A Constitution Written in Blood

September 17th, 2009 at 12:01 am by Brad Schaeffer | 118 Comments |

As he stood in a line of battle that stretched 1,000 men across, three ranks deep, through farms and woodlots and waited for the command to forward march, I highly doubt 1st Sergeant Charles Broomhall, Company D, 124th Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1st Corps, Union Army of the Potomac, was pondering that September 17th, 1862 was the 75th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. Or if he did understand the significance of the date, while studying the damage being done by the solid and case shot from the corps artillery screaming into the smoke-obscured rebel lines formed up against them a mile to the south, did he truly ponder the consequences of the momentous event in which he was about to be a bit player. I often wonder how much men like Broomhall and his fellow soldiers understood that they were about to take the first bloody steps of America’s most tragic and violent day. When the hot September sun finally set upon the devastated battlefield near the Antietam Creek, nearly 23,000 Americans had fallen, making it the bloodiest day in our country’s history. But the course of the nation was forever altered, and the first true act of reconciling the promise of the Revolution as embodied in the Constitution to include all of its citizens had been initiated. Antietam finally provided the Union its first significant victory (if not the hoped-for destruction of Lee’s army) and with it the moral force Lincoln needed to announce his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that he had tabled all summer while awaiting good news from the field. Today, September 17th, is indeed a date that Americans should celebrate as both the true birth of the constitutional republic, and the new birth of freedom for millions of Americans that resulted from the horrific battle fought along the sluggish creek’s banks.

September 17th is also a date that Republicans should look on with pride. We of the Grand Old Party can cast an eye across the chasm of time to recall the ideals of our most favorite son, Abraham Lincoln, arguably the nation’s greatest President. For seventy-five years following its ratification, the Constitution remained a fatally flawed document. It held forth that three million plus Americans of African descent held in bondage were property not people (although for purposes of House representation it was settled that they would count as three-fifths of a person!). The notion of slavery is viscerally repugnant to us today. The antithesis of who we are. But this is who we were. Through fifteen presidents in four political parties this practice was not only upheld, but was protected and, after the debates were over, seconded and signed with political compromises in 1820 and again in 1850 that kept men in chains for the sake of a faux peace. Neither solution lasted because neither solution rectified the fundamental moral crime of slavery itself which was an absolute wrong and unsustainable.

The great irony of the Civil War is that slavery, the one overarching and unavoidable question that was the incubator of all others, was the one issue that both sides agreed at the beginning was not what the war was about. And both sides were wrong. It finally fell to a Republican president to draw the line on the question. Cynics and racists will argue that Lincoln no more cared for the black man than did his Southern counterpart Jefferson Davis. And his earlier expressions give some weight to this, such as his oft-quoted claim that his primary goal was to save the Union, not end slavery (you know the one: “if I could free all slaves… if I could free some… if I could free none…”) But clearly a moral catharsis befell the man and by the summer of 1862 he was ready to make this a war about a higher cause than just union and free navigation of the Mississippi. All he needed was a victory to avoid his Proclamation appearing, as Secretary of State Seward warned him, “the last shriek on the retreat.”

Again the cynics will say that it was for political not moral reasons that Lincoln put forth his notion of emancipation — a foreign policy stiff-arm to keep the world power of England at bay and prevent their recognizing the Confederacy as France had our nation in 1778, tipping the balance of the Revolution in our favor. Only a naïve schoolboy would believe that such pragmatic notions did not play a role in Lincoln’s ultimate course. But from as early as an 1831 trip to New Orleans where he saw blacks so horribly mistreated, Lincoln seems to have formed a moral objection to the practice that was the foundation of many of his policies. He wrote often of how he hated the practice, calling it in 1858 a “monstrous injustice.” Even if the practical politician was forced to occasionally set it aside, the evil of slavery was always in his peripheral vision. And our great party was originally founded to end this practice completely, by first halting its expansion.

For me, the most disheartening chapter in the story of disarray that has been the modern GOP during the past few election cycles is the almost complete abandonment of our party by African-American voters. I realize that the nation has elected seventeen Republican presidents since Lincoln and that politics and indeed the nation has turned over many times since. But when 96% of any particular ethnic group votes for the opposition, something more than just the ebb and flow of political loyalties is in play here. Obviously the first black presidential candidate had much to do with the last election results, but what of the many before that which show African-Americans routinely casting their lots in overwhelming numbers with the Democrats?

I cannot speak for this nation’s many black communities. (I use the plural as I reject that there is one monolithic group here). But the ingrained mindset we must cut through to show that the Republican Party is not hostile to black interests is formidable nonetheless. It starts at the very highest levels of leftist academia and trickles all the way down to the urban streets. Consider Georgetown sociology professor, and ordained minister, Michael Eric Dyson’s take on Clarence Thomas (and I presume other black conservatives): ”White supremacy as a notion [can] inhabit black skin.” He goes on to offer that one can be “a ventriloquist as a black skinned person, saying ideas that are corruptive of a tradition of Black response.” To sum up Dyson’s thesis: “Blackness” as he defines it has nothing to do with skin color but rather one’s ideology and politics. And of course, the farther left your beliefs, the truer to your race you are. Thus the notion of “Uncle Tom” is alive and well in academia it seems. So long as this mentality is promulgated in the highest intellectual circles, dispensed as gospel by so-called “black leaders” who have a real political — and economic — stake in keeping the grievance machine humming, and then unchallenged and even endorsed by pop culture and the mainstream media, we have a tough road ahead.

Ironically, on social issues blacks as a whole fall more in line with conservatives than they do their self-appointed liberal spokesmen. It is thus on economic matters where the abyss is found. Again, this German-Irish writer would never presume to be an expert on the black experience in America. To my knowledge, I have never been denied anything in my life because of what I am rather than who I am. I therefore leave it to people like our African-American chairman Michael Steele and other spokespersons like Condoleeza Rice, J.C. Watts, even Colin Powell (should he return to the GOP in more than membership card) to develop the Republican case. I would implore Mr. Steele especially to create a serious playbook we can all implement. Educate us as to where the GOP has gone wrong, encourage grassroots organizing, town hall meetings, and other interpersonal encounters with black voters to help us roll up our sleeves and bridge past divides. Let Mr. Steele help us offer the notion that the Republican Party, by its very nature of treating all groups as equals (and not as wards of the state deserving largess, an approach that in the end destroys lives rather than builds futures) is where the true friends of the black communities can be found. That real political power comes from not being captive to one party alone, as this only encourages parties to take those votes for granted while discouraging the other side from even reaching out. We must break through with a message that we are a party that from its very inception was built upon the bedrock principles of racial justice which eventually would evolve into social, political and hopefully economic equality for all where no one need be treated differently… so long as all are treated fairly.

The Republican party, far from being hostile to blacks, must be re-packaged and presented for what we truly can do for African-Americans if they give us a chance. Our message should be this: we can in the 21st century empower black voters to finally free themselves from the economic and social shackles of big government dependence and Democratic cradle-to-grave condescension that buys votes but destroys generations, as much as our first President’s great Proclamation unlocked their literal chains in the middle of the 19th century.

So I implore all Republicans to mark today, September 17th, on their calendar and take a moment to consider its import. In 1787, a great constitution was drafted, and then in 1862, exactly three-quarters of a century later, a great and terrible victory won to right its inherent wrong. Consider that with the leadership of a great Republican, we took the first bloody steps to transform this nation from a slave to a free state on that day. That should Barack Obama stroll the fields of the Antietam battlefield where men like Sergeant Broomhall stood and fought and bled, that he is standing upon hallowed ground won by Union men under a Republican president which paved the way for his transcendental election 146 years later. And that if we could come so far from being founded as a slave nation, to fighting a terrible civil war to end slavery, to electing an African-American as our President in a span of two centuries, it should not be so difficult for this Grand Old Party to reclaim the mantle of Lincoln, and once again free black communities from the malicious grip of a systemic Democratic monopoly that has done them little good, while pretending to care for them so much.

118 responses so far

1 Arch // Sep 16, 2009 at 2:26 pm

The problem, as I see it, isn’t what side of history the republicans were on regarding slavery, but what side they were on during the civil rights movement, which is still in living memory.
2 rbottoms // Sep 16, 2009 at 2:44 pm

William F. Buckley

The Decline of National Review Here is an excellent commentary of the decline of WFB’s National Review from being a principled, defender of the legitimate rights of our people, of our culture, our right to exist now turned into the spineless race-less publication it is now.

I am including the article in full as Jared Taylor allows this to be done as long as the link is included: American Renaissance (Home of Brimelow and Francis these days) National Review is considered the flagship publication of post-World War II conservatism. William F. Buckley started it in 1955, declaring that it “stands athwart history yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Mr. Buckley was yelling “stop” to the spread of communism abroad and liberalism at home.

That it should now attack Mr. Buchanan for supporting protectionism and market intervention is consistent with founding principles and no surprise. But few would have thought that after 44 years of publication, a senior editor with an Indian surname would condemn a popular white conservative for speaking up for whites. Passages from some back issues could have been lifted right out of American Renaissance.

In fact, the National Review of the 1950s, 60s and even 70s spoke up for white people far more vigorously than Pat Buchanan would ever dare to today. The early National Review heaped criticism on the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education, and people like Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King, whom it considered race hustlers. Some of the greatest names in American conservatism – Russell Kirk, Willmore Kendall, James Kilpatrick, Richard Weaver, and a young Bill Buckley – wrote articles defending the white South and white South Africans in the days of segregation and apartheid. NR attacked the 1965 immigration bill that opened America up to Third-World immigration, and wrote frankly about racial differences in IQ. There were always hints of compromise, but passages from some back issues could have been lifted right out of American Renaissance. Not so today. NR still supports immigration reform and is not afraid of the IQ debate, but Mr. Ponnuru’s article is just one example of its complete abandonment of the interests of whites as a group.

What used to be an important part of the NR message it now dismissed as illegitimate “white identity politics.”

“Why the South Must Prevail” A famous example of the early NR stance on race was an unsigned editorial of August 24, 1957, titled “Why the South Must Prevail.” It was almost certainly written by Mr. Buckley, since he uses similar language in his book Up From Liberalism. The editorial argued against giving blacks the vote because it would undermine civilization in the South: “The central question that emerges … is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically?

The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.”

“National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. … It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.”

“The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class. … Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.”

In a 1969 column called “On Negro Inferiority,”

Mr. Buckley wrote about the furor over race and IQ, and bragged that NR had “brilliantly anticipated the findings of Dr. Jensen and brilliantly coped with their implications.”

The “eminent sociologist” defended IQ testing by citing the work of Hans Eysenck and research on identical twins. He claimed intelligence is largely heritable and that environmental factors cannot improve it by much.

Mr. van den Haag wrote that integrated education impairs whites and “demoralizes” blacks, and advocated separation:

“I am all in favor of improving the quality of education for all. But this can be done only if pupils are separated according to ability (whatever determines it). And this means very largely according to race.” In an April 8, 1969 column called “On Negro Inferiority” Mr. Buckley wrote about the furor caused by Arthur Jensen’s research about race and IQ, calling it “massive, apparently authoritative.”

Mr. Buckley even bragged that “Professor Ernest van den Haag, writing in National Review (Dec. 1, 1964) … brilliantly anticipated the findings of Dr. Jensen and brilliantly coped with their implications.”

Courtersy: http://www.stormfront.com

Thanks. I think we’ll keep despising the GOP.

~ Signed, 90% of the black folks in America
3 rbottoms // Sep 16, 2009 at 2:59 pm

We’ve been uncovering a remarkable level of anger toward Barack Obama in a lot of our recent polling so for New Jersey we decided to go a step further in determining how extreme some people’s feelings are about the President and asked respondents if they think he is the Anti-Christ.

8% said yes. 13% aren’t sure. Among Republicans 14% said yes and 15% weren’t sure.

Pretty eye popping numbers. The extent to which some people already hate Obama is amazing. We’ll test that question nationally this weekend.

I’m sorry, what party are you recruiting for again?
4 Raider1 // Sep 16, 2009 at 3:04 pm

You’re Rbottoms. You should stay with the party of such upstanding egalitarians as Senator Robert Byrd. So what if he was a “kleage” of that race-mending group the Ku Klux Klan right? You guys are brainwashed by a Democratic party that only cares for you every election cycle. And I honestly don’t think you speak for 90% of Black. That is a lot of people to sign off on this post you know? (By the way, to my knowsledge Buckley was a conservative, but never helpd a GOP office. Byrd on the other hand was the most powerful Senator in the land.) Racism is reprehensible. But to think it is just a GOP thing is simplistic and ignores history.

Enjoy reading about a “great democrat.” (If this will help, pretend for this exercise Byrd was a Republican. This way you will pay attention to what he wrote).

According to news accounts and biographical information, Sen. Byrd was a “Kleagle” — an official recruiter who signed up members for $10 a head. He said he joined because it “offered excitement” and because the Klan was an “effective force” in “promoting traditional American values.” Nothing like the thrill of gathering ’round a midnight bonfire, roasting s’mores, tying nooses, and promoting white supremacy with a bunch of your hooded friends.

The ex-Klansman allegedly ended his ties with the group in 1943. He may have stopped paying dues, but he continued to pay homage to the KKK. Republicans in West Virginia discovered a letter Sen. Byrd had written to the Imperial Wizard of the KKK three years after he says he abandoned the group. He wrote: “The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia” and “in every state in the Union.”

The ex-Klansman later filibustered the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act — supported by a majority of those “mean-spirited” Republicans — for more than 14 hours. He also opposed the nominations of the Supreme Court’s two black justices, liberal Thurgood Marshall and conservative Clarence Thomas. In fact, the ex-Klansman had the gall to accuse Justice Thomas of “injecting racism” into the Senate hearings. Meanwhile, author Graham Smith recently discovered another letter Sen. Byrd wrote after he quit the KKK, this time attacking desegregation of the armed forces.

The ex-Klansman vowed never to fight “with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

WITH DEMOCRATIC “FRIENDS” LIKE THESE BLACKS NEED NO ENEMIES.
5 Raider1 // Sep 16, 2009 at 3:08 pm

Rbottoms. You are falling right into the Democratic spinmeisters hands. People despise socialism. They despise Obama’s policies. (I bet those people also think Stalin was teh anti-Christ too!).

You left wingers are so self-brainwashed that you cannot imagine that someone would disagree with Obama based on his far left policies, assosications and beliefs that it MUST be something deeper right? Ummm rcae? Yeah that’s it. They’re just bigots nothing more.

Hate to tell ya. It ain’t his color. It’s his politics. Put the moveon.org pamphlet down and think for yourself.
6 rbottoms // Sep 16, 2009 at 3:09 pm

You’re Rbottoms. You should stay with the party of such upstanding egalitarians as Senator Robert Byrd. So what if he was a “kleage” of that race-mending group the Ku Klux Klan right?

Robert Byrd long since repented and apologized for his behaviour. At 90+ years old he came from another time and place to eventually accept America as it should be.

Now what was William F. Buckley’s excuse for maintaining his racist views well into the 1970’s?

The point of the isn’t that there are bad apples in the Democratic party, it’s that the GOP has much to offer. When you get the percentage of people who think the first black president is the Anti-Christ down to a more respectable number give us a call.

~ Signed 90% of all the black folks in America (who despise the GOP)
7 Raider1 // Sep 16, 2009 at 3:11 pm

Oh yeah. I’m sure he “repented.” LOL.

So if you are a living DEMOCRATIC Klansman and avowed racist who suddenly has the political version of a “deathbed conversion” you get a second chance, but you will hold the GOP responsbile for polices two generations ago. Got it.

Byrd will always be a racist. He just knew which way the political winds blew. He may have hated you, but he hated the thought of leaving the senate even more! Seriously, think for yousrself man.
8 Raider1 // Sep 16, 2009 at 3:14 pm

So you claim to speak for 90% of Black folks? Pretty arrogant don’t you think. Although the Dems think yuo all think the same, act the same, believe the same too so you are making them feel good. The GOP respects you enough to differ with you. You are nothing but a vote to the DNC. Nothing more. Bought with government handouts that destroyed the black community. From 25% in 1965 to 75% illegitimacy in 2005 brough to you by 40 years of democratic socialism targeting you by race and the Great Society.

With friends like the Dems Blacks need no enemies.
9 SpartacusIsNotDead // Sep 16, 2009 at 3:31 pm

Mr. Schaeffer:

I commend your recognition that the Constitution was, in many ways, an empty, impotent piece of parchment so long as millions of people remained enslaved.

However, your statements that blacks are not monolithic and that you do not presume to be an expert on the black experience appear gratuitous and insincere because you immediately go on to treat them as a monolith by presuming they all subscribe to the rhetoric of Michael Eric Dyson. And worse, you wrongfully, albeit maybe unconsciously, presume expertise by declaring: “It [the mindset that is resistant to the GOP] starts at the very highest levels of leftist academia and trickles all the way down to the urban streets.”

As other posters here, including some conservative posters, have pointed out in the past, most blacks used to support the GOP precisely because of Lincoln. As was the case with most Americans, blacks didn’t become diehard Democrats until FDR. And Black antipathy toward the GOP did not start to materialize until the GOP became dominated by conservative ideology.

The issue is not black hostility toward the GOP. Instead, the issue is black hostility toward conservatism. To understand why blacks are hostile to conservatism you need look no further than post #2 from RBottoms. While the GOP has at times in U.S. history been sympathetic to civil rights and the interest of minorities, conservatives have ALWAYS stood on the wrong side of every major social issue this country has ever confronted (see slavery, suffrage for women, child labor laws, integration of the military, civil rights for racial minorities and, most recently, gay marriage).
10 EscapeVelocity // Sep 16, 2009 at 3:36 pm

rbottoms is an avowed tribalist. He doesnt like other tribes. He is a hate filled bigot like that.
11 EscapeVelocity // Sep 16, 2009 at 3:39 pm

A winning formula for the GOP

Any Republican rebound will be fueled by a more conservative message delivered by a more moderate voice.

By Michael Medved

President Obama’s recent decline in the polls represents a comeback opportunity for Republicans, but they will squander that chance if they follow either of the two most frequently promoted strategies for party revival. The GOP’s remaining moderates want a shift to the center, while the right wing demands uncompromising, confrontational, us-vs.-them rhetoric. Both road maps will lead to political dead ends for a struggling party that actually needs a new combination of conservative substance and moderate tone.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/09/column-a-winning-formula-for-the-gop.html
12 Chekote // Sep 16, 2009 at 3:45 pm

The problem, as I see it, isn’t what side of history the republicans were on regarding slavery, but what side they were on during the civil rights movement, which is still in living memory.

The Civil Rights Act would not have passed without Republican votes. Nixon is the one who implemented affirmative action. So why are most AAs still voting for Dems? Why not a 60/40 or 50/50 split?
13 balconesfault // Sep 16, 2009 at 4:18 pm

I would implore Mr. Steele especially to create a serious playbook we can all implement. Educate us as to where the GOP has gone wrong

I don’t think that Steele has that latitude. The Republican Party is heavily tilted towards those who would tear Steele limb from limb in public if he even began to discuss “where the GOP has gone wrong” with relationship to treatment of black America.

In their narrative, there has always and only been one avenue for exploration of failure of the GOP – to not have been conservative enough, to not have been hard enough of critics or Democrats. Steele suggesting otherwise will only paint a target on his back that will ensure his inability to do his job, and he’s no doubt already well aware of that.
14 balconesfault // Sep 16, 2009 at 4:23 pm

Chekote: Nixon is the one who implemented affirmative action.

Nixon also created the Environmental Protection Agency. Nixon proposed national health insurance. Limbaugh would have been calling Nixon a “RINO” were he around back then.
15 Observer // Sep 16, 2009 at 4:54 pm

If this is a serious discussion, perhaps it should start with Republicans repudiating everyone who refuses to accept America’s victory of 1865, demanding a national textbooks policy on the Civil War, and voting for elimination of the secessionist flag and secessionist ‘victory’ celebrations from every public building in the Union.

Of course, the fact that millions of senior Republicans would never allow these steps to happen should make it clear why Brad’s worthwhile suggestions are dead on arrival when it comes to the present-day Republican Party.
16 jjv // Sep 16, 2009 at 5:34 pm

I liked this piece and think Sharpsburg (I live in Virginia now!) should be remembered. I think, however, that that early most of those folks were “preserve the Union” soldiers rather than “anti-slavery” soldiers. It is equally important to the National Project that secession be quashed as it is an easy way to destroy and weaken Republics. As for the Civil Rights period of the 1960’s the Republicans were mostly on the right side. Even the much lambasted “Southern Strategy” could only be implemented after Republican votes had destroyed Jim Crow. The South could only be wooed by Republicans once Jim Crow was destroyed as Republicans were its mortal enemy. After that it could be wooed by race neutrality and tough on crime policies, as well as strength abroad, none of which the McGovernite Party could supply.
17 sinz54 // Sep 16, 2009 at 5:38 pm

rbottoms: Remarkable how you quote neo-Nazis (who have once again, as they always have, twisted history to fit their own purposes), in order to serve your OWN purposes.

Instead of hearsay evidence, you should try quoting National Review directly sometime.

Your post is utterly worthless, since it relies on some neo-Nazi with his own evil agenda to make your case.

Would you like to “keep despising Jews” next? You can find plenty of stuff in Stormfront to make THAT case as well.
18 sinz54 // Sep 16, 2009 at 5:48 pm

I see there’s a lot of misunderstanding of history here–on all sides.

Let me set the record straight, as I’ve often done before:

In the 1950 and early 1960s, the Southern segregationists were Democrats: George Wallace, Lester Maddox, etc. And Southern blacks often voted Republican, because that was better than voting for Dem segregationists. In 1960, Richard Nixon, a staunch anti-Communist conservative, got 40% of the black vote against JFK, much of it from Southern blacks.

What changed was the Dem passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. Those ended racial segregation and discrimination in voting. As it turns out, a larger percentage of Republicans voted for those acts than Dems, because most southern Dems voted against them.

But one very important Republican was in opposition: Barry Goldwater, the GOP nominee for President in 1964. And he was a very visible symbol of Republican conservatism.

By 1968, southern whites were so disenchanted with the Dems over their advocacy of black civil rights, that Wallace ran as a third-party candidate. Wallace was becoming so popular (up to 21% in the polls) that if that continued, neither major party could get a majority in the Electoral College. To head that off, Nixon, the GOP candidate that year, came up with his “Southern Strategy.” The Deep South would go to Wallace. But Nixon resolved to win over the Border states like Arkansas, Virginia and the Carolinas.

By 1972, Wallace’s third party had disappeared, and the Southern whites, disgusted with the Dem’s advocacy of black rights, went into the GOP.

This was the biggest voting shift in my lifetime: The “Solid South” went from being solidly Dem to solidly GOP.

From then on, the GOP courted Southern white voters by advocating a socially conservative agenda. Essentially, this alienated southern blacks from the GOP just as they had been alienated from the Dems twenty years earlier.

Today, the GOP is ever more dependent on the South (specifically, southern whites) as its base. And that makes it real tough to convince black people that the GOP has their best interests at heart. Because, frankly, southern white people never have.

The real solution to this, as to many other problems, is for the GOP to stop huddling in its little huddle of Southern and Mountain states, and start aggressively pushing a 50 state strategy that will enable it to win outside those socially conservative areas.
19 sinz54 // Sep 16, 2009 at 6:04 pm

rbottoms:

Now what was William F. Buckley’s excuse for maintaining his racist views well into the 1970’s?

You are totally WRONG.

I used to listen to Buckley’s show, Firing Line, and I used to read his columns, all through the 1970s. I NEVER, repeat NEVER, heard him espouse any racist views. You are welcome to go to your local public library and try to find ANY racist views espoused by Buckley in that time period.

And in the meantime, stop quoting hearsay by neo-Nazis. Or else I might just have to quote what neo-Nazis think of black people too. After all, if they’re such reliable authorities, why not see what they say about black people too?

You should be ashamed of yourself.
20 Jim // Sep 16, 2009 at 6:16 pm

rbottoms:

We know how you feel about conservatives and the old south. Pleae provide a list, just a wish list, of what policies you would like to see implemented by a Republicans in office (presidential, congressional, or local). Tell me what practical, concrete steps George Bush could have taken, what policies he could have implemented, to better the daily lives of black Americans. (And try not to veer off into a diatribe against Cheney.) You have the floor, here’s your chance.
21 rbottoms // Sep 16, 2009 at 6:27 pm

Your post is utterly worthless, since it relies on some neo-Nazi with his own evil agenda to make your case.

You’ve of course missed the point bieing why is it that scum like Stormfront loves the early writings of Buckley. As a black man you won’t find me rooting for their success.

I used to listen to Buckley’s show, Firing Line, and I used to read his columns, all through the 1970s. I NEVER, repeat NEVER, heard him espouse any racist views.

Racist is as racist does. Or writes. Or wrote. Why he opposed the voting rights act, Brown v.s Board of Education, and integration is irrelevant. What he wrote helped the cause of those who fought my freedom. Hard to interpret articles abou Negro inferiority as being supportive.

As for the Civil Rights period of the 1960’s the Republicans were mostly on the right side.

Close counts in hand grenades and horseshoes.

And in the meantime, stop quoting hearsay by neo-Nazis.

I’m not quoting neo-nazis, I am quoting WFB using citation of their site.

Try Googling the same statements and Wiki, you’ll find them there. I did.

Here’s the same statements: WFB on blacks:

Also in 1957, Buckley came out in support of the segregationist South, famously writing that “the central question that emerges… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley changed his views and by the mid-1960s renounced racism. This change was caused in part because of his reaction to the tactics used by white supremacists against the civil rights movement, and in part because of the influence of friends like Garry Wills, who confronted Buckley on the morality of his politics.

The argument seems to be Buckley didn’t write that stiuff, but if he did he didn’t mean it, and Stormfront quoting it means it’s all a lie anyway. Buckley did eventually apologize and called the lack of support for Civil Rights was the biggest mistake he made with National Review.

Bob Jones University and their anti-race mixing policies were real, the Confederate flags still flying down south are real, and the 90% vote against the GOP is also real. The fact that you’re still explaining it as support for welfare handouts as if this were still 1980 means you rely of an insult to make your argument. We listen to both sides and then go pull the lever for D time after time.

To paraphrase the problem isn’t that you don’t get it, it’s that you can’t sell it.
22 rbottoms // Sep 16, 2009 at 6:37 pm

We know how you feel about conservatives and the old south

- Come of unequivocally against the Confederate flag as a symbol on public property

- Come up with a plan for national health care, not just oppose Obama’s

- End vote caging and other practices designed to suppress the black vote

- Support the elimination of Payday lenders

- Provide the IRS with the resources t go after millionaire tax cheats and tax havens

- Support the vote for Washington, D.C.

- Repudiate anti-science, anti-evolution measures

- Fund a real effort to recruit black political leaders

- Denounce Rush Limbaugh

That’s enough for a start.
23 JimBob // Sep 16, 2009 at 6:46 pm

Schaeffer , the only thing the war did was destroy the constitution.

http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2009/07/12/the-men-who-destroyed-the-constitution/

Do you actually believe Lincoln invaded the south to free the slaves?

http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=163
24 seeker656 // Sep 16, 2009 at 7:24 pm

Do you really believe that the party of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck is going to attract many in the Black community to be supporters. They have explicitly labeled our president a racist and by association anyone who shares his values.
25 Jim // Sep 16, 2009 at 7:49 pm

Thanks for the answer, rbottoms.

I’d like to hear your opinion of the job Schwarzenneger has done in California.
26 agentprovocateur // Sep 16, 2009 at 8:07 pm

It is neither an accident nor a coincidence that black people really came into the Democratic Party in huge numbers around the same time that Southern Whites largely deserted that same party for the GOP. The Republican Party of 1862 is most certainly not the Republican Party of 2009. But do keep talking about Robert Byrd. I’m sure that will work such wonders as driving black people into the Republican fold.

The real solution to this, as to many other problems, is for the GOP to stop huddling in its little huddle of Southern and Mountain states, and start aggressively pushing a 50 state strategy that will enable it to win outside those socially conservative areas.

Oh, good luck with that. Maybe some magic ponies can also be discovered on the way to somehow finding that mythical 50 state strategy.
27 sinz54 // Sep 16, 2009 at 8:08 pm

rbottoms:

You’ve of course missed the point bieing why is it that scum like Stormfront loves the early writings of Buckley.

Because they don’t understand what he was talking about.

And neither do you.

It is possible to oppose court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, and legislation like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, on libertarian rather than racial grounds.

That was Barry Goldwater’s argument: That a small Federal Government of limited powers just doesn’t have the right to order individual states to change their social arrangements–even if those social arrangements are backward. And it was also Buckley’s argument.

Note that Fred Thompson, a GOP candidate for President in 2008, used that exact same argument to argue against a “Federal Marriage Amendment” (which was intended to define marriage as between man and woman)–he said it would end up overriding the marriage laws of the states. That put Thompson on the same side as liberals who favor same-sex marriage. Thompson does NOT favor same-sex marriage. He just doesn’t think it’s the job of the Federal Government to ban it.

The kind of small Federal Government, with tightly limited powers, that libertarians (and many conservatives) favor, will no longer be capable of addressing social problems that the states have failed to deal with. I suppose the libertarian’s answer would be: If a black person doesn’t like the segregation of the South, he should move elsewhere.
28 Observer // Sep 16, 2009 at 8:14 pm

“Do you actually believe Lincoln invaded the south to free the slaves?”

No, but rebel troops attacked Union forts, arsenals, ships and units, and supported secession because they believed he intended to. And just as important, once Lincoln had the opportunity to free large numbers of slaves, he took it. And then kept taking it until the entire nation was covered.
29 balconesfault // Sep 16, 2009 at 8:22 pm

What I see here are is that a large number of Republicans can best be described as “Calhounists” in their philosophy.

John C’s proud legacy lives on. It’s not about “x” – it’s about state’s rights to do “x”.
30 EscapeVelocity // Sep 16, 2009 at 9:21 pm

sinz, you are making a valiant effort. Kudos to you.

But rbottoms position is not based on rationality, its based on fear and hate.

As I told you before we are still fighting the Civil War, preceded by the Federalists and the Anti Federalists from the foundation of the nation.
31 jjv // Sep 16, 2009 at 9:36 pm

You know I have no problem with the Stars and Bars as a battle flag being part of southern culture even today. I live in Northern Virginia and what the army of Northern Virginia did under Lee will be remembered wherever Americans fight. But it was not the flag of the Confederacy, only of the Armies organized by the South. The Flag that represented the Confederacy was the “single star” and it is that flag which represents the slave constitution.

The erasure of confederate monuments and the battle flags stinks of the history erasures of totalitarian regimes to me. It also marks the mallification of America where every place looks like every other place. I don’t think Southerners should make a fetish of these things but I also think the urge on the part of some to drive old Dixie down every day and twice on Sundays does not contribute to the nation building project of Lincoln, who remember, asked Dixie to be played upon Lee’s surrender as he always liked th song and thought it was now the Unions by right of victory.
32 EscapeVelocity // Sep 16, 2009 at 9:41 pm

- Come of unequivocally against the Confederate flag as a symbol on public property

This does nothing to help black people.

- Come up with a plan for national health care, not just oppose Obama’s

Many ideas are on the table, and have been for years.

- End vote caging and other practices designed to suppress the black vote

Im all for protecting all CITIZENS voting rights. Voter ID is a big plus for ending fraud. But for some reason the Obama Adminstration didnt enforce the Voting Rights act with regards to Voter Intimmidation in Philadelphia last fall. Furthermore…the key is to protect all voters rights, not just those of your preferred groups…its the difference between being a racist and being a decent human being.

Why Did Holder’s Justice Department Dismiss the Black Panther Case?

The attorney general apparently believes that civil rights legislation protects only certain races.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/why-did-holders-justice-department-dismiss-the-black-panther-case/

- Support the elimination of Payday lenders

No problem with that, but again this is not a Black issue…but a universal issue.

- Provide the IRS with the resources t go after millionaire tax cheats and tax havens

This doesnt help black people…although tax law enforcement is a general good that helps all people….reducing fraud and corruption. Furthermore, should Rangel be at the top of the list?

- Support the vote for Washington, D.C.

Now this is an interesting topic. It would require a Constitutional revision or Amendment. However there is good reason not to….and it has nothing to do with black people. Living in DC comes at the cost of not voting….you are not forced to live in DC.

- Repudiate anti-science, anti-evolution measures

This has nothing to do with Black people….and doesnt help them. ID isnt anti science.

- Fund a real effort to recruit black political leaders

I dont know what a real effort looks like to you. But does the head of the RNC Michael Steele please you? Also Lynn Swan was recruited up in Pennsylvania. And Michael Williams in Texas. As you know, when 90 percent of the African American population votes Democrat, its hard to find candidates for the GOP of the few that are Republicans. Many of those are successful businessmen and in business as well, and are committed to the private sector…..and not serial political leeches as in the Democrat machine.

- Denounce Rush Limbaugh

What does denouncing Rush Limbaugh do for African Americans.

- That’s enough for a start.

It seems to me that you are more concerned about bringing other people down than lifting up African Americans given your list.

You should also abandon this notion of helping African Americans. We are all the same, buddy. We all benefit with good laws and policies. Try to think universally, instead of tribally. Tearing down other people doesnt help African Americans.
33 EscapeVelocity // Sep 16, 2009 at 9:43 pm

The erasure of confederate monuments and the battle flags stinks of the history erasures of totalitarian regimes to me. — jjv

Bingo!
34 EscapeVelocity // Sep 16, 2009 at 9:48 pm

Anti Southern bigotry is thick these days.

You can see it dripping from Maureen Dowd’s piece in the New York Times…..who imagined in her own mind a racial slur, tacked on to Joe Wilson’s….”You lie “boy!” Straight up Southern Bigotry.

“Because many otherwise thoughtful and open-minded Americans only see the South, past and present, as a failed society, poisoned by slavery and racism, peopled by evil masters and wretched rednecks — Simon Legrees and “Deliverance” extras. Any love or respect for anything Southern, to these people, is just a transparent mask for racism. This is palpably false. And it is destructive. First, because objective historical inquiry is an essential aspect of a free, thinking people. To ask, “was slavery profitable?” is not to say, “slavery was justified,” even if the answer you come up with is, “yes, it was.” Moral abhorrence does not preclude honest study. The historian’s job is not to tell you the way things ought to have been, but the way they were.

My second objection to unthinking South-bashing is more personal and patriotic. I have seen too many people shift the blame for America’s modern race mess, and its violent past, onto that one-third of the nation that lies below the Mason-Dixon Line. This psychological shell game absolves the whole by cheating a part. Behind this scapegoating, perhaps, is frustration at a race problem that won’t go away. We’ve given up on dialogue and understanding, and now we just hope to placate the demon with sacrifices. I have had conversations with sane, intelligent, liberal-hearted men who, without a trace of irony, have said that Jefferson and Madison should have been slaughtered by their slaves, and that this would have been fitting and proper and the best possible course of American history.

Scapegoating the South trains the mind to think the race problem is one that happens somewhere else, in someone else’s town. Particularly, it encourages those of us outside the South to overlook our own communities. It ignores the oft-told truth — told by Frederick Douglass and Alexis de Tocqueville and Martin Luther King Jr. — that racism in the Northern cities has always been far more virulent than that in the Southern countryside.

Trash-talking the South also incidentally sanctifies a New England-based political and moral culture that is the root of much that is wrong in modern America. The North was a great deal more than just abolitionists and Freedom Riders, just as the South was more than the slave auction block and the lynch mob. Manichaean history does no justice to America’s complexity.”

http://www.etymonline.com/cw/apologia.htm
35 narcissa // Sep 16, 2009 at 9:49 pm

I admire your criticism of slavery, Mr. Frum, but I think it may be time to for you leave this Republican party and start another. For the Republican party in living memory has played to racists again and again and again. Can we say Willie Hornton? How about equating Max Clelland a paraplegic veteran with Osama? How about everything now: The claim that Obama isn’t an American, the gorillas cartoon or the joke that Michelle Obama’s relatives lived in the zoo, or the suggestion that the President demeaned the country by speaking to the joint session, the flying of a confederate (treasonous) flag over the state capital, the, well, you know, you just have to listen to Glenn Beck or Rush to hear a racist statement a day.

The Democrats may not be helping the African-American community as they should, but they haven’t thrown African-Americans under the wheels of expediency. They haven’t knowingly strengthened the hand of racists, and most importantly, they acknowledge the horror of slavery, the oppression following the civil war and the special obstacles facing African-Americans.

If the Republicans want to woo African-Americans, there needs to be a truth and reconciliation committee. They have to admit their wrongs. They have to admit slavery was wrong, not relatively wrong, actually, simply wrong. They have to admit that the oppression and terrorism that occurred in the post-reconstruction south was wrong. They have to admit racism even exists.

But that will never happen because the Republicans won’t risk losing the racist vote. It is the party’s catering to that interest group more than anything else that keeps African-Americans democrats.

I’m sorry Mr. Frum, you simply can’t have both. Choose.
36 SpartacusIsNotDead // Sep 16, 2009 at 10:40 pm

Sinz: “It is possible to oppose court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, and legislation like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, on libertarian rather than racial grounds.”

Based on this kind of morally bankrupt thinking, it doesn’t matter how predictably terrible the consequences of a person’s actions are as long as he was motivated, at least in part, by a principal that is not patently offensive.

Conservatism will never overcome its racist past as long as it continues to try to justify it.
37 EscapeVelocity // Sep 16, 2009 at 11:34 pm

Thank goodness that the overzealous reactions to Brown vs Board of Education are being rolled back by the Roberts court.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” — Chief Justice Roberts

Using Brown to justify discriminating on the basis of race is a farce. Desegregation yes. Forced integration via bussing children around town…..braindead.
38 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 12:03 am

JIMBOB,

You ask the author whether he actually believes Lincoln invaded the South to free the slaves? I think this shows that you simply refused to read the piece carefully. Schaeffer addresses this question in the paragraph below. Clearly he sees that it started out as a war (so people thought) about anything BUT slavery. He even addresses Lincoln’s seeming indifference.

“The great irony of the Civil War is that slavery, the one overarching and unavoidable question that was the incubator of all others, was the one issue that both sides agreed at the beginning was not what the war was about. And both sides were wrong. It finally fell to a Republican president to draw the line on the question. Cynics and racists will argue that Lincoln no more cared for the black man than did his Southern counterpart Jefferson Davis. And his earlier expressions give some weight to this, such as his oft-quoted claim that his primary goal was to save the Union, not end slavery (you know the one: “if I could free all slaves… if I could free some… if I could free none…”) But clearly a moral catharsis befell the man and by the summer of 1862 he was ready to make this a war about a higher cause than just union and free navigation of the Mississippi. All he needed was a victory to avoid his Proclamation appearing, as Secretary of State Seward warned him, “the last shriek on the retreat.”
39 Jim // Sep 17, 2009 at 12:12 am

Narcissa (what a name, btw):

No reasonable republican candidate for any office in the land is going to get that far down on their knees for a few votes. That’s a fact, and you can make of it whatever you want to make of it. When people as leftist as you are ready to meet the rest of the world halfway, we might have something to discuss.
40 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 12:16 am

If someone ever offers me: free government hand-outs so long as I do not work; more government checks, so long as I continue to have children out of wedlock; government housing that cages me in with nothing but poor, jobless, fatherless youths; or tells me that I am not succeeding because “the man” is keeping me down; tells me that to believe in free enterprise, entrepreneurship, hard work, my own abilities to prosper and grow, my worth as a man makes me a traitor to my people (makes me forfeit the right to even call me one of my people); that tells me the only way I can get ahead is to rig the system in my favor because I am not worthwhile to compete evenly; and in essence offers me all the tools I need to remain in perpetual servitude to the state from the cradle to the grave, I WILL RUN FROM THEM AS FAST AS I CAN.

That, however, is precisely the Democratic (liberal) approach to Blacks in America today. The worst thing that could happen to Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Eric Dyson, et al. is for race relations to be in harmony because THEY’D BE OUT OF A JOB and lose their million dollar grievance networks.

On 60 Minutes Mike Wallace asked Morgan Freeman how we can overcome racism in America. Freeman said: “Stop talking about it!” You are you, I am me, there is no Black or White. Just people. Why is that so hard.

When Democrats inject race into the equation every time a white person disagrees with Obama on matters of POLICY and PHILOSOPHY, they hurl back progress for the very people they claim to help. They don’t care about Blacks. They care about power. The vote. Racial condescension is racism…period.
41 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 12:44 am

“The great irony of the Civil War is that slavery, the one overarching and unavoidable question that was the incubator of all others, was the one issue that both sides agreed at the beginning was not what the war was about. And both sides were wrong.”

So the people fighting a massively brutal war were nincompoops and didnt know what they were fighting the war for. The utterances out of their own mouths and from their own pens are just from idiots that didnt know their own minds. That is some chutzpah there.

The Cost of Union

http://www.etymonline.com/cw/intro.htm

This country needs real education about the Civil War….to end this demonization and bigotry which is fully socially exceptable to espouse in public. Its shameful.

SLAVERY or TARIFF?

http://www.etymonline.com/cw/economics.htm
42 rbottoms // Sep 17, 2009 at 12:53 am

It is possible to oppose court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, and legislation like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, on libertarian rather than racial grounds.

A man has his foot on my neck keeping all the best jobs, living spaces, medical care, schools, and even food for himself and keeps me from my right to vote and I should be upset that someone finally made him stop because the means violated some libterian ideal?

Frak that.

It is only because of Martin Luther King we didn’t ultimately make that foot go away by force but one way or another it was going to stop. Be grateful as a nation that King sacrificed himself to ensure that Ghandi’s way was by and large the one we chose.
43 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 12:54 am

“A man has his foot on my neck keeping all the best jobs, living spaces, medical care, schools, and even food for himself and keeps me from my right to vote…”

Leave the Democrats and the Kennedys out of this.
44 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:02 am

“So the people fighting a massively brutal war were nincompoops and didnt know what they were fighting the war for. The utterances out of their own mouths and from their own pens are just from idiots that didnt know their own minds. That is some chutzpah there.”

Oh boy here we go. The ole “the war wasn’t about slavery because people back then said so” argument.

You’re right. the compromises that Schaeffer mentions had nothing to do with slavery. Dredd Scott had nothing to do with slavery. John Brown, etc. In fact, it is just a coincidence that North and South were divided along slave and free state right?

Look, you can say, even firmly believe in your heart, that gravity is not the cause of a rock falling, but t is nonetheless. And the men in battle, North and South were telling themselves they were fighting for Union, or States Rights or whatever. But for the South the right to do what exactly?

Jefferson recognized slavery as “the death knell of the Union” in the 1820s. Everything about the war revolved around slavery…whether or not revisionists wish to admit it.

Before the war there was slavery. Afterwards, with the South defeated, it was no more. Another coincidence I suppose. It was THE question of the war. These people were nincompoops. But they were deluding themselves if they thought that they were not fighting to end or maintain slavery depending on the color of the uniforms.

And I can quote Robert Gould Shaw if you want. There were enlightened men in the Union army who got it before their comrades did and, in Shaw’s case, died for the belief: “We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written but which will presently be as enviable and as renowned as any. “
45 rbottoms // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:04 am

This has nothing to do with Black people…

You must be under the impression that black people aren’t citizens like everyone else. Where did I say that improving society for one does not improve it for all.

This is why the GOP will never increase its black numbers:

If someone ever offers me: free government hand-outs so long as I do not work

This ladies and gentlemen is what you think of us.

And we know it. And it’s why we despise the GOP.

You keep fighting the fight like it’s 1972 and all we care about to your mind is welfare. Aside from being insulting, it’s also anachronistic thinking as much as any of it was ever true.

My concerns are bigger than welfare checks. Very little of what motivates me as a voter has anything specific at all with being black, which is why I am a Democrat. All the things I do care about they are on the correct side of.
46 rbottoms // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:07 am

No reasonable republican candidate for any office in the land is going to get that far down on their knees for a few votes. That’s a fact, and you can make of it whatever you want to make of it. When people as leftist as you are ready to meet the rest of the world halfway, we might have something to discuss.

You not saying anything I want to hear so why would I bother.
47 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:20 am

“This ladies and gentlemen is what you think of us.

And we know it. And it’s why we despise the GOP.”

Umm…nooooo. This is what the DEMOCRATS think of you which is why they offered this to you. Republicans believe in workfare not welfare. Of these two options which do YOU think is better for any people…regardless of race.

You should be insulted…by the Democrats who foisted these programs on you and created a FINANCIAL INCENTIVE to go from 25% to 75% illegitimacy in just 40 years. (The years following the implementation of the Great Society mind you) .

You have swallowed the DNC talking points just like they want you to. You are being insulted alright. YOu have been for two destroyed generations now…but not by the GOP.

YOu main concern if you really do care for Blacks in this country should be that 7 out of 10 black children are born to fatherless households. That demographic will destroy you all and keep you perpetual wards of the state. No matter how much wealth redistribution or “sensitivity training” gets foisted on the rest of us.

So please tell me what the Democratic Party has done for you in this regard? Hell when I was in school liberal teachers tried to pass off single mothers as just another legitimate family structure! How’s that working out for you? As I said, with friends like Liberals, trust me you need no GOP as enemies!
48 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:23 am

correction: My earlier post should read “these people were NOT nincompoops!” My apologies to the dead.
49 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:50 am

raider, you are right that Slavery was an issue. But it wasnt the issue. The reason for seccession was not slavery. A Constitutional Amendment was proposed just before the war to protect Slavery. If slavery was the issue then their would have been no war…..period. The Emancipation Proclaimation was another offer…in the middle of the War “Rejoin the Union and lay down your arms and keep your slaves” that was rejected.

“If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission and offer my sword to the other side”
— Ulysses S. Grant

RACE in the NORTH

One of the Pennsylvania newspapers I studied was full of race-baiting that makes me cringe even now. It slandered Lincoln, too, calling him every name in the book. But nobody made trouble for the editor until the summer of 1861, when he printed his opinion that the North had gone to war with the ultimate goal of freeing the slaves. This was considered so outrageous and offensive that soldiers just back from their three-months regiments attacked the office and sacked it.

http://www.etymonline.com/cw/northrace.htm
50 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:04 am

But for the South the right to do what exactly? — raider1

For Self Government, freedom from Tyranny, and unfair taxation, from subjugation as a economic imperial holding of the North and the Federal Government which the North was using to abuse and dictate to the Southern States.

The UPPER SOUTH – States Rights

http://www.etymonline.com/cw/virginia.htm
51 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:28 am

“The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history…the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination — that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue . The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.” –H.L. Mencken ( HL Mencken )

“[T]he contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions…are the general opinions of the English nation.”
London Times, November 7, 1861

“Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late… It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision… It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.”
Maj. General Patrick R. Cleburne, CSA, January 1864

“If you bring these [Confederate] leaders to trial it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution secession is not rebellion. Lincoln wanted Davis to escape, and he was right. His capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one.”
Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, July 1867 (Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 3, p. 765)

“The Union government liberates the enemy’s slaves as it would the enemy’s cattle, simply to weaken them in the conflict. The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”
London Spectator in reference to the Emancipation Proclamation

“The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”
Charles Dickens, 1862

“It is stated in books and papers that Southern children read and study that all the blood shedding and destruction of property of that conflict was because the South rebelled without cause against the best government the world ever saw; that although Southern soldiers were heroes in the field, skillfully massed and led, they and their leaders were rebels and traitors who fought to overthrow the Union, and to preserve human slavery, and that their defeat was necessary for free government and the welfare of the human family. As a Confederate soldier and as a citizen of Virginia, I deny the charge, and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels; we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes.”
Colonel Richard Henry Lee, C.S.A.

“As for the South, it is enough to say that perhaps eighty per cent. of her armies were neither slave-holders, nor had the remotest interest in the institution. No other proof, however, is needed than the undeniable fact that at any period of the war from its beginning to near its close the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the Union.”
Major General John B. Gordon, from his book, Causes of the Civil War.

“The flags of the Confederate States of America were very important and a matter of great pride to those citizens living in the Confederacy. They are also a matter of great pride for their descendants as part of their heritage and history.”
Winston Churchill

“Like most war leaders, he [Lincoln] grossly distorted and exaggerated the motives of his enemy. He constantly insisted that the South wanted to “destroy” the Union, when it merely wanted to withdraw from it. He called honorable men like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee “traitors,” though they never betrayed anyone in their lives. He accused the South of “aggression,” when it was the South that was being invaded, and truly destroyed, by the Union armies. Having assured the country that he had neither the power nor the inclination to disturb slavery, Lincoln made the destruction of slavery his lofty war aim in the middle of the war.” —Joseph Sobran

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”–Abraham Lincoln. March 4, 1861 Inaugural address

The predicament in which both the Government and the commerce of the country are placed, through the non-enforcement of our revenue laws, is now thoroughly understood the world over….If the manufacturer at Manchester [England] can send his goods into the Western States through New Orleans at less cost than through New York, he is a fool for not availing himself of his advantage…If the importations of the counrty are made through Southern ports, its exports will go through the same channel. The produce of the West, instead of coming to our own port by millions of tons, to be transported abroad by the same ships through which we received our importations, will seek other routes and other outlets. With the lost of our foreign trade, what is to become of our public works, conducted at the cost of many huindred millions of dollars, to turn into our harbor the products of the interior? They share in the common ruin. So do our manufacturers…Once at New Orleans, goods may be distributed over the whole country duty-free. The process is perfectly simple… The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North…We now see clearly whither we are tending, and the policy we must adopt. With us it is no longer an abstract question—one of Constitutional construction, or of the reserved or delegated powers of the State or Federal government, but of material existence and moral position both at home and abroad…..We were divided and confused till our pockets were touched. —New York Times March 30, 1861

The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing….It is very clear that the South gains by this process, and we lose. No—we MUST NOT “let the South go.” —-Union Democrat , Manchester, NH, February 19, 1861

That either revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the ports must be closed to importations from abroad….If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe…..Allow rail road iron to be entered at Savannah with the low duty of ten per cent, which is all that the Southern Confederacy think of laying on imported goods, and not an ounce more would be imported at New York; the railroads would be supplied from the southern ports. —New York Evening Post March 12, 1861

“Any society which suppresses the heritage of its conquered minorities, prevents their history or denies them their symbols, has sown the seeds of their own destruction.”
Sir William Wallace, 1281
52 rbottoms // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:45 am

I’m perfectly happy with the GOP continuing to do the same thing and wonder why they attract nearly zero black voters. We have the White House and both house of Congress and even if we lose seats in 2010, which is typical we’ll still have control of the White House.

The GOP has nothing we want. However we have something you need. Voters. Demographically the GOP is doomed to shrink.

So don’t go changing on me.
53 Jim // Sep 17, 2009 at 7:25 am

“The GOP has nothing we want. However we have something you need. Voters.”

The GOP doesn’t need them as badly as you think.
54 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 8:06 am

Escapevel….The South wanted the right for self-government so it could practice….??? Go ahead. You can say it.
55 balconesfault // Sep 17, 2009 at 8:32 am

raider1 – clearly the leaders of the Confederacy were very forward looking – and wanted the right for self-government so that they could prevent a Federal Government from imposing the evils of universal healthcare on their populace.
56 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 8:40 am

Escape I love how you are completely ignoring slavery in your discsussion of the Civil War. As if it were a side issue. A “by the way.” The South’s rebellion was immoral because they were trying to free themselves from what they saw as Abolitionist rule. And what were they abolishing exactly? Were they trying to take over Southern ports? We were they abolishing Southern rights under the law? The freedom, if you want to paradoxically call it that, that teh South was fighting for was at its root the paradoxical “freedom to own slaves.”

The Southern economy was based upon a business model that required slave labor (paying no wages and preventing anyone from quitting basically) to function. Even Southerners knew it was wrong, euphemisms like “peculiar institution” asider.

This was not a battle of moral equals. Say, an American war of the Roses. Rather this was a battle for a “new birth of freedom” as Lincoln said…a part of the Gettysburg Address I notice you also ignore. I argue the most important part.

I could quote revisionist historians and Southern apologists all day long too but dueling quotes is not a game I feel like playing. So just look at the facts.

1820 – A Missouri compromise allowing free and slave states to come in simultaneously to keep balance in the House between what was defined as Souther and Northern States (but slavery was not what the war was about).

1850 – A California compromise bringing in free Cal and slave TX once again shows that the events leading up to war were just about “states rights” and nothing at all to do with slavery. Certainly appeasing the South with a very unpopular fugitive federal slave law allowing slave-catcchers to chase blacks all the way north to the Canadian border had nothing to do with slavery but rather “states rights.’

Dude, drop the euphemisms of Calhoun et al. It was THE RIGHT TO OWN SLAVES UNMOLESTED TO KEEP THEIR FLAWED ECONOMY AND FAUX LIFESTYLE AFLOAT IN AN INCREASINGLY MODERN AGE.

3 million Blacks in chains made the avoidance of slavery as an issue as impossible as avoiding a boulder blocking a mountain road. Just saying it had nothing to do with slaverand backing it up with historians’ quotes (I can give you Barabara Fields on my end) and quotes from contemporaries (Shaw, Greely, Douglass?) who fit your views do not make it so. I can do the dueling quotes thing too. The internet is a powerful tool ain’t it.
57 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 8:53 am

Balcone…to mention healthcare reform/coercion whatever (which I bitterly oppose on constitutional, ethical, practical and economic grounds) to slavery is an insult to slaves. Only people like us who have never lived under the whip could even think to offer such a ludicrous comparison. You should be ashamed.

“Slavery is all midnight all the time,” one slave once said. Another said: “You know what I’d do if I was to go be a alsvae again? I’d take a gun and end it all….cause you ain’t nothin’ but a dog.”

A far cry from paying higher health premiums don’t you agree? Come on. Keep the discussion real.
58 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 8:55 am

You know what Balcone? You were kidding weren’t you. I’m an idiot. Ignore me. Time to get on with my day. LOL Sorry.
59 balconesfault // Sep 17, 2009 at 9:06 am

You know what Balcone? You were kidding weren’t you. I’m an idiot. Ignore me. Time to get on with my day. LOL Sorry.

Yes, I was. But unfortunately, it has become impossible to mock the rhetorical excesses of some on the right to a degree that it’s clear that one is kidding. They are determined to make parody obsolete.
60 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 9:13 am

Escape…let me ask you. Do you think that if in 1861 the entire nation was either all free or all slave there still would have been a Civil War?

If your answer is yes, what then would have been the cause?

By the way, there are usually several motivations for going to war. Profit, ideology, religion, morality, conquest, defense from attck, etc. You are showing me people’s personal motivations which I respect. I have no illusions that the North was the land of racial harmony in April 1861. But remember, most in the North had never even seen a slave up to that time. It was soemthing, like the rest of the country, “out there” on someone else’s turf.

And ok Escape I see earlier you’re quoting Grant (notice your quote is in 1861). Here we go. Let the internet quote war begin:

I never was an abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly and it became patent in my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace established, I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until the question is forever settled.” – August 30, 1863, in a letter to Elihu Washburne.

“As soon as slavery fired upon the flag, it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle… there had to be an end to slavery.” -In a conversation with Bismarck, 1878.

“The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that “A state half slave and half free cannot exist.” All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true.” – U.S. Grant, in his Memoirs, 1885.
61 sinz54 // Sep 17, 2009 at 9:46 am

spartacusisnotdead: The Federal Government does NOT have absolute powers to intervene all over the country every time somebody has a grievance that they take to the Federal Government for assistance.

You need to read the Constitution. We’re a union of states, with separation of powers.

This issue has been argued back and forth for years. Anyone who, like yourself, claims it’s simple–just let the Federal Government decide every question that comes up and ignore the view of the cities, counties and states–doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
62 sinz54 // Sep 17, 2009 at 9:55 am

rbottoms:

A man has his foot on my neck keeping all the best jobs, living spaces, medical care, schools, and even food for himself and keeps me from my right to vote and I should be upset that someone finally made him stop because the means violated some libterian ideal?

Frak that.

At least now we’re discussing the REAL issue–whether Buckley’s libertarian and constitutionalist ideals justified ignoring the plight of black citizens in the South. Not this idiotic claim that Buckley was a racist. Because he wasn’t.

It is PRECISELY the fact that the Federal Government’s powers are LIMITED–meaning they can’t always do what YOU want or even what a majority of the public wants–that keeps the U.S. from degenerating into the kind of banana-republic dictatorship like Peron’s Argentina or Chavez’s Venezuela. The U.S. Constitution is all that stands between me and your coming to my home with an armed mob demanding that I feed you because you’re hungry and I have more food than you do.

Let me explain MY views on it.

The deliberate racial segregation taking place in the South was indeed a violation of individual rights. And the Federal Government should have intervened.

But what about same-sex marriage? Should the Federal Government override the views of the states? How about abortion? And if the Federal Government does intervene, should it be protecting the rights of the woman to have an abortion, or the rights of the unborn children to be born?

This issue–when does the Federal Government have the right to intervene–is NOT a simple question. We’ve never had a hard-and-fast rule to decide it.

But the case of racial segregation in the South is clear enough to me. The Federal Government was absolutely right to override states like Georgia (and its segregationist governor, George Wallace). Because American citizens’ rights–like the right to vote–were being violated.

To sum up: Stop throwing around wild charges of racism, and start THINKING about a Constitution that deliberately limits the powers of a Federal Government to intervene every single time someone has a complaint.
63 sinz54 // Sep 17, 2009 at 9:59 am

raider1: Oh, please.

The situation was NOT symmetric, as you claim.

Many white Northerners were just as racist as white Southerners.
In the 19th century, the notion that black people were genetically inferior to white people was almost universal. As it was among white Europeans.

Northern troops really were fighting to keep the Union from being split up, and to keep the South from invading the North. I doubt that more than one in 20 white Union soldiers gave a damn about risking his life to help black people.

Southern troops really were fighting to preserve their so-called “peculiar institution” of slavery.
64 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 10:10 am

Ah ok. So you equate having people dislike you for your skin tone in the North with being held in chains, raped, having your children sold out from under you, beaten, whipped, hobbled, worked to death while living in squalid filthy conditions as they were in the South. Got it.

If the war was not about slavery, then you must believe that in 1861, had both sides of the mason-dixon line been free, or both sides slaveholding, that war would have come anyway yes?

if this is the case, then what would have been the cause?
65 Chekote // Sep 17, 2009 at 10:52 am

Can we say Willie Hornton?

Willie Horton was first used by Al Gore during the presidential primary. Using your logic, Gore was playing to the racists in the Dem party.
66 Chekote // Sep 17, 2009 at 10:55 am

They have to admit slavery was wrong, not relatively wrong, actually, simply wrong

You need to pick up a history book. The Republican Party was founded because they believed slavery was wrong and should be abolished. Ignorance is the most expensive commodity in this country. I have to agree with Rush on that.
67 Chekote // Sep 17, 2009 at 11:00 am

But the case of racial segregation in the South is clear enough to me. The Federal Government was absolutely right to override states like Georgia (and its segregationist governor, George Wallace). Because American citizens’ rights–like the right to vote–were being violated

After the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constituion, the federal government had a duty to step in. Federalists are about enforcing the Constitution.
68 SpartacusIsNotDead // Sep 17, 2009 at 12:25 pm

Sinz wrote: “The Federal Government does NOT have absolute powers to intervene all over the country every time somebody has a grievance that they take to the Federal Government for assistance.”

Quite a pathetic straw man. Of course the Federal government does not have absolute powers to intervene all over the country on every greivance. But, the Federal government does have absolute power to intervene all over the country whenever somebody has a greivance that one of his/her U.S. constitutional rights has been denied.

All of the rights that blacks were attempting to vindicate were rights that were enshrined in the U.S. constitution, which is why the U.S. Supreme Court was able to protect those rights despite the pathetic and morally bankrupt Tenther claim by conservatives.

Maybe if you read the constitution and its jurisprudence you would know that. Although, based on many of your previous posts, I suspect you already do know this, but your bigotry compels you to justify these past evils.
69 SpartacusIsNotDead // Sep 17, 2009 at 12:34 pm

Chekote wrote: “The Republican Party was founded because they believed slavery was wrong and should be abolished. ”

This is correct. As I first wrote above, the issue is not whether the GOP per se. The issue is conservative domination of the GOP. For a very good portion of the GOP’s history, it had a comparatively good record on civil rights. However, for its entire history, conservatism has had a deplorable record on civil rights. It was when conservative ideology began to dominate the GOP that the GOP’s record on race and civil rights became horrible.

The GOP cannot compete for minority votes as long as its dominated by conservatives who continue to try to justify the past record on civil rights.
70 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 12:47 pm

Ah ok. So you equate having people dislike you for your skin tone in the North with being held in chains, raped, having your children sold out from under you, beaten, whipped, hobbled, worked to death while living in squalid filthy conditions as they were in the South. Got it.

If the war was not about slavery, then you must believe that in 1861, had both sides of the mason-dixon line been free, or both sides slaveholding, that war would have come anyway yes?

if this is the case, then what would have been the cause?

————–

In fact the Northern States which had abolished slavery (not all of them had, not by a long shot)…they didnt free the slaves and grant them full citizenship rights and the right to vote. They were in full Jim Crow mode, even worse than Jim Crow. Furthermore, they didnt just free the slaves, they encouraged the black slaves to be sold out of the state, to get rid of the inferior wretched mongerels.

Yes the Civil War would have happened without slavery in the mix. This was about the political and economic subjugation of the South (and the rest of the Nation) to the Northern Industrialists via control of the Federal Government. The expanding population through immigration was the key that gave the North the power to engorge themselves on the Federal Treasury and to make the rest of the Nation a protected imperial market for their exploitation….where they recieved land grants and extraction rights for their railroads, oil, lumber, agricultural production, and mineral extraction. The lure for Euro immigrants (whose cheap labour was being exploited)who were expanding the population and thus giving control of the Federal Government to the North, was Free Land out West. If these were Slave territories then guess who would have been collecting giant tracks for agriculture….wealthy plantation owners with lots of slave labour. No golden arches to sell to would be immigrants….no political empowerment, no cheap freely exploitable expanding labour market.

The underlying cause of this war was not slavery, it was economics….greed for money and corrupting the system for power to rig the system to their benefit. The original Corporatism, the age of the Robber Baron.

Southern troops really were fighting to preserve their so-called “peculiar institution” of slavery — sinz

Sinz has one portion of the argument right, but not the other. The South was fighting to prevent a would be imperial subjugator from putting their jackboots on their necks.

It was clearly an agressive military invasion and imperial subjugation, just like the Native American Nations that was still going on and resumed after the war out West, and the Mexican War immediately preceding it.
71 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 12:54 pm

I dont have a problem with Brown, but how Brown was eventually implemented with forced bussing and race integration of the schools not based on pragmatism, but as an end to itself. Schools are about learning and the color of the person sitting next to you has nothing to do with the 3 R’s.

Should little girl Brown had to walk by the white school to get to the inferior black school no. The schools should be equal. And you should have a choice where you go.
72 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:11 pm

Dude, drop the euphemisms of Calhoun et al. It was THE RIGHT TO OWN SLAVES UNMOLESTED TO KEEP THEIR FLAWED ECONOMY AND FAUX LIFESTYLE AFLOAT IN AN INCREASINGLY MODERN AGE.
— raider

Yes the modern age of capitalist exploitation Northern Industrialist Robber Baron imperialism.

YANKEE CANARDS

Was the ante-bellum South a primitive, backwards, illiterate, violent culture?

http://www.etymonline.com/cw/canards.htm

SLAVERY as HISTORY

One of the gulfs between most of the modern historians I read and many of the older ones is that the earlier historians were able and willing to look at slavery as an economic institution, and at the enforcement of fugitive slave laws as a legal process between the sections.

It is necessary to do this to understand the coming of the Civil War. But it’s also not easy or entirely pleasant to do so. We who do it stand in an exposed position, not in terms of historical realities — because in doing so we’re more true to those realities than our opponents — but in terms of modern moralities.

http://www.etymonline.com/cw/slavery.htm
73 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:14 pm

The deliberate racial segregation taking place in the South was indeed a violation of individual rights. And the Federal Government should have intervened. — sinz

The North and the Rest of the Country had deliberate racial segregation as well….Jim Crow laws and enforcement, via law, government enforcement and informal enforcement.

The reason why it was more blatant and in your face in the South is that the population of the Black Americans was much greater, in totatity and per capita.
74 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:15 pm

Boston, New York, Chicago, and many others where blacks gathered in numbers up North…..all had nasty desegregation of schools….with whites opposing it in the most crude of ways.
75 sinz54 // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:25 pm

raider1:

If the war was not about slavery, then you must believe that in 1861, had both sides of the mason-dixon line been free, or both sides slaveholding, that war would have come anyway yes?

And if pigs had wings….

Your premise is impossible. The South would have collapsed economically without slavery. It couldn’t sustain a small population of what were essentially feudalist manors (renamed “plantations”) with hired labor–because competition for wages would drive down the wealth of the manor owners. And because Northern companies would migrate down South to lure away those lower-paid workers to work in factories instead of on cotton plantations.

And this is why I believe that slavery would have ended eventually even without the Civil War. The advent of automated farming–mechanical threshers, combines, tractors, etc.– in the late 19th century, would have replaced slaves. Slaves were cheaper than hired labor. But machines were cheaper than human slaves.

As I’ve said before, your home and my home employ lots of slaves. Look around your home. You can identify many slaves that wash and dry your clothes, clean your carpet, wash your dishes, take messages when you’re out. But they’re not human. They’re machines.
76 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:31 pm

Escape. All the reasons you give (the typical Just Cause, Jubal Earley and later revisionist tripe) about Northern “subjugation thorugh industrial, immigration, blah blah…” all stems from the fact that the South had a culture of slavery embedded in its fabric that disparaged industrialization for a more agrarian economy. But that economy was only viable so long as labor was FREE. A plantation could not function if it had to pay a wage. It was a broken business model artifically supported on (literally) the backs of millions of oppressed Africans.

Why did immigrants come to the North? Because there was WORK there. The South needed no immigrants from abroad to fill its need for workers, and thus evenutually kept it’s population at 25% of the North’s (in terms of free whites) and 40% including slaves. Why was the North so industrial? Because it had a vibrant entrepreneurial culture that was driven, at its core, by the desire for wages and growth. Slavery kept the South in a perpetual state of Antebellum luster for the fortunate aristocrats and horror for the blacks.

The Southern plantation owner was doing fine and needed no factory when he had “Tera” to sustain his lifestyle. Thus no true urban centers except for really Atlanta developed. Is it any coincidence that the South is now very economically viable in a way it never could have dreamed of vis a vis the North in 1860?

So there was no need to grow and industrialize because so long as labor was free, even the worst business models succeeded so no motivation to put money into any other ventures. So long as there was a pool of free labor, there was no need for immigrants (heck you would just have to pay them) so naturally the immigrant wnet North where the paying jobs were…and all the talent, chutzpah, smarts and elbow grease that these immigrants impy went with them to the great cities growing like weeds north of the MD line and Ohio River.

You are still talking about the symptoms of slavery that kept the behind as causes unto themselves. Like saying the disease itself if the cough and runny nose, not the virus within.

The slave owning South, given these factors could not compete with the free, wage paying, industrial North. So they decided that the enemy was without, not from within, and falsely believed that by leaving the North they could perpetuate their false way of life ad infinitum. But history, morality, and common sense shows differently.

So, in conlusion, you are patently wrong about war happening with a an all free country or all slave country. Because, like today, we would have just been one country.

At least you stopped with the Grant quotes. He was a great man wasn’t he? An underrated president and the reatest general of the war on either side. (Yes, even Lee. Sorry)
77 sinz54 // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:36 pm

escapevelocity:

The reason why it was more blatant and in your face in the South is that the population of the Black Americans was much greater, in totatity and per capita.

No. It was because it was explicitly enshrined in the state laws of the Southern states.

There were laws mandating separate schools, separate drinking fountains, etc. A private businessman who would have dared to provide only one drinking fountain for both black and white customers would have been violating the local laws, and would at the very least have gotten a stiff fine.

We had nothing like that in the North. What we did have was de facto segregation: People clustered in neighborhoods of their own kind: Jewish neighborhoods where all the kids went to yeshivas, black neighborhoods where the kids went to their local all-black school, etc. We also had discrimination by personal choice: Many upscale country clubs didn’t accept blacks (or Jews or Italian-Americans either). Realtors would refuse to show some homes to black families. And so on.

People, left alone, often tend to self-segregate. And some folks feel uncomfortable around
other folks who don’t look like them. (When I would eat in my company’s cafeteria, I would see that. The secretaries sat together at the lunch table, the engineer nerds like me sat at another table, and the blacks tended to sit together by themselves.)

But that’s a matter of CHOICE, not a matter of LAW. Nobody should be FORCED by the law into huddling with certain people and not others.

Those “whites-only” type laws in the South were wrong, and had to go. Liberals were right about that.

But liberals overreached. Faced with self-segregation by choice, liberals insisted that people had to be FORCED into integration. They invented this vague notion of “racial balance,” and started forcing people into that mold. For education, they started moving children around like pieces on a chess board: We’ll move some white kids over to THIS school and we’ll move some black kids over to THAT school, etc.

That was wrong too.
And it’s one reason why liberals lost their hold on suburban America and white ethnic America. (A few years of Obama will remind them of why they fled liberalism decades ago.)
78 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:44 pm

Sinz, not sure how to address the fallacious points you make but your answer is a cop-out nonetheless disguised as a clever retort.

The question was simple and logical. If you say slavery did not cause the Civil War, then logically, if both the North and South had slaves, or all were free, the war still would have come. Yet your response is some sort of faux nexus between appliances and human beings that loses me. But let us look at it this way. What if half the country had appliances and the other didn’t? Would there not be tension there that currently does not exist?

And appliances are machines made by man, not God so that is in innane comparison. An appliance does not have a soul, or a yearning to be free, , able to suffer, feel pain, with familes ripped apart, living in an unnatural state. You would have been better using pets…actually those pets who do work like in theFlinstones are the perfect metaphore! Yes there it is! Ugh. Utterly ludicrous. See how silly your argument was. LOL

Any way, your answer to my question seemed to be that that is a moot question becuase the South could not have existed without slavery. Yet I have photos from Houston, Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas, Mobile, Miami, etc. that show that the South is very much alive and slavery has been gone (on paper at least) since 1863. Hmmm. Maybe Antebellum South. But today’s South is doing quite nicely.

What you did was you answered my question.
79 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 1:47 pm

Escape, I am going out on a limb here and assume that you have never been a slave. I hardly think those poor, sick, chained, filthy, souls on the ships coming over the Atlantic realized that they were just data inputs for your forensic examinations.
80 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:09 pm

But that economy was only viable so long as labor was FREE. A plantation could not function if it had to pay a wage. It was a broken business model artifically supported on (literally) the backs of millions of oppressed Africans. — raider

That is just false. Post Civil War the Blacks served as freely exploited labour as sharecroppers….in very successful agricultural pursuits.

The war was about subjugating the Souths economic output to the Norths advantage…..via a protected market, through tarriffs.

Slavery was just a part of the economic reasons for war.

That the US post Civil War and especially later on would like to see it as a War of Liberation in the abolishionist sense is not surprising. Its an attempt to persuade African Americans that the North was their friend and shed blood to free them, in give the African Americans a reason to support them politically and and something to hang their hat on to support the United States of America. Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator.”

There is certainly truth to the statement that Republicans were not friendly to Slavery….and that civil rights and abolishionism played some roll in the grand scheme of things, but they were not front and center. Abolishionists were despised in the North as well as the South and were radicals (and who resided in both sections as well.) But all that is not even secondary to the reasons for the Civil War…(innappropriately named because it wasnt a battle for control of the central government, but an imperial war of agression and subjugation.)

“Why was the North so industrial? Because it had a vibrant entrepreneurial culture that was driven, at its core, by the desire for wages and growth. Slavery kept the South in a perpetual state of Antebellum luster for the fortunate aristocrats and horror for the blacks.”

Yes your argument is for the beaufication of a capitalist industrialist system who ditched slavery because it was unprofitable….the high up front costs of labour plus the cost of housing, healthcare, and food…..all discarded. Cheap labor, free, and freely exploited.

There is no doubt that slavery as an institution is abhorant. Claiming that the immigrants being exploited up North were in some kind of non perpetual empoverishment (until the unions came and Teddy Roosevelt) is just fantasyland.

“Thus no true urban centers except for really Atlanta developed. Is it any coincidence that the South is now very economically viable in a way it never could have dreamed of vis a vis the North in 1860?”

You are just arguing in favor of the superiority of a system. Not about the causes of the Civil War. You seem to be really confused. The South was impoverished for a century….because of the legacy of the Civil War. Furthermore the current push by the South for policies that promote economic expansion, activity, and development now clash with the North, who favor protectionism for their industry and their union workers from the upstart South. The North trying to maintain in perpetuity their economic superiority via political and legal means…..instead of competing in the free market. Fascinating hey? Its about economics and power via government to promote Northern interests, it always has been.

Again, you are just arguing the superiority of a system and the problems with the slavery model as an economic endevour. This is not the cause of the Civil War. Slavery was very profitable….however cheap freely exploitable with little worker rights and protections, immigrant labor is also very profitable….even moreso than slavery….with lessor up front and continuing costs. The South would have moved away from Slave Labor, for economic reasons.

Furthermore, if it was mostly about the moral disgust at slavery as an institution, then the Industrialized North would have ponied up the money to buy the slaves and free them, invited them to live en masse up North, free and fully infranchised citizens, whose labor could be freely exploited. This didnt happen.

“The slave owning South, given these factors could not compete with the free, wage paying, industrial North. So they decided that the enemy was without, not from within, and falsely believed that by leaving the North they could perpetuate their false way of life ad infinitum. But history, morality, and common sense shows differently.”

The South in fact was very profitable, and it was the North who would lose big time economically by the South leaving and the tarriff no longer funding the Federal Government which spent the money in the Northern factories. They would have had to compete with Southern ports for shipping goods and materials from and to the interior. Yes, the South would have probably moved away from slave labor and to cheap immigrant labor, but at their own pace, and they would have sold their slaves to South America, profitably, as well, and been rid of the inferior race like the North already had done.

Grant was hardly the greatest General on either side. He had superior numbers, funding, and supplies. He just kept pounding away with them. Allowing Sherman to wage total war on the citizens of the South, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This war was about economics, and slavery was a subset of that economic conflict.
81 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:15 pm

Escape, I am going out on a limb here and assume that you have never been a slave. I hardly think those poor, sick, chained, filthy, souls on the ships coming over the Atlantic realized that they were just data inputs for your forensic examinations. — radier

See that is the mistake that you are making raider. You are applying our modern morality and sensibilities to the past. I can abhor slavery and still understand that it was a profitable venture in the past. I can abhor that blacks were considered sub human and inferior and still understand that that is just the way it was back then. The word racism is a modern invention, it did not exist in the lexicon back then, because the inferiority of blacks was a given…..and only a very small percentage of radicals were arguing that even though they were inferior they were still humans and deserved God’s freedom.

The Civil War was a white man’s war, and it was about power and economics. Full Stop.

Ill state it right here. Slavery is a vile institution and Im glad to be rid of it. But the South is being unfairly villified and the current read on the Civil War is serving modern US interests and sensibilities, not an accurate portrayal of events. Essentially, youve thrown the Southerners under the bus.
82 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:18 pm

No. It was because it was explicitly enshrined in the state laws of the Southern states. — sinz

Why do you think that was so in the South but not the North?

Answer: The number in totality and as a percentage of the population…. of blacks in the South. The power dynamics were greater because the threat was greater. No Northern States were threatened with Black takeover of the Legislatures.

Get real sinz!
83 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:22 pm

“This war was about economics, and slavery was a subset of that economic conflict.”

Let’s just close this with I argue the opposite. This was a war about slavery, as expressed through the subset of economics, the differences between the two systems being a direct result of one side practicing slavery and the other a free state.

I respect your opinion if I disagree.

As for Grant, you cannot commit a war crime against war criminals. The South’s entire state was built upon the greatest crime in US history. If you think that Sherman’s march to the sea was a war crime, I can only imagine your thoughts on the USAAF WW2 bombings!

Grant was great because he was fighting war in the present day. Not in the past like the early Northern Genrals (and the Southern ones as well). All Union genls had superior numbers, but Grant seemed to be the one who knew how to use them. In a 19th cnetury militray world raised on Napoleanic principles, Grant’s modern approach to war was a mark of genius. The South held the Union at bay for three years before Gran was given overall command. He launched his campaign against Lee (who was adroit at producing victories–if bloody ones) in the spring of 1864. 11 months later the war was over. That says it all.
84 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:23 pm

Anway. What about Schaeffer’s prmise that the GOP has something to offer the Balck community? does this hold water?
85 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:27 pm

Its just like Muslims in Europe….at 1 percent of the population they are not a threat. At 10 percent they become powerful. At 30 to 50 percent they become very powerful in a democracy. At majority and greater…so on and so forth.
86 rbottoms // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:38 pm

But liberals overreached. Faced with self-segregation by choice, liberals insisted that people had to be FORCED into integration.

“I feel just sick about it.”
~ Rupert Giles
87 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:42 pm

I respect your opinion if I disagree. — raider

You make some good points to.

The underlying problem here is that my opinion of the Confederacy and the Civil War is not shown due respect…..and the Confederacy is the object of derision….and denounced in the most vile of terms.

It is a proud history of Southerners. Why is that history not respected even if you may dissagree with it. Other peoples and groups are allowed their view of history without it being derided and castigated for it. You can see the Anti Southern bigotry pouring out of the likes of Maureen Dowd who adds words to the end of Joe Wilson’s statements in her own mind, based on her bigoted view of Southerners….then calls them racists and bigots. Its maddening!
88 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:43 pm

Anway. What about Schaeffer’s prmise that the GOP has something to offer the Balck community? does this hold water? — raider

Absolutely, Ill get back to you on that. Gotta run.
89 balconesfault // Sep 17, 2009 at 2:50 pm

The underlying problem here is that my opinion of the Confederacy and the Civil War is not shown due respect…..and the Confederacy is the object of derision….and denounced in the most vile of terms.

Traitors usually are denounced. Particularly when their treason results in the death of over half a million of their countrymen.
90 rbottoms // Sep 17, 2009 at 3:16 pm

The underlying problem here is that my opinion of the Confederacy and the Civil War is not shown due respect…..and the Confederacy is the object of derision….and denounced in the most vile of terms.

I kept waiting for the punch line.

F*** the Confederacy. How’s that for a denouncement.

They are lucky that more of them weren’t hung after the end of hostilities, but the desire to make the country whole again was more important.

As a former soldier, I respect their soldiers as I would any other person who serves with honor in battle, but I think they get way more honors than they should. What they should get is as much sympathy as the average Third Reich got gets for his efforts. Unlike the German soldiers they are allowed monuments and polite remembrances for their stupid and futile attempt to destroy the United States and to preserve slavery.

Be satisfied with that.
91 Raider1 // Sep 17, 2009 at 3:18 pm

Well I tell you that I think the Army of Northern Virginia was an incrdible group of determined soldiers. Perhaps the best in teh world at the time. Lee was a model of a man. James Longstreet — schaeffer wrote about him a while ago (guess this guy likes history) also a good decent man. The South was a product of its times I agree. And the North could be brutal and oppressive I agree as well, with no love of “negritude” as they called it. But the fact is we will, in 2009, never understand the horror that was slavery. The movie “Amistad” does a good job. We will just never know how awful it was. And to support a society unable to support itself, makes it even more a crime. Northern soldiers butchered Indians I know…also a crime. But on the great question of the day, the right for all men to be free, Lincoln and the boys in blue were on the right side of the moral divide…even if dragged their kicking and screaming.
92 lupe // Sep 17, 2009 at 3:48 pm

I first came to this website because I was curious about some of Mr. Frum’s interesting posts. But what keeps me coming back is to see what balconesfault and rbottoms have to say about some of the more . . . interesting worldviews represented among Mr. Frum’s commenters.
93 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 5:25 pm

raider I dont have any disagreement with what you said…..except this….

“And to support a society unable to support itself, makes it even more a crime.”

The Confederacy was able to support itself…..just because it had to import some goods doesnt make it not self sufficient. In fact the North had to import food from the South to support its workforce.

The Confederacy were not traitors. They tried their damnest to reach comporomise on issue after issue. In fact the tariff was instituted during the War of 1812 to keep the New England states from seceding, because their export business was seriously hurt. Then it was twisted into a weapon to bleed the South dry and engorge themselves from the US Treasury.

The North can only lay claim to moral superiority in that they however half arsed stumbled into Emancipation and the 13th and 14th Amendments. This is why this angle is pushed as the main reason for the war….because the victors write history to suit themselves…and to glorify themselves as valiant liberators in a War of Liberation and disparage the Confederacy and the South is in their interest.

Sinz,

Think of it this way. If every African American had packed up and moved to New England, Jim Crow, poll taxes, intimidation by law enforcement, and segregation would have been institued there as it was in the South. This is without question true.

Hell, if they did so now, and equal numbers of white Northerners moved South so that burden on resources and services wouldnt be an issue…..the reaction by New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and New Englanders would be quite revealing, methinks.
94 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 5:31 pm

Be satisfied with that. — rbottoms

I wonder which other groups rbottoms thinks should be satisfied with being villified and demonized, unfairly.
95 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 5:38 pm

Ill state it once again.

Slavery continued on the US after the Civil War was over. The last state that had legalized slavery was Delaware.

Slavers defeating slavers however does not a good Manichean tale of the virtue of the United States Make.

And we havent even touched on the war crimes, the crimes against humanity, the starvation via blockade, the trashing of the Constitution, civil rights abuses, military despotism, and tyranny of the Lincoln Administration….much of this executed even among the states that were still within the Union.

Imagine if New England seceded fromt he Union and we razed the place to the ground, today.

That is what happened to Southerners by the hand of the United States.
96 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 5:44 pm

As I said that is why Slavery was elevated to the lead reason for the Civil War, elsewise….its morally and ethically indefensable.
97 agentprovocateur // Sep 17, 2009 at 8:51 pm

The underlying problem here is that my opinion of the Confederacy and the Civil War is not shown due respect…..and the Confederacy is the object of derision….and denounced in the most vile of terms.

Oh, you poor unfairly treated soul. Opinions which are wrong are often not shown due respect. Should an opinion which looks favorably upon segregation be shown due respect? How about an opinion in favor of apartheid? As for the Confederacy, of course it is the object of derision. Confederates were traitors to this country, no better than Benedict Arnold or Aldridge Ames. By the way, slavery and treason are quite vile, and any group of people who would advocate both of those things deserve to be denounced in the most vile of terms. But please continue your whining victim shtick. It is so adorable.
98 Jim // Sep 17, 2009 at 8:53 pm

Not that it matters anywhere in this particular debate, but if acheiving industrializiation is the definition of the ultimate good for a nation, then Stalin was a Godsend for the USSR.
99 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 10:04 pm

So much for the farce of multi culturalism and embracing diversity, heh?
100 EscapeVelocity // Sep 17, 2009 at 10:22 pm

Electoral Reform just like you wanted rbottoms…

Cracking ACORN Requires Comprehensive Electoral Reform

The rogue group and its related organizations will hold power as long as they can manipulate the electoral process.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/cracking-acorn-requires-comprehensive-electoral-reform/
101 agentprovocateur // Sep 18, 2009 at 12:01 am

So much for the farce of multi culturalism and embracing diversity, heh?

Embracing diversity doesn’t mean tolerating racism and treason. Surely you aren’t too stupid to realize that? Then again, you do constantly try to decouple racism and treason from the Confederacy.
102 EscapeVelocity // Sep 18, 2009 at 12:39 am

That is exactly what I tell traitorous haters and bigots who populate the Left in such large numbers that they form a majority.
103 Raider1 // Sep 18, 2009 at 8:26 am

Escape I think Grant summed it up best. At the surrender in Appomattox he wrote that he was “depressed at the defeat of a foe who had fought so valiantly”, though he believed it was for “the WORST CAUSE for which anyone ever fought”. (Remember, there had yet to be Nazis and Communinists when he wrote that!)

But that is past now. We need to consider how to take back this country from the leftists who have overrun it today without appearing to be a smal group of disgrunteld Southern White men (which the press lables us falsely) but rather people whom I believe share the same sentiments as most Americans regardless of color. That Black vote overwhelming Democrat today is rediculous. It’s like voting for a dealer to keep supplying you the drugs that are destroying you in mind body and spirit! In this case, as Schaefer says, “government largess.”
104 balconesfault // Sep 18, 2009 at 10:59 am

We need to consider how to take back this country from the leftists who have overrun it today

I think the first step would be to realize that the “leftists” running the country aren’t that left … and in many cases, occupy the center of the political dialogue on the issues.
105 Raider1 // Sep 18, 2009 at 11:38 am

How do you define “center”? What is centrist about wanting universal healthcare, appeasing enemies, shunning allies (the real ones), immasculating the CIA, cutting the military, wanting to raise taxes, etc. This sounds to me more like European Socialist dogma than old fashioned moderation.

Obama was considered to be the farthest left Senator when he was there. Consider his past assosications from Ayers to Wright to Dorn (sp?) to ACORN. Look at his appointments and his actions thus far (Afghanistan notwithstanding). He, Pelosi, Reed and others are as left as you get in this country without being considered “fringe radicals”.
106 balconesfault // Sep 18, 2009 at 12:35 pm

What is centrist about wanting universal healthcare, appeasing enemies, shunning allies (the real ones), immasculating the CIA, cutting the military, wanting to raise taxes, etc.

From the most recent polling I can find that actually uses the term “universal healthcare”:

Kaiser Family Foundation Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. July 7-14, 2009. N=1,205 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3 (for all adults).
“Do you favor or oppose … having a national health plan in which all Americans would get their insurance through an expanded, universal form of Medicare-for-all” N=609 (Form A)
Favor 58%
Oppose 38%
Uncertain 3%

Where I come from, if 58% of Americans favor something, it’s kind of centrist.

cutting the military

The most recent polling I can find on military spending was Gallup back in 2007:
The Feb. 1-4 poll finds that 43% of Americans believe the government is spending too much for national defense and military purposes, while 35% say the government is spending the right amount and 20% say too little.

That makes cutting the military a center-left position – certainly not extreme left, unless you believe that 43% of Americans are extreme left. And the military budget has increased since that poll was taken.

wanting to raise taxes

CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. Aug. 28-31, 2009. N=1,010 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3 (for all adults).
“Do you think the Republicans in Congress or the Democrats in Congress would do a better job of dealing with each of the following issues and problems? . . .”
“Taxes”
Republicans 47%
Democrats 47%

Gallup Poll. April 6-9, 2009. N=1,027 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.
“As I read off some different groups, please tell me if you think they are paying their fair share in federal taxes, paying too much, or paying too little. How about [see below]?”

“Lower-income people” Too much – 39%/Too little – 16%
“Middle-income people” Too much – 43%/Too little – 5%
“Upper-income people” Too much – 13%/Too little – 60%
“Corporations” Too much – 8%/Too little – 67%

From those responses, raising taxes on upper income taxpayers and corporations is a centrist position.

“appeasing enemies, shunning allies (the real ones), immasculating (sic) the CIA” are all opinions. I think you’re wrong, and Obama isn’t doing those things. You and a lot of right wing commentators think he is. Not relevent to this discussion.
107 EscapeVelocity // Sep 18, 2009 at 1:12 pm

Predictable,

The key raider is to get em young in the school system so that you have access to other peoples kids to brainwash them with Leftist dogma, K through Uni. Then reinforce those beliefs via media control. This is how you shift the citizenry and electorate Left generationally. As each generation comes online, you can shift the indoctrination even farther Left as their parents are already moved Left.

However the increase in bandwidth has allowed the media shield to be broken and dissenting voices to be heard.

Now we need to focus on the schools.

Elsewise all wins over the Left are phyrric victories, reargaurd actions.

All that will be Left of the European Left will be the Nazis and Neo Nazis soon, methinks. But that is because of its alliance with Islam or Islam proving the tired tropes of Leftwingism….multiculturalism and mass immigration, non stop bludgeoning the indigenous Europeans as racists and haters for not wanting to Islamize Europe. The assault on Western Civilization by the Left is more clearly defined by the Islamic mass immigration and multicultural tropes…than with any other group. And the Left cant keep the lies up too much longer, the violent or otherwise Islamic supremacists are growing in number and more confidence…they are acting and speaking out.
108 SpartacusIsNotDead // Sep 18, 2009 at 2:53 pm

raider1,

Do you have a substantive response to balconesfault’s post at 106 because he just obliterated you?
109 agentprovocateur // Sep 19, 2009 at 2:39 am

That Black vote overwhelming Democrat today is rediculous. It’s like voting for a dealer to keep supplying you the drugs that are destroying you in mind body and spirit! In this case, as Schaefer says, “government largess.”

I’m sure that telling black people that most of them are stupid and/or addicts is a wonderful part of a winning strategy to drive them into the Republican fold.
110 Raider1 // Sep 19, 2009 at 12:05 pm

Sparta:

1) “Cuting military” I should have said “cutting military in favor of increasing spending on domestic programs…” which is what we are talking about and I am too. No one denies there is waste at the Pentagon. that was a misquided opinion on my part. So, I would like to see data on how many AMericans support cutting the military in favor increasing domestic spending.

2) Until the GOP Bush tax cuts the majority of AMericans ore-2003 felt they all paid to much in taxes. He threw out a different issue. I would like to see what % of Americans (all of them) would like to see THEIR taxes raised. Everyone wants everyone else to pay more. But that is not what I am talking about becasue only a fool or blind Obama ideolgue would deny the eventuality of ALL of us paying more. Campaign promises aside.

And I think all Americans (myself included) would love to see a plan that coveres everyone while costing nothing more to the government or themselves personally. But the polls obviously show that AMericans believe that government cannot get it done. Thus only the eft shows a faith in government that belies reality.

As for my national security claims. Well, he didn’t address that at all did he? Just claimed that it was my opinion.

So in essence what he did was set up several straw men and “obliterate” them handily. Too bad his data points do not address my claims directly (one of which I admit was worded poorly).

As for Agent…I never claimed that should be GOP policy to say such things. But it is a legitimate observation nonetheless. I don’t recall using the word “stupid” Sorry. But many lower income people of whom many are Black ARE “addicted” to government largess. At their own peril. The truth hurts.
111 sinz54 // Sep 20, 2009 at 1:14 pm

spartacusisnotdead:

All of the rights that blacks were attempting to vindicate were rights that were enshrined in the U.S. constitution

There’s nothing about a right to racially balanced public schools in the U.S. Constitution.
112 sinz54 // Sep 20, 2009 at 1:17 pm

escapevelocity:

This was about the political and economic subjugation of the South (and the rest of the Nation) to the Northern Industrialists via control of the Federal Government.

That’s absurd.

Without slavery, on what POSSIBLE basis would the South have seceded from the Union?

And if they didn’t secede, on what POSSIBLE basis could any American president (Stephen Douglas probably) have asked Congress to declare war on half of the nation?
113 sinz54 // Sep 20, 2009 at 1:21 pm

raider1:

But that economy was only viable so long as labor was FREE. A plantation could not function if it had to pay a wage. It was a broken business model artifically supported on (literally) the backs of millions of oppressed Africans.

Yep.

BTW, note the similarity to how agribusiness, and the “housekeeping and food service industries” (cf. Peter Venkman) depend on illegal immigrant labor today, men and women imported from Latin America to work in the shadows at wages below the minimum wage, and often in terrible conditions.

That too is a broken business model.
114 sinz54 // Sep 20, 2009 at 1:28 pm

balconesfault:

Here are some more recent poll numbers (from Gallup) than the ones you cited:

March 26, 2009
Fewer See U.S. Spending Too Much on Defense
Currently, 31% of Americans think the U.S. government is spending too much for national defense and military purposes, down 13 percentage points from last February….

September 15, 2009
Americans: Uncle Sam Wastes 50 Cents on the Dollar
Figures are 42 cents for state governments; 37 cents for local
by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, NJ — Americans are markedly cynical about the amount of waste in federal spending, more so than at several other times in recent history. On average, Americans believe 50 cents of every tax dollar that goes to the government in Washington, D.C., today are wasted. That’s an increase from 46 cents per dollar in 2001.

You can get more of the details from their website.

As both Gallup and Rasmussen have noted, having a doctrinaire liberal in the White House who’s obsessed with bringing major “change” tends to make people “remember” why things aren’t so bad that we need all that much “change.”

You know the old saying: Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t.
115 sinz54 // Sep 20, 2009 at 1:35 pm

raider1:

We need to consider how to take back this country from the leftists who have overrun it today without appearing to be a smal group of disgrunteld Southern White men (which the press lables us falsely) but rather people whom I believe share the same sentiments as most Americans regardless of color.

To make common ground with us Northerners,

You really have to get over your bitterness and your own personal interpretation of the Civil War.

History has made its judgment.
And it doesn’t agree with you.

I believe “escapevelocity” and I would agree on lots of foreign policy issues, energy issues, and on the domestic issues of government spending and ensuring civil order.

But I’m proud of the fact that in the Civil War, the right side won.

However much defenders of the South try to rationalize it, the fact is they were trying to preserve an economy in which human beings–equal to themselves–were being treated as chattel. And this society was based on a scientifically wrong theory that a human being who had more melanin in his skin was inferior to white-skinned humans in many ways.

It had to end.
116 sinz54 // Sep 20, 2009 at 1:40 pm

agentprovocateur:

I’m sure that telling black people that most of them are stupid and/or addicts is a wonderful part of a winning strategy to drive them into the Republican fold.

That’s not what he meant, and you know it.

It meant it metaphorically: That liberals hand out government largesse to black people to make them dependent on handouts and favors, much as a pusher hands out samples of heroin to get folks hooked on it.

I don’t think it’s deliberate.

But I sure got to see it firsthand.
I grew up in a poor neighborhood in which a lot of our neighbors were on welfare. We were friends with some of them, and we would offer to try to help them get jobs. They said why bother.

Most 9-to-5 jobs aren’t fun. And if someone offers you a welfare check that’s maybe 70% of what you could earn as a short-order cook getting the minimum wage, you might decide it’s not worth the extra few bucks to knock yourself out.
117 Jim // Sep 20, 2009 at 3:55 pm

Or, Sinz, we could all agree to draw a line under the past, say, “mistakes were made by all sides” and try to move forward together to build a better America. That was Reagan’s ideology, and it worked.
118 SpartacusIsNotDead // Sep 20, 2009 at 9:15 pm

sinz54 wrote: “There’s nothing about a right to racially balanced public schools in the U.S. Constitution.”

Of course there isn’t, and you’ve just chosen yet another straw man. The U.S. constitutional rights that are at issue are (1) the right to vote, (2) the right not to be discriminated against in school or commerce on the basis of race, (3) the right not to live wherever you can afford irrespective of your race, (4) the right to marry the person of your choice, and (5) all the other rights that conservatives attempted to deny people because of the color of their skin.

Are you really this stupid or are you just morally bankrupt?