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My reviews of Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse by James L. Swanson are now available at Amazon.com here (via Amazon vine) and Lunch.com here
It’s a great taste of the last days of the Civil war and its aftermath.
This article at Nice Deb yesterday caught my eye:
Russian TV covers the growing Marxist movement in America – it’s not often that a media outlet calls “progressives” what they really are, as RT America does, here.
I’m not going to embed the video as it’s Deb’s story, but both the story and Deb’s headline is off.
It hasn’t “begun” it has been going on for years.
It went on in the 60’s when college students found that they would not longer get the exemptions that the less fortunate had, joining with Marxists and Jane Fonda aiding enemies and directly leading to the death of millions in southeast Asia
It went on in the 70’s as Colleges veered left preaching moral equivalence between the Soviets and the US
It went on in the 80’s when pols like VP Biden and the late Ted Kennedy backed by the media opposed Reagan tooth and nail as he called the Soviet Union what it was and contained and rolled back communism in our own hemisphere.
We had a brief break in the 90’s as the soviets finally collapsed freeing hundreds of millions (while pols who had supported them and academics who considered them superior suddenly claimed they had been against them or expecting this all the time) but the green movement took over trying to advance the same Red system with a green veneer while ignoring the lack of “Green” in places like China and appeasing North Korea.
And this decade we had the left again blaming the US for the attacks on our soil, railing against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while ignoring the excesses of regimes like North Korea the violence of Radical Islam, the Judenrein nature of the middle east and the actions of leaders like Chavez.
The reason why it is out in the open is the fear. Times are tough so a nation that has been taught by people who have never had to sign the front of a paycheck or actually understood the sacrifices that allowed them the freedom to goof find themselves confronted by the left once again trying to sell a repackaged bottle of the same “ism” that has slaughtered more people over the last hundred years than anyone or anything else ever. The times have emboldened them and they hope to take advantage of it.
The truth is this: This is the living of the far left and always has been. The left impulses have always been totalitarian, they don’t trust the people but they trust themselves to rule them and hope to be part of that privileged class that like Saddam’s relatives, and party members in the old Soviet Union will still have the privileges that the average person is discouraged from. They aspire to the comfort of the feudal lords of the middle ages while pretending to be the friend of the people that they would make serfs.
This is an old style being sold to a public that has forgotten.
Update: I would have included this Mike Barone article if I saw it before I hit post but here is the little secret that people don’t know:
In addition, as George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen writes in the American Interest, “The inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well.” Bill Gates may have a bigger house than you do. But you have about the same access to good food, medical care and even to the Internet as he does.
Or consider something as prosaic as food. The supermarkets of the 1960s and 1970s didn’t come close to matching the amazing selection of produce, meats and exotic foods as you find in supermarkets today — and not just in high-income neighborhoods but in modest-income places all over the country.
Or clothing. Stores like Walmart, Target and Kohl’s sell good quality clothes at astonishingly low prices; you can outfit a kid in school clothes for $100 or so a year.
He also nails the elites who cry wolf:
I suspect that most Americans would be thrilled to get a 13th month of pay. But they’re not seething with envy at those who are better off.
So who does? One example is the cartoonist and author Garry Trudeau, a college classmate of George W. Bush, who has been spewing contempt for the Bushes for 40-some years. The strongest class envy in America, it turns out, may be the resentment of those who were one club above you at Yale.
Bingo!
Listening to Joe Scarborough and company prophesying defeat in Afghanistan after reports of US Casualties Let’s imagine Morning Joe as it reports on US wars throughout the ages:
Nov 1776: There is no polite way to say it: The Continental Army is in full retreat despite the heroic efforts of Washington and his troops
Dec 1780: There is no polite way to say it: The British are in full control of the south despite the heroic efforts of Continental troops
Oct 1803: There is no polite way to say it: The pirates of Tripoli have captured the USS Philadelphia and there is no way we can suppress them despite the heroic efforts of Commodore Preble
Aug 17, 1812: There’s no polite way to say it: the USS Nautilus has been captured and the USS Constitution has barely escaped a British Fleet, there is no way we can compete with the British Navy despite the heroic efforts of our sailors
Aug 1814: There’s no polite way to say it: The British have burned Washington and despite the heroic efforts of Mrs. Madison to save national treasures.
March 1836: There is no polite way to say it: The Alamo and the Goliard forces have fallen to a man and Sam Houston is in full retreat despite the heroic efforts of the Texans who fell.
July 1862: There is no polite way to say it: Our armies are in full retreat before General Lee despite the heroic efforts of the troops in the peninsula.
Sept 1863: There is no polite way to say it: Despite the heroic efforts of General Thomas the south has driven and besieged our forces in Chattanooga and we have to rethink if we can win this war.
June 1864: There’s no polite way to say it: with 40,000 more casualties Grant is no closer to Richmond that McClellan was two years ago despite heroic efforts on the part of the Army of the Potomac
June 1876: There’s no polite way to say this: The Sioux have destroyed General Custer’s command despite the heroic efforts of the 7th cavalry.
Dec 1917: There’s no polite way to say this: With the Russian surrender the war has turned despite the heroic efforts of the AEF
Aug 1942: There’s no polite way to say this: After Salvo Island we just don’t have the ability to cope with the Japanese fleet at Guadalcanal, despite heroic efforts of the Navy and Marines
Feb 1943: There’s no polite way to say this: Kasserine pass show there is no way for us to defeat the Desert Fox despite the heroic efforts of US troops.
Sept 12 1950: There’s no polite way to say this: The North Koreans and their allies have us in a pocket and our troops are exhausted after World War 2 despite heroic efforts of our men.
and could you imagine them after Thermopylae? There’s no polite way to say this but the Greek city states can’t cope with the Persians despite the heroic efforts of the 300 Spartans
I haven’t bothered mentioning Iraq because it’s recent enough that you can actually see the media from Leslie Stahl telling General Powell we can’t get our supplies and our rear is exposed. and Harry Reid saying (with Pelosi standing beside him) the war is lost.
It’s the old “we love our troops but they can’t win.” meme of the left.
If only he could talk to an expert on military history like Victor Davis Hanson to give them some perspective that is if Jeffery Sacks can give him permission to have an extremist like him on the show.
Nope this isn’t a post about my predictions for 2011 this is instead about predictions in the past that have become busts:
It is always entertaining to look at predictions from the past, and see how far off they were. In the 1920s, the assumption was that by the 1950s, we would all be getting around in flying cars. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward describes how by the year 2001, capitalism would have completely disappeared (at the instigation of the capitalists, who would see the advantages of socialism), replaced with a democratic socialism where everyone ate in common mess halls, owned everything in common, and there was almost no violence anymore.
Clayton then links to this list of predictions of environmental catastrophes that weren’t and concludes thus:
When scientists make apocalyptic predictions based on claims of science, I expect them to hit their marks, or have a darn good explanation for why not.
The problem being these days that huge amounts of cash ride on these predictions and the right way of looking at things can be the difference between a well-funded grant keeping you in champagne for decades to teaching chemistry at a community college. More importantly with the amounts of money involved any challenge to the orthodoxy becomes not so much a scientific debate as a threat to a person’s standard of living requiring a strong and sometimes devastating counter.
The whole Global Warming bit has become basically a giant 21st century version of The Sting with the taxpayers of the western world as the mark. I predict that when it fails there will be a new version with a new prediction and a new urgency that will drive media coverage and funds for NGO to keep them in caviar for another decade or two.
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