Posts Tagged ‘history’

A side thought about the military and the left

Posted: December 31, 2010 by datechguy in Afghanistan war, culture, media, opinion/news, war
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As I been reading the continuing commentary on the Washington Post piece that has really got the attention of bloggers and readers from the daily pundit

“DADT as the reason for ROTC’s banning was always a sham. Now the mask is finally off. The elite professoriat doesn’t hate ROTC because of DADT, they hate ROTC because they just can’t stand “the warrior ethic”. That’s code for courage, honor, and duty, ethics all anathema to Leftist indoctrinators. They prefer us supine, afraid, and dependent on them.”

an opinion I share to Vodkapundit

“See there, Mr. U.S. Marine Captain — McCarthy doesn’t hate you. Why, he thinks you’re every bit as respectable as a Taliban.

who adds a graphic that says it all to this post at Ace of Spades HQ that compares the course requirement for ROTC at Sienna College and woman and gender studies at Columbia guess which one is more challenging academically?

While all of these are first-rate there is a thought that hit me this morning that hasn’t been touched on. Namely that the McCarthy’s of the world actually bring about the results they claim to deplore.

Consider; our media tends to reflect the views of people like McCarthy and the movies and media we put out there tend to show our troops in a very poor light, particularly over the last 40 years that has been exported as American Cultural and elite opinion to foes all over the world that the Saddam’s, Bin Ladin’s and Chavez’s et/al have bought into. It is precisely believe they have bought into the weakness of American culture and the people opposition to the military and the troops as uneducated rabble that they have been bold enough to make war figuring we can’t defeat them or oppose them.

Hundreds of thousands of idiotic and fanatical followers of these fools have learned the hard way that this is not true (in fact it was the last thing they ever learned), yet their fanatical leaders who are not hiding in caves manage to convince them that America will simply roll over. Why don’t they believe the evidence of the empty chairs where their predecessors have been? Because men like McCarthy promote the idea of a military unwanted and supported, because our media is so focused on the number of our casualties in war that they ignored the losses of our foes that dwarf ours.

These men are the enablers of the very wars they claim to oppose, and even more ironically are only able to be such enablers because our military is precisely NOT like the Taliban or any of these guys.

The secret here is that the McCarthy’s on the left’s position is really less about their hatred of the military, but more about convincing themselves of their own moral superiority. They can’t match the courage or the honor or the sacrifice of these men and women so they denigrate them in a vain attempt to convince themselves that it is their words and good wishes, dare I say it their faith in their own love for their fellow-man that outweighs the works of the military in risking their own lives to save others.

That’s liberalism in a nutshell belief and good intention trump works and results every time.

Update: Oh Brother!

Hitler could have been waited out. He might have been overthrown by his own government. Who knows? To have 50 million people killed: Hitler would have died within 10 years no matter what he did.

Oh and Lincoln was wrong to fight the civil war too. Moe Lane nails it:

Whichever editor approved this Washington Post article should be ashamed of him- or herself. I do not expect shame, but it’s long past time that we started telling these people when they’ve done something foul.

He certainly has the right to free speech but did he have the right to a Washington Post op-ed?

Claria Csiong isn’t the only person with a long memory

Posted: December 27, 2010 by datechguy in opinion/news, politics
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There is nothing like actually living under socialism to make a person oppose it:

Many Russian immigrants to the “red borough” of Staten Island are flocking to the Republican Party, saying that the national Democrats’ “socialistic” policies remind them too much of the top-down oligarchy they fled in their native land.

With many of the borough’s Russian arrivees already owning businesses and active in civic organizations, their muscle could help the Island GOP solidify electoral gains made this year, when the party took back congressional and Assembly seats.

Businessman Arkadiy Fridman said that the newly formed Citizens Magazine Business Club, a confederation of more than 50 Russian-owned businesses here and in Brooklyn, has aligned itself with the Molinari Republican Club (MRC) in an effort to increase the Russian community’s political and economic clout. . . . Fridman said that the Democrats “are going in an absolutely different direction,” focusing on “income redistribution” and rich-versus-poor “class war.”

Still think it’s a myth Tim? Ah if only we could go back to the days of the 50’s when people actually recognized socialism for what it was, right Frank?

Haley Barbor’s real crime: “We paid more attention to the girls than to King”

Posted: December 21, 2010 by datechguy in elections
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Ah 2011 is only 10 days or so away, so tis the season to hit one of the most qualified republicans in the likely field as racist:

The Citizens’ Councils were, right in the state of Mississippi where Barbour is from, the respectable face of white supremacist political activism.

Hmmm now what did Barbor say about the Citizen’s councils back then when he was 16 in that interview:

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”Emphasis Mine

So in other words, if you were Klan in Barbour’s town you lost her job, unlike the democratic party (who with apologies to Dave Weigel who considers this sentence “standard republican deflection”) give their ex Klan Members the job of President Pro Tempre of the Senate until death as late as 2010.

I’m not a southerner, and anyone who thinks the citizens councils of the Jim Crow south believed in racial equality is deluding themselves, but that not what the question was. The questions were “why there was no violence” and “what he remembered as a 16 year old kid” who ( as we will see later) had other priorities. So lets see if the statement in question is supported:

Tom McGuire examines the case:

I don’t think Barbour claimed the Councils were led by integrationist progressives on the right side of history; I think he claimed they helped keep the peace. Two sources say they did, against which we have to weigh Matt’s shock and awe.

He quotes noted segregationists David Halberstam Neil McMillen (and yes I’m being sarcastic).

Meanwhile as we also seen in the interview Barbour attended MLK’s rally in his town …

“I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

Did you go? I asked.

“Sure, I was there with some of my friends.”

I asked him why he went out.

“We wanted to hear him speak.”

but had (ahem) other priorities:

I asked what King had said that day.

“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”

As you might guess on the left this is all over this (Journolist redux) over at Ace’s spot some good points are made:

First, both Barbour and Yglesias can be right. Based on the profile it’s clear that many people in Barbour’s home town (including his brother Jeppie, the then Mayor) held beliefs that simply were reprehensible about blacks but none the less managed to take a relatively benign course of action in integrating the community.

That’s very true, again; that is the question that was asked.  Meanwhile shades of a double standard:

Obama skated by on Bill Ayers by saying he was a child when Ayers was bombing buildings and killing people. Of course Ayers past wasn’t the issue, it was his unapologetic defense of it and the wisdom of a presidential candidate associating himself with such a man in the present.

Barbour was 8 years old when the 1955 campaign to intimidate supporters of school integration Yglesias cites was conducted. What’s the relevance of that to Barbour or his memories of integration efforts in the 60’s?

If Barbour were associating with men who still believed in segregation or defended their role in opposing it back in the day (as Ayers does about his terrorist past and continued belief in violence as a political tool), I’d be the first to say he has a disqualifying problem. But that’s not the charge, is it?

Oh and if supporting segregation is disqualifying (and again no one is claiming Barbour did any such thing, then or now), then I’d like liberals to explain their on going love affair with Jimmy Carter.

Drew M also points out that if you are from the North you have a particular view of the south drummed into you. When it came to Southerners I was rather bigoted and self righteous at one time and it took some years to get over it. Meanwhile Stacy McCain who is a Southerner provides some education about the “solid” south:

I don’t care how many times liberals invoke “The Southern Strategy,” that still doesn’t make it true. The Democratic Party remained a viable and even dominant political force in the South for three decades after the end of segregation.

Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 and Southern Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. The Democratic Party maintained control of the Georgia state legislature until 2003 and it was not until this year — let me check my calendar, yeah, it’s 2010 — that Republicans gained a majority in the Alabama state legislature.

As much as it may flatter the vanity of liberals to think that the Democratic “Solid South” ended in 1964 — and that the success of the GOP in the Sunbelt is therefore somehow attributable to redneck bigotry — it simply is not true.

And I’m sick and tired of pious lectures from arrogant fools whose moral horizons can be summarized in two words: “Vote Democrat.”

Even today’s uninformed “students” of history can use the net to find that out, but of course our scholarly friends of the left who think that C. S. Lewis is a mere children’s author may not know this.

So lets review the facts briefly:

  • The Citizen’s councils in Yazoo City kept out the Klan and kept violence out of the city.
  • The members of the citizen’s councils of the south in the 60’s were (like Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln and Margaret Sanger) not believers in the equality of races.
  • If you were 8 years old in 1955 and lived in the south odds are your parents, grandparents and neighbors were all people whose views on race were likely not the same as our views today.
  • Given the choice between caring about race or girls, 16 years olds, even those who will grow up to be pols like Haley Barbour, will choose girls over Martin Luther King every time. (Does he read rule 5 Sunday?)

And the final rule as told by Hotair

If he’s the nominee, Democrats will spend six solid months shrieking about racism in order to deflect attention from Obama’s record.

Mitigating factor: That’s actually their game plan no matter who the nominee is.

That’s pretty much it.

Bristol Palin, Grover Cleveland and the Civil Service

Posted: November 26, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech, oddities, opinion/news
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I’ve never much card for American Idol, or Dancing with the stars, at game night over Dave’s house its on so I do my best to ignore it but neither one are anything that I care to watch. Unfortunately the convergence of the show with the Palin wars forced it into the news. I didn’t want to write about it at the time but now that it’s over there are some valuable lessons for everyone here.

Once Bristol Palin started to advance in the show the left started getting into a huff because better dancers were being eliminated and complained comically about the “integrity” of a vote in popularity show. It was admittedly a lot of fun watching them have a cow as she made it into the finals. This show was nothing significant but they had made it so as a way to hit the Palin’s who were simply having fun. This is and was a great example of Palin Derangement Syndrome

It was at this point that many on the right made a fatal mistake. They decided that because the left had invested themselves into this TV show emotionally that they would have to as well. This was a huge mistake and an example of the same idolatry that elected Barack Obama.

Gone was the principle of advancement by merit, that conservatives prize, gone was the opposition of special preference, we preferred Sarah Palin and by Extension Bristol Palin plus we could upset the left so many people invested themselves in an attempt to gain a victory that would feel good for a day but prove Pyrrhic. In the end the mirror image of Obama worship gave the left a talking point and a cause to smile as Bristol Palin came in 3rd. It was frankly a meaningless victory but one that got some small meaning because Palin fans made it so.

In 1884 Grover Cleveland was election becoming the first Democratic president since before the Civil war. Democrats who had been in the wilderness for a long time looked forward to the fruits of the spoils system but unfortunately for them President Cleveland’s reputation for honesty was well-earned. He was studious in replacing only the unqualified and when pressed by the party over this replied “A Democratic Thief is as bad as a Republican one.” (It is the lack of such democrats today that helped push me into the GOP). When people blindly voted for Bristol they made that same mistake that Cleveland scolded the party insiders for.

I like Sarah Palin a lot, of the candidates I believe are running only the very qualified Haley Barbour has a shot of getting my vote. Palin combines the practicality of an authentic life and a common sense approach to most issues, with the courage to stand up for things she believes in even if there is a political cost (as Lincoln said of Grant, he Fights!) when others hide in the shadows. She is however a person, I am going to disagree with her on occasion, she will get things wrong and/or make mistakes on occasion as we all do, and if we blindly follow, we are doing both her and ourselves a disservice.

Sarah Palin isn’t “the one”, nor is her family, I like them both and think she is the best choice for 2012 but I refuse to be caught up in the same throes of passion that drove the election of President Obama or the frenzy concerning Bristol Palin and neither should you.

We are conservatives for a reason, lets act as such.

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