Jacob Isom’s facebook page is killing me:
And here is an action shot as our hero skates off:
I’m still chuckling. “Dude, you have no Quran!”
by John Cole| 59 Comments
This post is in: Enhanced Protest Techniques, Excellent Links, Humorous, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
Jacob Isom’s facebook page is killing me:
And here is an action shot as our hero skates off:
I’m still chuckling. “Dude, you have no Quran!”
by Dennis G.| 92 Comments
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Open Threads, Good News For Conservatives
I’m sure they will be no more extreme than they were 150 years ago.
In the 1860 Election the Confederates were against:
And then as now the Confederate Party uses the memes, rhetoric, scare tactics, and talking points of white supremacy and fear of the ‘others’ to bring the low hanging rubes into their movement.
And then as now the only compromise the Confederate Party was/is willing to accept was/is complete and total capitulation to whatever crazy idea was/is freshest in their lizard brains.
The Republican Party is dead.
It is the Confederate Party now bitches. Get use to it.
Oh, and get ready to party like it’s 1860.
Cheers
Great night for the New Confederate PartyPost + Comments (92)
This post is in: Enhanced Protest Techniques, Assholes, Security Theatre
As part of an ongoing series subtitled “Above the Law”, the New York Times reports that “Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent”:
… Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years. Security officials say the inquiries reflect their concern about software piracy, which is rampant in Russia. Yet they rarely if ever carry out raids against advocacy groups or news organizations that back the government.
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As the ploy grows common, the authorities are receiving key assistance from an unexpected partner: Microsoft itself. In politically tinged inquiries across Russia, lawyers retained by Microsoft have staunchly backed the police.
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Interviews and a review of law enforcement documents show that in recent cases, Microsoft lawyers made statements describing the company as a victim and arguing that criminal charges should be pursued. The lawyers rebuffed pleas by accused journalists and advocacy groups, including Baikal Wave, to refrain from working with the authorities. Baikal Wave, in fact, said it had purchased and installed legal Microsoft software specifically to deny the authorities an excuse to raid them. The group later asked Microsoft for help in fending off the police. “Microsoft did not want to help us, which would have been the right thing to do,” said Marina Rikhvanova, a Baikal Environmental Wave co-chairwoman and one of Russia’s best-known environmentalists. “They said these issues had to be handled by the security services.”
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Microsoft executives in Moscow and at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., asserted that they did not initiate the inquiries and that they took part in them only because they were required to do so under Russian law.
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After The New York Times presented its reporting to senior Microsoft officials, the company responded that it planned to tighten its oversight of its legal affairs in Russia. Human rights organizations in Russia have been pressing Microsoft to do so for months. The Moscow Helsinki Group sent a letter to Microsoft this year saying that the company was complicit in “the persecution of civil society activists.” …
by Dennis G.| 86 Comments
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Post-racial America, Assholes, Flash Mob of Hate, Good News For Conservatives
Thank the FSM it is September!
The intense stupid of August will soon begin to fade like a bad Boone’s Farm Apple Wine hangover. And it may have one bottle of Boone’s Farm too many that destroyed the brain cells of the cavalcade of fools marching to the dog-whistles of Beck, Palin and the other sirens of wingnutopia.
Of course the stupid of August will leave a residue. One clear sign is the “thoughtful” conversation about the Beck Scamfest of last weekend. There have been endless idiotic (and yet serious) words written about this sideshow, but one of the silliest was the column by Reihan Salam that E.D. had some fun with yesterday. In it, the very “serious” conservative-up-and-comer compared Beck to Malcolm X. That is just stupider than bathing in pig shit.
Still, the roots of the Beck rally go deep. There is a very long American tradition to wrap a movement dedicated to limiting the Liberty and Rights of others in patriotism and old time Christianesque rhetoric. There are many examples one could turn to, but Beck reminds me most of the Time Magazine cover boy from June 1924, Hiram Evans:
Or maybe he is just D.C. Stephens…
In 1922 Hiram Evans became the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He led a movement that would see more than 6 million Americans join the KKK. In August (of course) of 1925 more than 40,000 Klansmen marched through the streets of Washington DC. While hatred of black folks was (and is) a strong motivator for the Klan and other neo-Confederate movements (like the Teabaggers) that is not a very great organizing tool. What worked for the Klan in the Twenties was fear of foreigners, immigrants and their weird Religions that were out to conquer and subjugate the United States.
Back then the main threat was from Catholics, then Jews, foreigners and (as always) African Americans. This passage from Wikipedia describing the 1920’s Klan could be about the Teabaggers, Fox, Beck and most of the current GOP if you replaced Catholic with Islamic:
The
Klan’sTeabagger’s primary enemies wereCatholicsMuslims who theKlanTeabaggers feared were behind secret plots to overthrow the government and exterminate Protestants. Another important enemy was people of foreign birth, especially those fromCatholicIslamic countries. A third, and lesser enemy, were blacks.
It was Evans who hit upon the bright idea to wrap the Klan in the American Flag and Jesus and market the group as a grassroots movement firmly rooted in traditional American values. Mobilizing around hate and efforts to restrict liberty are always easier when you evoke the blessings of a divine power and magical ancestors like Founding Fathers. It worked for the Confederacy, it worked for the Klan and it works for Beck.
Of course the comparison of Beck to Evans isn’t really fair–to Evans. Beck is really just a common grifter. A better comparison from the second Klan era to the Teabagger era might be between Beck and D.C. Stephens, who–back in the day–was the Grand Dragon of the Indiana KKK. Stephens was a real grifter. He backed Evans in a power play to take control of the Klan and was rewarded with contol of Indiana and 22 other states. It was a money making operation. Stephens took a cut of every dollar paid for hoods, robes and other tools of the Klan trade. In no time at all he was a millionaire and he used his influence with the gullible rubes flocking to join the KKK fad to elect certain candidates to office–candidates who would do his bidding. By the mid-Twenties almost all of the elected officials in Indiana owed their office to Stephens and the Klan.
Like Beck, D.C. Stephens was very powerful with the wingnuts of his era. And then he fell. Turns out that Stephens kidnapped and repeatedly rape a young women who then ate (or was fed) poison. As she got sick, Stephens refused to release her. After a few days he finally sent her home, but by then she only had days to live. Before she died she told her story and Stephens was arrested for murder. He thought his political pals would get his back, but instead they let him go down. Once in prison, Stephens spilled the beans on the grifters he helped to elect and they followed him to ruin. On the way down, he also helped to end the KKK fad of the Twenties. So at least he did some good.
Beck being compare to Malcolm X is just stupid. OTOH comparing Beck to an opportunistic grifters like Evans and Stephens seems just about right. The thing about Beck is that you know he is going to crash and burn, the entertainment factor is when and how. I think a goat, a penthouse and latex will be involve in his downfall. Time will tell, but if there is a FSM with a sense of justice (or humor) it will happen in August.
Now, I am certain that there will be some who think that comparing Beck to leaders of the Klan is “over the top”. Perhaps, but the tagline of the official website of “The Knights Party, USA” (a KKK effort) is “Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America!”
And that tag line could also have been the tag line for Beck’s rally.
Cheers
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Post-racial America, Flash Mob of Hate, Good News For Conservatives, Teabagger Stupidity
August is the month when America celebrates stupidity and I have been avoiding the celebrations. Sure, the stupidity of Americans is on display almost any given day. After all, we live in a Nation where 25% of the folks do not believe in evolution and also, too think that President Obama was not born in the United States. Almost as many also think that he is a secret Moooslim. The stupidity of these Twenty-five percenters is astounding, but not as astounding as the stupidity that lets these dumbshits define the political issues of the day.
And yet, here we are.
Over in Washington a vanguard of fools came to town to hear the drivel of the latest iteration of the bastard union of Know-Nothing Nativism with Confederate piety, racism and morality–all wrapped up in a patina of Jesus to make the appeals to hate, ignorance and fear seem blessed by the Divine. The name of the rally was Key: “Restoration Of Honor”.
The Confederacy and the Confederate movement has always been very concerned with ‘Honor’ and its restoration and when seen as a neo-Confederate rally the gathering today make sense as a fitting endpoint to a month celebrating stupidity in America. It makes sense that these neo-Confederates would hold this rally on the Anniversary and at the site of MLK’s famous speech 47 years ago. And it is predictable that these shifty fuckers would claim ownership of King and his movement. After all, Confederates have been trying to reclaim their right to own people, their labor and their ideas for more than two hundred years.
“Honor” is a wingnut code word that defines the term in the same way that the old Confederacy defined the term. And when paired with the word “restoration” it is a call for a return to an American rooted in the White Supremacy of the Confederacy. This Neo-Confederate movement has–ironically–captured the political party that was formed over a 150 years ago to destroy Confederate thinking and slavery. History is filled with funny twists of fate.
Rather than spend my time following the rantings of these neo-Confederate wingnuts, I have been enjoying a 27-part online lecture series by Yale historian David Blight on “The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877”. One thing that is amazing is how similar the arguments of the Confederates and the modern Conservative movement are. And certain words cut through the ages like a golden thread ever linking the generations of extremist wingnuts to certain ideas, myths and goals. “Honor” is one of those words.
In his second lecture of the series, Blight talks a bit about the Confederate sense of “Honor”. Now in these lectures he talks about the South and in the time he is talking about it was fair to use the terms ‘Confederate’ and “South’ interchangeably. That is no longer true. Today, the Confederate mindset is an infection that can be found in all fifty states. It is distinct and separate from “the South”. So, in this passage replace the word ‘southern’ with “wingnut” or “Confederate” of “Republican” or Teabagger. It still works as a apt description of both eras:
In one of the greatest books ever written on the South, by a Southerner, in particular Wilbur Cash’s great classic in 1940 called The Mind of the South, he did something similar to Jefferson, although he’s focusing only on Southerners here. Cash was a great journalist, intellectual historian in his own right, deeply critical of his beloved South. In fact it was Cash who wrote a book called The Mind of the South in which he argued, in part, that the South had no mind. He didn’t really mean it. He said Southerners are “proud, brave, honorable by its”–The South is “proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible in its actions. Such was the South at its best,” said Cash, “and such at its best it remains today.” Then comes a “but.” But the South, he says, is also characterized by, quote, “violence, intolerance, aversion, suspicion toward new ideas, an incapability for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice.” [snip]
As one of my favorite historians warned me once, “don’t leave out the politics.” Don’t leave out politics. Now, if I could hang your hat on one kind of Southern distinctiveness, perhaps above all–it’s fun to play with all these stereotypes and realize that if so many people were writing this way, from personal observation, yes, there must be something to all these differences. But what eventually evolved in the South–and we will return to this a good deal next Tuesday when I’ll devote an entire lecture to this kind of slaveholder worldview and the pro-slavery argument–the pro-slavery defense–and how that evolved into a political culture. But if there’s one thing–and this is a little risky because there are always holes in any claim like this–but if there’s one distinct feature of the Old South society and indeed its leadership and most of its people, it would be what we might label anti-modernism
It was a society that eventually developed a disdain for what they perceived as the corruptions of modern commercialism. Southern slaveholding leadership, in particular, were very suspicious of the spread of literacy. They were very suspicious of the democratic tendencies, or so it seemed, the democratic tendencies of that northern society which was spreading literacy more widely, and eventually the right to vote more widely, at least among white people. It is a society where the leadership for sure, and much of the non-leadership, were suspicious of reform, suspicious of change, suspicious of democracy itself. Democracy, the slaveholding class of the South came to see–small d–as a dangerous thing. It was a threat to hierarchy and the South became quite distinctively a very hierarchical society–more on that in just a second. It became a hierarchical society rooted very deeply in open conceptions of class and obviously open conceptions of race. Some were born to rule. In the overall attitude of the planter class and the leadership class of the American South by the 1840s and 1850s, some were born to rule and some born to be ruled. Deal with it, was their attitude.
They became deeply protective and insistent upon their own peculiar sense–and there’s a great scholarship on this–their own peculiar sense of honor. Honor. That old-fashioned concept–it’s an old-fashioned word. How many of you even use that word anymore? “Do the honorable thing.” Ah. “Oh, I didn’t act today with much honor did I?” We’re more likely to–we have other words for it now. What would the–? We might say class — “we did that with class.” Or being effective. I don’t know, what would a synonym today be for honor? Anyone? A good synonym for honor. “A person of character.” Oh, I don’t know. Work on that, will you? A synonym for honor.
Well, honor in the Old South. There’s a whole vast scholarship on this and two or three of the teaching assistants in this class are real experts on it. So check it out with Steve and Sam and others. But it was essentially a set of values, and it was a deeply rooted set of values in the planters’ worldview. It was a form of behavior, demeanor. Yes, it meant a certain kind of gentleman’s understanding of behavior. It was the idea that a gentleman must be honest. A gentleman must be trustworthy. A gentleman was a man of entitlement. A gentleman was a man of property. A gentleman had class, rank, and status, and you better recognize it. And the most important thing in the Southern code of honor, I think, safe to say, was reputation. A man of honor must be recognized, must be acknowledged. And indeed there must be virtually a ritual of that recognition. [snip]
James Henry Hammond of South Carolina once said, I quote, “Reputation is everything. Everything with me depends upon the estimation in which I am held.” That’s honor, personal honor. For many Southerners it was more important than law, more important than conscience. And when they started encountering these Northerners, whether they were from Massachusetts or Ohio, who started talking about a politics of conscience, or a politics of law, they’re not always talking on the same page. So anti-modernism and honor are two hooks you can hang your hats on.
And these are the hooks the Teabaggers hang their tri-corner hats on: anti-modernism and a Confederate sense of honor–a code word of respect for white rule as an entitlement and that an elite of those whites folks are blessed by God to rule us all.
IMHO there is nothing honorable about the fools who followed Beck to Washington to support a restoration of the Confederacy. Fuck them and the horse’s ass they rode in on.
Cheers
dengre
The Confederate Party has always been about ‘Honor’Post + Comments (137)
by Dennis G.| 13 Comments
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Open Threads, Post-racial America, Good News For Conservatives
Andy Hall is leaving his week at TNC’s place (but we will be able to follow him over at Dead Confederates). He leaves us with a poem–The Great Lie–by Tim Lewis. It is well worth the time to click this link and give it a read. The poem explores the great lie of the Confederacy in six stanzas and follows that with a call to truth and action. Here is how those six stanzas begin:
The first part of the Great Lie
Is to deny
That slavery was savage, barbaric…The second part of the Great Lie
Is to deny
The evil of the system…The third part of the Great Lie
Is to imply
That most enjoyed their bondage…The fourth part of the Great Lie
Is to deny
That the war concerned slavery at all…The fifth part of the Great Lie
Is to deny
Slave wisdom, endeavor and capacity…The sixth and final part of the Great Lie
Is to deny
Even the existence of wartime slaves…
This is a poem that should be taught in every high school in the land.
Thanks to Andy for sharing this.
Enjoy the night.
Cheers
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Post-racial America, Good News For Conservatives
Ta-Nehisi Coats has invited some fine guest contributors in recent weeks. I’ve been enjoying the work of Andy Hall, a frequent commentator at TNC who also blogs at Dead Confederates. As TNC says Andy’s “…knowledge of all things Civil War is truly intimidating.”
There are many myths about the Confederacy, but one of the biggest is that it was a political movement built around honor. It wasn’t. It was a movement built around protecting a system of stolen labor and the ‘rights’ of a selective few to grossly profit from that system. Selling ideas of honor, states rights and outright racism was how a small group of 19th century Southern Oligarchs built an army to fight for injustice. Ever since their defeat these Confederates and their idealogical descendants have worked hard to spin their treasonous racist enterprise into an honorable ‘lost cause’ and in recent decades they have completely captured the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement.
In the beginning of the last century the Confederates were early adapters of new technologies to spread their myth. It was D.W. Griffiths’ “The Birth of a Nation” that spread the myth of Confederate honor across America and presented millions of white immigrants a narrative of white supremacy and shiftless, lazy, untrustworthy and threatening blacks. It was a narrative that generations of immigrants embraced as they and their children became Americans and it was a narrative that spread the reach of the Confederate Party and its ideology of hate to all 50 states.
The power of this myth is fading, but the Confederate Party is making a desperate effort to keep it alive with new (and yet old) lines of racist attacks, charges of ‘reverse racism’ and the search for new enemies of the white race (Hispanics, gays, Islam and non-white foreigners) to add to their old standard enemies lists of blacks, liberals, unions and abolitionists. This latest iteration of the Confederate Party is trying to mobilize a new army of teatards, wingnuts, racists and neocons to protect a new generation of oligarchs and new ways to steal labor. And just like 150 years ago they are selling myths of honor, states rights and appeals to white supremacy to build their movement. One can draw a straight line from the Dred Scott decision to the effort to end the birthright citizenship guarantee of the 14th Amendment. Many things have held this movement together over the last century and a half, but perhaps the biggest one is the myth that the Confederacy was honorable and that by extension some forms of racism can be honorable as well.
Confronting racism in America requires that the myth of Confederate honor is destroyed. And that gets me back to this guest post by Andy Hall at TNC’s site which strikes at the heart of the myth of Confederate honor. Citing an essay by David G. Smith, “Race and Retaliation: The Capture of African Americans During the Gettysburg Campaign,” Andy goes on to explain just what Bobby Lee and his Army of Confederates were after on their raid into Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863 (emphasis added):
During the Gettysburg Campaign, soldiers in the the Army of Northern Virginia systematically rounded up free blacks and escaped slaves as they marched north into Maryland and Pennsylvania. Men, women and children were all swept up and brought along with the army as it moved north, and carried back into Virginia during the army’s retreat after the battle. While specific numbers cannot be known, Smith argues that the total may have been over a thousand African Americans. Once back in Confederate-held territory, they were returned to their former owners, sold at auction or imprisoned.
That part of the story is well-known. What makes Smith’s essay important is the way he provides additional, critical background to this horrible event, and reveals both its extent across the corps and divisions of Lee’s army, as well as the acquiescence to it, up and down the chain of command. The seizures were not, as is sometimes suggested, the result of individual soldiers or rouge troops acting on their own initiative, in defiance of their orders. The perpetrators were not, to use a more recent cliché, “a few bad apples.” The seizure of free blacks and escaped slaves by the Army of Northern Virginia was widespread, systematic, and countenanced by officers up to the highest levels of command. This event, and others on a much smaller scale, were so much part of the army’s operation that Smith argues they can legitimately be considered a part of the army’s operational objective. Smith is blunt in his terminology for these activities; he calls them “slave raids.”
The last army of the Confederacy had “slave raids” as a top strategic priority and why wouldn’t they as the entire enterprise was built around protecting the theft of labor. The new teatard/wingnut Confederate Army is working to update the ‘slave raid’ concept for a new century with attacks on uppity negroes, ACORN, the NAACP, teh gays, brown people and the latest runaways to capture: anchor babies. Then as now the goal is to take prisoners, deny freedom and inflict punishment motivated by revenge and hatred.
I know that this will hurt the feelings of those who completely buy into Confederate mythology, but the cold fact is that the modern Confederate movement is without honor just like the traitorous movement that took up arms against our Nation 150 years ago. And sure, there may be examples of individuals who occasionally engage in honorable acts in any iteration of the Confederate movement, but these isolated incidents can not make the Confederate movement honorable any more than the honorable act of an individual German soldier could infuse the Nazi movement with honor or the honorable resistance to Hitler’s army by Russians in Leningrad and Stalingrad could, by extension, make Stalin’s Soviet regime honorable. There are political ideologies that justifiably belong on the ash heap of history–and the Confederacy is one of them.
A call has been made to treat Glenn Beck’s magic day of September 12 as Burn The Confederate Flag Day. Perhaps I will head down to a local statue of that old racist Bobby Lee and burn one. And then head over and burn another in front of a local statue of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. I might, but the time to do it would give the Confederacy far more honor than it deserves. Still, it might be fun.
Cheers