Yeah, after Mark Warner abolished it, Treason-in-Defense-of-Slavery Heritage Month is back for all Virginians. You can celebrate the wonderful decision to take up arms against the federal government for no other reason than you didn’t like the outcome of a presidential election. You know, not like we all did after November 2000, but with guns and gangrene and stuff.
Virginia’s new governor and attorney general are just a microcosm of the kind of crazy we’ve got headed our way if these polls don’t turn around.
Memo from a native of the Great Secession State to the governor of the Virginia Confederacy.
Dear Guv:
I do hope that your heritage month includes proper remembrance of Appomattox.
You see, the most significant fact about Appomattox is this: the Confederate States of America surrendered. Not just lost, but surrendered. And surrendered again at Bennett Place in North Carolina.
And contrary to you Lost Causers’ thinking, the South did not lose in that. The South won its freedom from slavery. The cause that was lost was neither noble nor aristocratic nor a matter of liberty nor protective of Southern womanhood nor an agrarian finger in the eye of the industrial north. What was lost was the institutional defense of the immoral.
Likewise, in the Civil Rights movement, white folks didn’t lose anything but censorship of their speech about equality, the cramping confines of bigotry, and that which held back the Southern economy for a hundred years.
All the Calhounist rhetoric about states rights cannot change the simple fact that in losing the Civil War, the South won its freedom. In capitulating to the awful Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, most Southerners lost their bigotry and won the freedom to speak openly about healing the effects of the racialization of slavery and the freedom to associate with whom they pleased.
It’s a shame that our sister state is ruled today by those who haven’t.
I hope people now realize that it matters if you vote, and it matters who you vote for.
I hope that Democrats learn that running away from Barack Obama is not the way to win, nor is running away from Democratic positions.
Failure to stand up for real change opens the door for the faux (or Faux) change promoted by the astroturfed Tea Partiers with their expensive, well-painted buses.
This is probably the most incisive and concise response to the announcement we’ll see anywhere. I hope you’ll post it widely.
Still not quite enough to kill off my equanimity at the prospect of the region getting its confederacy back, though. Sorry.
The region is not going to get its confederacy back. It will mess up too many good things. Tourism. NASCAR. March Madness. What we are witnessing is the Lost Causers’ last gasp. And the bigots’ ire that the rest of the world doesn’t take them seriously.
And I’m serious about commemorating Appomattox. Without that, you are dealing with mythology and not heritage. Too many liberals in the South have ancestors who fought and too many who died in this “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” to put up with this nonsense much longer. This is a desperation play by Pat Robertson, who is in danger of losing the attractiveness of his Christian entrepreneurial fortunes if there is a change in the mood of the country. Playing the old song one last time for the geezers who have not changed and the nostalgics who want to go back to a “simpler?” time.
And one little bit of information that the media might have overlooked. Liberals and progressives are gun owners too. And there are even a few whose hobby is Civil War re-enactment. It is time to breathe and laugh at the nonsense, not fear for the Republic.
I’ve suggested that the Coonfederate surrender be celebrated by a national holiday called “Unity Day”.
Running for governor in NY.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The first pol who stands up and says “I am madder than hell and I will not take it anymore” will win and win big. Regardless of political position. Left, right, center…it won’t mean a damned thing.
Paladino’s worth $150 million.
He is right wing, he is male, he is rich and he is white.
Watch.
He is going to throw a monkey wrench into the almost totally corrupt NY State political situation.
Watch.
AG
I don’t know. Can he be exposed as a fraud? If so, then he’s screwed. Anyway, complete self-funders don’t have such a great track record as it is.
He’s not a “fraud”. Not as big a fraud as Bloomberg, for damned sure, and probably not as big a fraud as Cuomo, either. He’s an up-from-the-neighborhood success story, it looks like. There’s a big Italian population in Buffalo + Rochester. Very conservative overall. Did he cut corners to make it big? Doesn’t everybody? It depends on which corners he cut.
We shall see…he means business, that’s for sure.
AG
He’ll only throw that wrench if nobody asks what the hell he’s madder than hell about — that he has to pay a little tax on his unearned riches? But of course it’s hard, hard, for any pol to point out that the rich are different from you and me. Teabaggers will buy anything that knows how to scream, but even some of them might wonder why he used to be a Dem. The rest of the voters may stop and wonder how much more wealth and power this guy needs to get over his pathetic angst.
You write:
Don’t bet on it. He’s only too happy to tell people what’s bugging him, and when you get right down to it he’s saying many of the same things that Alan Grayson is saying, minus the de rigeur Dem political correctness rigamarole.
Watch.
He’s got some power.
Watch.
At the very least, he’s going to make for some interesting politics.
Bet on it.
AG
Elections have consequences. Hopefully this will be a wake-up call to people of color and progressives who are thinking about sitting out the mid-terms. This is no damn joke! No time to get complacent! And damn sure no time to be focusing on Obama’s “broken promises” when you have crazy and racist tea baggers ready to take over the country. If you can’t see the threat that these people (I use the term loosely) pose, then you deserve what you get.
Let me also say that as a resident of this tea bagger state, that the history here is taught with great ambiguity.
You don’t learn until you actually do the research yourself, or rather until you get to the AP history courses, that the South was stomped into oblivion and lost by a wide margin. Here you are taught that it was really close, and the South would have won had it not been for blank.