So, today the Grand Wingnut Senator of South Carolina proclaimed that the astroturf Teatards are a spiritual movement. Jim DeMint is channelling a deep Confederate meme that their view of the world is the only view blessed by God. Sure, it is an idea straight from the crazy store that can not withstand a fact-check, but leaving reality behind for your fantasy world is what the Republican Confederate Party celebration of Confederate History Month is all about.
Ooo boy. Never mind about reaching ‘peak wingnut’, I’m wondering if we’ll ever reach ‘peak confederate’ (of course they could be the same thing). And yet, behind DeMint and the highly spun Teatards is the deeply disturbed base of the Republican Confederate Party.
This week is yet another with stories of wingnuts and their hate-filled rhetoric and easy propensity to violence. It is an expected part of any celebration of CHM as this has been a tradition for the group since at least 1856 when South Carolinian Preston Brooks beat the shit out of Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the US Senate–ever since (and really long before that beating) whenever these Confederates feel that they are losing control they lash out. Joe Wilson was channeling Brooks when he yelled “You Lie” last summer and when you watch the clip you can see that he wished that he had a cane. Violence of word and deed are as Confederate as grits.
This year is the sesquicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s election and next year will be the 150th Anniversary of the start of the Civil War. This coming five years of remembrance is filling some folks with a sense of dread.
The Alternative Newsweeklies in the South have been doing some fine work to capture that dread and in turn help folks to celebrate CHM. For example, the Metro Pulse out of Knoxville Tennessee has a fine essay up today about CHM and slyly folds in the fact that East Tennessee did not secede from the Union and that Knoxville was a Union stronghold. It is a fun read.
More astounding is an item in a column, Separating history from hysteria, by Courtney Haden in the Birmingham Weekly. After pointing out that most folks in Alabama have accepted that celebrating the Confederacy is just a fact of life, the author begins to worry about the coming sesquicentennial. The main cause of the worry is a quote from the ‘Chaplain’ of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Army of Trans-Mississippi about why the South lost the war (emphasis added):
Here in Alabama, where every month is Confederate History Month and state employees still get the day off for Jefferson Davis’s birthday, we tend to be more sanguine. Heck, Bob Riley even mentioned slavery straight up in our state’s official Confederate History Month proclamation. Most of us have come to terms with the fact that our ancestors’ insistence on defending the right to traffic in human lives was a big cog in the creaky machine that was the CSA. I’d like to think our intellects are broad enough to accept that a Black History Month and a Confederate History Month can co-exist, separate but equal, on our calendars.
Then I happened upon a quotation in the current issue of The Alabama Confederate from Chaplain Len Patterson, asking the theological question, “if God is on the side of what is right, true, Christian, and Godly, and we know that He is, then, why did the South lose? There is one, and only one, possible answer, and to me it seems obvious. It’s not over!”
It’s gonna be a long sesquicentennial.
See, they never lost because the war goes on. Linking to the original post from ‘Chaplain’ Patterson is a window into the hate filled fantasy world of these treasonous scoundrels. Here is more from the ‘Chaplain’ of hate:
There is one, and only one, possible answer, and to me it seems obvious. It’s not over! Oh, the shooting war may have ended long ago, but the battle rages on. The struggle for what is right, true, and Godly has not ended. Our Southern heritage and the principles of our founding fathers are still under attack. And we, like those brave Confederates who faced the barbaric Union invaders, are still being forced to defend what is true and Godly against deceitful and demonic oppressors. [snip]
Consider also our Lord. He was executed as a criminal with criminals. His followers were in fear and despair. They had believed Him. Trusted Him. And now, He was dead. The Romans who crucified Him, thought it was over. The Jewish leaders who sought His death, thought it was over. Even His disciples and friends, thought it was over. But, it wasn’t over. Three days later Jesus arose from a cold grave turning death into victory, and despair into joy.
The Bible tells us, “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?” The South’s Cause of truth, freedom, justice, and Christian Godliness is not lost. It’s just not over. And I know it’s not over because we haven’t won yet. We may not know God’s plan, or exactly what He is going to do. But this we can know: It may take nineteen hundred years or just a few days, but God’s side always wins.
I am reminded of Bob Dylan’s classic “With God on Our Side“, but that is way too kind to these fuckwads.
If the Teatards and the Republican Confederate Party are leading a spiritual awakening it must mean that they are worshiping nameless deities of evil. Of course, they could just be a bunch of selfish, hate-filled picks who use references to God to fool the gullible.
I would go with the latter choice, but what do I know.
Cheers
dengre
ps. THC was spot on today (as always).
Mike Kay
Demint still wallowing in Waterloo
TenguPhule
The sooner they’re sent to join Him, the better.
kommrade reproductive vigor
I am reminded of the Black Knight in MP’s Search for the Holy Grail.
[Ahem] T
HNC was spot on todaySGEW
Ever the praises of Great Cheneyulhu, of Reagath, and of the Bush Who is not to be Named! Eh-ya-yahaah e’yayaa ngh’aaa h’yuh!
(A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)
Iä! Iä! Sarah-Palinurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
RJ
We all know the rules – the war is finished when somebody raises a `mission accomplished’ banner and declares major combat operations in the south are over.
Until then, the south is…um, reloading. In a totally non-threatening or treasonous manner.
PS I hate to write this, but where did the current trend for writing `can not,’ as opposed to `cannot,’ begin?
BR
Dennis –
This series you’ve been writing has been amazing, and very educational. Just wanted to say thanks.
It would be awesome if someone could put together these posts with TNC’s related posts and compile them into a website / document / book / history lesson that receives wide distribution.
sneezy
Re: “what the
RepublicanConfederate Party…”I just want to say how much I like this.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
Peak Confederate.
geg6
Once again, Dennis, you are hitting it out of the park. These people frightening me. This kind of stuff is how it all began the last time, this kind of language and this whipping up the anger of the ignorant and the eliminationist and racist talk never ends well.
TNC had a related post today pointing out that it wasn’t just Confederate resentment over the total and complete loss of the war that got Lincoln killed. It was the white supremacist outlook of Booth and his gang that motivated them. He has Booth’s own writing explicitly saying that Lincoln had to die to maintain white supremacy and how black slavery and white slave holding was what god intended.
Nothing has changed. Nothing. Not to these people anyway.
El Cid
This is the same mother fucker who went to bat for the Honduran coup d’etat, and won.
SGEW
Is this a reference to the awful “Tee-hee-hee Coates” thing? Or just a post 4/20 slip?
Sly
Divine mandates are only necessary when the naked and parasitic self-interest of your objectives make rational arguments and consensus-building impossible. God is the ultimate argument from authority, and the unconscious purpose behind its use is to make the user immune to reason.
The history book on the shelf,
Is always repeating itself.
Waterloo! I was defeated you won the war…
El Cid
The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given; and the longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course, when once it is let loose. It is true, that judgment against your evil works has not been executed hitherto; the floods of God’s vengeance have been withheld; but your guilt in the mean time is constantly increasing, and you are every day treasuring up more wrath; the waters are constantly rising, and waxing more and more mighty; and there is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, that holds the waters back, that are unwilling to be stopped, and press hard to go forward. If God should only withdraw his hand from the flood-gate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath of God, would rush forth with inconceivable fury, and would come upon you with omnipotent power; and if your strength were ten thousand times greater than it is, yea, ten thousand times greater than the strength of the stoutest, sturdiest devil in hell, it would be nothing to withstand or endure it.
Dennis G.
@The Sheriff’s A Ni-:
Yes, perhaps DeMint will lead a neo-Pickett’s Charge in the near future.
That would be nice.
Sly
@El Cid:
Except that John Edwards didn’t go waving his dick around or getting expensive haircuts. So he really was Godly.
dmsilev
Proof, therefore, that God hated the Confederacy.
Or, if you prefer, “God fights on the side with the best artillery” – Napoleon.
dms
Polar Bear Squares
It’s a spiritual movement alright.
The spirit of (mostly white) resentment and greivances for shit that ain’t happen, hasn’t happened yet or actually happened to someone else.
Good luck with that.
Jamie
I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to reach peak wingnut.
El Cid
@Sly: Jonathan Edwards never tried to force people to buy health insurance, and surely he would have been in favor of divine torture for Muslins.
Midnight Marauder
Personally, I think THC is spot on every day.
Liberty60(Veteran, Great war of Yankee Aggression)
This is becoming more and more clear that the conservative movement is nothing more than tribalism, of Our side, and Their Side.
This is why they are so resistant to reason, why they wallow in Stalinist fear and seething rage.
It isn’t unusual- look at the Balkans, at the Hutus and Tutsi tribal wars- it isn’t about policy or economics or anything but Us vs Them.
Andre
I LOLed. FSM help me, but I LOLed.
El Cid
@Midnight Marauder: As sure as eggs is eggs.
demimondian
@Sly: John Edwards didn’t go waving his dick around? Then where did Francis Quinn Hunter come from?
Now, Jonathan Edwards…that’s something else entirely.
RJ
@Jamie:
With no small amount of regret, I’m beginning to agree with you there. I just wonder what could bring it on.
demimondian
Peak wingnut will precede the movement’s collapse into a BLACKBLACKblackityblackblack hole…
Sly
@El Cid:
All true.
But he also didn’t think women were bottomless pits of sin, temptation, and wretchedness like all good theologians of yore did, Papist and Heretic alike. So add a +1 to his “Pinko Hippy Faggot” rating.
El Cruzado
@dmsilev: I prefer Cervantes version: “The Sarracen came, and beat the crap out of us, as God is with the bad guys, when they are more than the good guys” (liberally translated).
Nutella
The old saying
used to sound amusing because it was so unlikely but reading that treasonous scoundrel’s nasty crap sure ruins the joke.
Mike in NC
Jim Bob DeMented will cruise to an easy reelection in South Carolina, and it will only burnish his credentials for a run for the White House. Those people are nucking futs!
MoeLarryAndJesus
I like mints. Can we change this prick’s name to DeMaggot?
bago
THC is sooooo yesterday, man.
West of the Cascades
Guy named Lincoln answered this Rebel asswipe “Chaplain” Patterson’s theological question about a month before he died very simply — God hates slavery. The Douchebags of the Confederacy should re-read the Second Inaugural Address:
Mike G
I was reading the obituary of Eugene Terre’Blanche, the South African white supremacist and founder of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, and saw so many similarities with the Confederate douchebags who infest American politics – the narrow-minded tribalism, whining about victimization, predilection for violence, God-is-on-our-side self-righteousness; and minds ruled by bigotry, fear and hatred.
Every country has its low-education, right-wing nativist bigots.
mclaren
The Republican party is certainly deeply disturbed…but it’s no more deeply disturbed than the crackpots who swarm on this forum.
Among the wild lunacies I’ve heard from the kooks and cranks who infest Balloon-Juice over this last month:
[1] Raising taxes on the wealthiest 5% of Americans “may be unconstitutional.”
[2] Anyone who thinks we should pay university professors more than firefighters is “an ignorant fucktard.”
[3] As long as we have a representative government, the people of America would never stand for an excess profits tax on giant corporations (even though the American people had no problem with such an excess profits tax during the Eisenhower administration).
[4] America has the greatest military the world has ever seen, and the proof is that we’re losing two wars against barefoot teenagers who are armed with antique rifles in third-world hell holes.
[5] Anyone who objects to torture and kidnapping of suspects without charges or trial is a “far left kook.”
[6] Suggesting that America should adopt a progressive tax system is “Marxcist rambling.”
That’s just within the last week.
The sheer amount of dementia spilling out of the mouths of the cranks who post on this forum is enough to drown an entire populatin of creative geniuses, much less the American people.
The commenters on Balloon-Juice seem typical of the American population. A reasonable person who listens to the American people proclaim that we must reduce our deficits while increasing military spending and cutting taxes must conclude that the American people have gone insane.
Dennis G.
@West of the Cascades:
Amen
geg6
How is it that I am here on BJ every day and yet managed to miss every single one of the posts mclaren cites? Can you provide me some links for all of those? Kthxbai.
SiubhanDuinne
@mclaren #35: I admit I don’t read every post or even every thread here, but I’m pretty sure I’d remember at least one or two of your claims. Could you provide links or references, please?
SiubhanDuinne
@geg6: Sorry, I somehow posted without seeing your earlier, and nearly identical, comment.
WereBear
@Liberty60(Veteran, Great war of Yankee Aggression): They put the god in egodystonic!
With the constant projection, rationalization, repression, and displacement the wingnuts are constantly doing, only the least self-aware person on the planet would conclude that Freudian psychology has no basis in understanding behavior… oh, yeah.
Self-aware.
kay
I’m wondering when they’re going to get around to ballot initiatives in 2010.
I expected a slew of them. I think they’ve covered the field on anti-gay marriage, in 2004 and 2006, but there’s just a world of possibilities on ballot issues out there to fire up the religious base.
kay
@mclaren:
Who’s the creative genius? You?
I responded to your health care posts. I asked you several times how we might achieve the only option you offered, which was a non-profit health care system, because all of your objections ended at the same place: we’re doomed because health care is a for-profit industry. I get that. I got it with your first post. Okay. Let’s go, then.
You responded with a series of articles proclaiming the imminent demise of Medicaid. We can’t get to where you want to go with single payer insurance, mclaren, like Medicaid, so that leaves one option. A nationalized health care delivery system. Do you have another idea?
You never engaged. You just continued to post dire projections that purported to go to the bad faith of the people proposing reform.
I’m asking you for specifics, and you’re attacking my integrity, and intent. That’s not engaging. That’s ducking.
I’m left defending what exists, while you pick it apart, and tell me why it won’t work. But you won’t grapple with anything specific, and you flat out refuse to admit it’s complex and interconnected.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
mclaren is trying to become the Wilfred of American government but his missives are too damned long winded.
So the South will rise again? Like Zombie Jesus? What a comparison. This ‘chaplain’ is a total fuckwit and any religion he belongs to has to be a real piece of shit. Do fuckwits like this ever entertain the possibility that they just might be wrong about something?
There is little to no difference between the Islamic and Christian religions extremists in this world, they are hateful, intolerant pricks love to push and bully people into seeing things their way. They can’t win with words because their words are nothing but hate so they have to win by bomb or gun, some threat of force to get their way.
Crazy fucking hateful racist assholes. I bet if you ask the ol’ chaplain if he thinks of himself as a patriotic American that he would say ‘Damned right!’ without hesitation. He and his type are anything but patriotic. They don’t love our country, they love their ideals more. They worship ideals and little more. That explains why they are a fucking mess, they run on faith and they are all out of it.
kay
@mclaren:
I also think your estimation of the “worth” of various jobs and professions is wrong-headed and simplistic.
Did you think this through? University professors are underpaid while (skilled) health care workers are overpaid? What is the basis for this?
Is it the “genius” thing? Would you agree that front-line hands-on health care workers have a measure of STRESS in that job that university professors probably don’t suffer?
How does all this over-paying and under-paying fit with your other position: that the middle class is dying. Health care workers are somehow not middle class? Why would we promote and protect the wages of skilled trades in manufacturing but carve out the health care “skilled trades”, and insist they should be paid less?
Joey Maloney
Wrong “loosing”. Which is not at all to denigrate a great post, but I have to pet my peeve.
flukebucket
Shorter Chaplain
Dennis G you have made this the best Confederate History Month ever. I think I have said that before but it cannot be said enough.
Cynicor
Shorter Chaplain Len Patterson: “The Civil War is the South’s Vietnam.”
Also make sure to call it The War Of Southern Submission. People from down that way love that.
someguy
Not until the trees are bearing a whole lot of strange fruit.
You’d think they would have gotten better after desegregation and the dying out of a couple racist generations, but the fact is they are getting much, much worse. I can foresee another civil war in this country, started again by the South hoping to re-enslave blacks, and for that matter anybody who isn’t “white enough.” The Repukes don’t much like white ethnics, either, y’know.
elmo
“Gott mit uns.” Like so much of what they say, it sounds better in the original German.
The other day I was reading the Birther threads over at Free Republic, and there was one guy who — in all seriousness — was saying that “natural born citizenship” required both American parentage and birth in the United States (jus sanguinis and jus solis). Now, that’s actually become a standard trope of birtherism, but this guy was using a shorthand phrase to describe it.
“Blood and soil.”
I am not kidding. And neither was he.
geg6
@SiubhanDuinne:
Ha! Great minds, girlfriend. Great minds.
SammyV
Hey now. That’s an unfair slam on grits.
Michael
@elmo:
Which Freichtard said that?
Dennis G.
@Joey Maloney:
Thanks for catching that typo.
Cheers
elmo
@Michael:
Sorry, can’t remember. I do remember that I was mostly skimming posts by the time I saw it, so it took me a little while to realize what I was reading. The post used the phrase more than once.
Why? Do you think it was a clever, subtle spoof?
Michael
@elmo:
No. Sadly, I think it was real. Its just that I used to spend a lot of time there and met a fair number of them at various events, and wondered if I was acquainted with the utterer of it.
liberal
Reminds me of those attempts by the slavers in the first half of the 19th C to ban even discussion of abolition, IIRC. Thank god for John Quincy Adams.
liberal
@kay:
It’s absolutely certain that doctors are overpaid, because they have a union (aka the AMA) which keeps the supply of doctors down.
liberal
@El Cid:
Though Lincoln cited God’s wrath to good effect in the Second Inaugurual.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
No, you got called an ignorant fucktard because you said that firefighting is so easy (any idiot can connect a hose) that it should be a minimum wage job and pay no more than $20K a year.
I realize that you are so far beyond reason that you can’t even remember what you yourself posted, but that’s what it was.
You also got called an ignorant fucktard because the average pay for a firefighter is $31K to $56K while the average pay for a college professor is $57K to $106K.
In other words, you were completely, 100 percent wrong and couldn’t handle the truth, so you lashed out at the people who tried to correct your ignorance. Hence the “ignorant fucktard” label.
frankdawg
Very glad to see the second inaugural address quoted at length. It is one of the greatest speeches ever given and does not get enough attention.
As far as “Gawd’s side” Lincoln was once asked “Is God on our side?” and his reply is one that should be used for all these nut jobs “It is better to hope that we are on HIS side.”
Wag
Um, I’m pretty sure that God’s side did, in fact, win.
That would be the Union side.
scarshapedstar
I got this idea earlier today about a movie in which a Zombie Confederate Army rises from their graves and marches on D.C. alongside jubilant throngs of gun-toting rednecks.
I hope it doesn’t come to that, but I think that’s your peak right there.
DMD
Right. And you’re not going to like it, buddy.
DBrown
Just ask the
daughterswhores of the Confederacy … they put upmonumentslies and falsehoods across the country – even in North Dakota.Jack Newhouse
“if God is on the side of what is right, true, Christian, and Godly, and we know that He is, then, why did the South lose? There is one, and only one, possible answer, and to me it seems obvious. It’s not over!”
Or, maybe you got your treasonous asses whupped because God disagrees…
Catsy
Methinks the gentleman is unfamiliar with Occam’s Razor.
frosty
Dennis G.:
There is a precedent for the current Confederate Party, which I would love to see you read up and post about before the month is over: the Dixiecrats.
That was the Confederate Wing of the Democratic Party that decided to go it alone in 1948 (I think). What would have happened if the Dixiecrats had stayed as a third party? What are the chancesthat they would recreate themselves now, and if they did, would we have two or three major parties?
iriedc
@scarshapedstar: Don’t worry. The brothas won’t let the great Confederate Zombie army get East of the Anacostia River. The folks in Upper NW might be on their own, though. (DC residential humor)
Thanks Dennis G., for another great post.