its laws in secession states -- i.e., tariffs.

This concept of "Divorce" is so complicated. Everyone knows that it's reasonable to expect the "ex" to keep paying the bills.

Lincoln believed it could & should but Confederates took great umbrage at that.

I don't know why they would be upset at continuing to pay the bills for a nation that they left. Doesn't everyone continue to pay bills after they have left?

The answer is that like other cabinet members Seward opposed resupplying Fort Sumter at first, but like the others came around to Lincoln's view eventually.

You gloss over the raw truth. Seward said it would cause a war. He was opposed to starting a war over a fort.

He and the rest of the cabinet "came around" after Lincoln made it clear he was going to do it anyway.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "You're gonna keep going with your preamble attempt at humor.
I'm going to ignore it."

You can end it right here & now.
Simply deny that you're trying to play god with us by declaring the US Supreme Court "unconstitutional".

Tell us that DiogenesLamp is not the final authority on what is, or is not, Constitutional, and that the Constitution provides us with numerous methods for correcting historically poor decisions.
And none of these methods make reference to the super-authority of somebody under the name of DiogenesLamp.

How hard can that be to do?

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp on Corwin: "Informing people that he had no objection to it was effectively permission to support it for his party followers."

Corwin mattered in Maryland and especially in Kentucky, both of which states had lots of Democrats but nearly zero Republicans.
Unionist Democrats liked Corwin, Republicans did not, but went along with Democrats in hopes of preserving the Union.
In the end Corwin may have helped keep Kentucky & Maryland Union, but otherwise had no affect.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "I can read for myself. I don't need others to "interpret" the constitution for me."

Sure, of course, agreed -- opinions.
Your opinions on this are just as valid to me as... oh, say, that Ford woman who testified against the good judge.
I believe there was likely something happened, just impossible for me to see what it was.

It would help this entire discussion if you'd recognize distinctions between your opinions and real facts of history.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "You may be referring to war time, i'm referring to post war constitutional violations. If you would read what I write more closely, you would realize we have been discussing the confiscation of slaves after the war."

This is the second time on this thread that you've claimed to be discussing some other situation than was obvious from your words.
The first time was not even to me, but I noticed your claim seemed very lame, now you've done it again.

Might I suggest you take more care to make sure the subject of your claims is very, very clear?

DiogenesLamp: "You are trying to deflect the point about proof of rebellion with proof of war."

Logically, all rebellion is war but not all wars are rebellions...

DiogenesLamp: "Sure, anyone you pick up on the battlefield can likely be regarded as having been proven at war, but you cannot make such blanket statements regarding the civilian populations."

At the Civil War's end former Confederates were not allowed to vote or hold political office.
And this is a problem for you... why?

DiogenesLamp: "According to constitutional law, you have to prove they were guilty of crimes against the United States.
You can't just declare everyone guilty.
Except they did."

After the Civil War the voting franchise was taken from former Confederates and given to former slaves.
And your problem with this is what...?

[x]

DiogenesLamp: "Rebellion is a master/slave relationship. It does not apply to members of equal status. It does not apply to states leaving an organization of which they no longer wished to be a part, and doing so in a democratic and orderly fashion."

BroJoeK: But if those very same "democratic and orderly" people then provoke, start, declare & wage war on the United States, then it doesn't much matter what term you call it, does it?

Well said. Secession was neither democratic nor orderly, and eventually the secessionists already declared war on the US: not what respectable US citizens usually do. As for the master-slave thing. People "rebel" when they think they are oppressed - whether they really are oppressed or not.

Crazy though it was, Southern slave owners in 1860-1 thought they were being oppressed. Diogenes thinks they were being oppressed. So is it really that far-fetched to think that they were rebelling?

DiogenesLamp: "William Seward should have been our 16th President. Much bloodshed and destruction would have been avoided. So too would we have avoided the growth of the Federal Monster thus created in 1861. "

Seward might not have won. He would have lost Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, and California. If Democrats had run a single candidate against him, they could conceivably have beaten him, but secessionists didn't want to win. They wanted an excuse to secede.

Given a four candidate race, though, if Seward lost Pennsylvania or Ohio as well as the other four states, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives. Each state would have had one vote. If the Southern representatives had remained in office, it's unlikely that Seward would have won.

Only the top three electoral vote winners would be in the running, so it's likely that Douglas would eventually prevail as compromise candidate, acceptable to Northern and Southern Democrats and the remaining former Whigs. But if Douglas was so unacceptable to Southerners as a Democratic candidate, would they really have accepted him as President?

And assuming that Seward did win, what would he have done differently from Lincoln? Given what he did as Secretary of State, he might well have tried to unite the country behind a war against a foreign enemy, but if that didn't work, what then?

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Pearl Harbor is not comparable to Fort Sumter.
Not in terms of deaths, not in terms of value, not in terms of who was doing the attacking and why, and not in terms of National interest."

Sure it was, all of those:

1. Casualties -- 7% at Fort Sumter, about 7% at Pearl Harbor.

2. Value -- Fort Sumter was one of the US most expensive forts at the time, Pearl Harbor held the entire US Pacific fleet.

3. Who attacked: Fort Sumter was attacked & lost to an enemy military power, as was the US fleet at Pearl Harbor.

4. Why attacked: Fort Sumter was attacked because it represented a provocation to enemy authorities, as was Pearl Harbor.

5. National interest: Fort Sumter represented one of the furthest extensions of US military power in 1861, as did Pearl Harber in 1941.
   Both places were valuable to the national interest as symbols of the United States and as projections of US military power into potentially hostile regions.

Seriously, I see no problem with such comparisons, your repeated denials notwithstanding.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "If you think it is unreasonable that the Union should have to abide by the system of law that it violently forced on people who did not want it, then I don't really see what point there is in arguing with you."

First go back and re-read my post #559 on the constitutional "suicide pact", it applies here.

Second, the US Constitution was not "forced" on anybody.
Rather its protections & rights were temporarily denied to those who declared & waged war on the United States.
Those rights were then restored after loyalty was reconfirmed through either pledges or pardons.

DiogenesLamp: "Preserving the Constitution is tantamount to preserving the Union, because the Union only exists as a condition of the agreement known as the Constitution."

But the Constitution was never intended as a suicide pact which must self destruct whenever clever legal minds like DiogenesLamp can poke enough holes in it.

The fact is that by 1876 former Confederates were back in power in the South and so effectively nullified the 13th, 14th & 15th for nearly 100 years.
And how is that even a little "constitutional"?

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Something tells me you are including the people killed in that Union cannon explosion as "casualties at Confederate hands."
You tend to be quite liberal with your interpretations when it favors your side."

Every one of those Union soldiers would be alive and whole except for the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter.
They were casualties of the battle, period.
For a Pearl Harbor analog: some Hawaiian civilians were tragically killed by US anti-aircraft rounds falling back to earth.
But you can't says that's not ultimately the fault of the Japanese attack.

DiogenesLamp: "And how many of these Union casualties occurred in Union states? (and no, you can't count West Virginia, which was illegally made into a state.)"

So somehow you fantasize it was constitutional for Virginia to declare secession, but not for West Virginia?
You know, with your double standards you truly are a Democrat, you mind works like the typical Democrat mind -- one set of rules for thee, different rules (or no rules) for me.

In fact, West Virginia's statehood is totally constitutional & lawful and has never been successfully challenged in court.
Nor has Virginia ever attempted to force West Virginia's return.
The real truth is those people didn't much like each other and were just as happy to go their own ways.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "They didn't provoke a war. They went to great lengths to avoid it."

They went to no lengths -- none.
You can't name a serious length Confederates went to avoid war.
Indeed, right off the bat in his February 1861 Inaugural Jefferson Davis announced he would start war if he felt Confederate "integrity" was "assailed".
And that is precisely what happened at Fort Sumter.

DiogenesLamp: "Lincoln started the war by sending a fleet of warships to attack them instead of just ordering those troops to come home."

And you just can't stop yourself from lying about it, can you?

[x]

My theory is that Lee's support for the Confederacy was a generational thing. Lee's children supported secession and that was an influence on him. His sister and brother-in-law didn't. His brother was a reluctant Confederate.

But there was more enthusiasm for secession in the younger generation that had grown up with stronger sectional feeling. Contrary to what's often been said, thinking of Virginia as one's country may not have been some ancient survival, but rather the way the state was evolving in the decades just before the war.

Lee is an compelling figure in our history. The emphasis on honor and local feeling is something pre-modern, but the talk of the lonely individual wrestling with his conscience and going against his earlier oath and commitments to be true to oneself is modern, maybe even post-modern.

[bert]

——Lee is an compelling figure in our history.——

Without Robert E Lee, there would be no Red Hen restaurant

[DiogenesLamp]

I’m not going to let you drag me into your Pearl Harbor chaos. :)

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "You are a little weak on the specifics.
What Union ships were seized prior to Ft. Sumter?"

At times in the past I've posted long lists of Confederate seizures of Federal properties beginning in December 1860, many before those states even declared secession.
That's one of the reasons Union voters were willing to respond in April to Lincoln's call for state militia units.

Among those seizures were at least half a dozen Federal ships, especially revenue cutters.

DiogenesLamp: "But my point is that the first invasion of the Confederacy was by sea.
It was that Fox expedition.
I suppose the Pickens expedition counts too."

Absurd, typical propaganda, a resupply mission is not an "invasion" regardless of how often you lie about it.

But at that time Confederates were already invading Union states like Maryland and Missouri.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Really? What does this mean?

"No Person ... shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour,"

Fugitive slaves!
Nobody, not even crazy Roger Taney himself, fantasized it referred to permanent residents in non-slave states.
So why do you?

Is that more of your god-like powers of declaratioin, or simply a weak, pathetic, unsupported-by-facts opinion??

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Here's another account of it."

Nice description, thanks!
I read nothing in it that didn't sound like Trump's campaign & enthusiastic supporters, hooray for them!
As for Lincoln's rewarding his supporters, again I ask you to think of Jeff Sessions.
It happens, but with not always the best results.

[DiogenesLamp]

Right, obviously some mixed signals in the backfield, quarterback threw to the wrong receiver, busted play, etc.

Yeah, those "mixed signals" had Porter trying his D@mndest to open fire on the Confederate batteries in Pensacola, and were it not for the efforts of Captain Meigs, deliberately putting his ship in Porter's path, he would have done so. Porter mention in his memoirs that he thought seriously about running over Meigs and his ship, but then he decided to stop.

He did end up firing on Confederate ships that approached him, and with no knowledge at the time of events in Charleston. He thought he had fired the first shots of the war.

But the fact remains that Porter misunderstood what Fox & Lincoln intended -- resupply of Fort Sumter under cover of darkness using small boats from ships stationed safely off shore.

Well his comment was published in 1885, so you would think he might have had time to develop an understanding of their plan in the intervening 24 years. It also doesn't make any sense how you can use your "entire force" if your plan is to stay safely out of range of the guns. Perhaps you can explain what "force" would be employed in such a situation?

There were no orders to attack Confederates any more than needed to protect the resupply boats.

And how much attacking would that have required? If you have read about the Confederate preparations you would know that those small boats would have been massacred. They had floating bonfires in the channels, and mortars sighted in to rain shrapnel down on anything in the channel. I believe the Floating battery was positioned to rake the landing area with cannon fire, and even Anderson said it was a D@mn stupid idea, and *HE* sent them the drawings of all the gun emplacements.

[DiogenesLamp]

Simply deny that you're trying to play god with us by declaring the US Supreme Court "unconstitutional".

Pointing out that the Supreme Court is often occupied by lying judges is not playing god, unless one has a very weak regard for the power of deities.

The Supreme Court is, and often has had absolute liars making decisions based on personal preferences, and not based on actual law.

This is a point that I had always believed to be unremarkable among conservatives. Judicial activism has long been a gripe of the conservative movement.

[DiogenesLamp]

In the end Corwin may have helped keep Kentucky & Maryland Union, but otherwise had no affect.

It had the effect of demonstrating slavery had nothing to do with the reasons why the North started a war with the South.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "He couldn't let them go, so he deliberately conflated their democratic secession with "Rebellion" because using the word "Rebellion" was the only means by which he could get his hands on the power necessary to stop them."

Nooooo… once again: Lincoln never said "rebellion" until there was rebellion.
And Lincoln never "invaded" until long after Confederates declared and began waging war against the United States.

DiogenesLamp 'quoting' Lincoln: "What shall I do for a revenue?"

A fake quote with no provenance at best taken out of context and merely expressing the basic idea that government, like everybody else, must concern itself with its income.
The fact is Lincoln's government found plenty enough revenues to wage & win the Civil War, and his concern for such matters is entirely appropriate.