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On the Confederate monuments: Be careful what you ask for

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The U.S. Civil War killed or maimed huge numbers of people – as a proportion of how many people were alive, then. I’m told that, for two generations after the war, you would walk down the street in almost any U.S. city and see veterans missing an arm or leg, or women who were veterans’ widows.

After the war, the point of statues on both sides was to remember the sacrifice of those who had fallen. Both sides were American. Both fought because they thought they had a point.

The war was not about slavery until 1863 (well into it). The South fought to preserve the States against an encroaching central government. They lost – only after President Lincoln claimed a moral high ground, by finally making it a war to end the evil of slavery. Before then, in 1861 and 1862, the constitutional issues were primary and the South had a point. In short, they were not evil for fighting. They were Americans, fighting from a place of moral conviction (however mistaken).

The point of the Confederate monuments is to remember all that. The people whom you oppose so deeply are fellow Americans and they often (not always) come from a place of moral conviction (however mistaken).

It follows that the real effect of removing the Confederate monuments is to forget all that. Removal makes a statement that only one side matters: Your side, membership in which gives you the right to spit upon, and eventually to erase, your fellow Americans.

Whether a particular city or college or State should keep monument X is a local issue, that I won’t have an opinion on. But the overall push to remove the Confederate monuments is disturbing: it’s a push for ignorance and incivility. Forgetting the past, that’s the ignorance. And having only one side matter (yours) – that’s the incivility.

So, lefties: Be careful what you ask for. I will leave you with Charles Barkley’s perspective:

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And Diamond and Silk’s perspective.

#FakeCNN and their #FakeLincolnQuote

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From Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. On July 4, CNN Politics tweeted this:

Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe. — Abraham Lincoln

As if it endorses CNN’s fake approach to the news. Problem: The quote is fake. It’s not from any of Lincoln’s speeches or letters.

After Lincoln’s death, someone reported a conversation (also known as hearsay) in which Lincoln might have said this:

I have faith in the people. They will not consent to disunion. The danger is, they are misled. Let them know the truth, and the country is safe.

Maybe CNN meant that quote; but note how they got it wrong (or deceptively edited it?). Or there’s another quote which, some years later, a writer attributed to Lincoln:

Let the people know the facts, let them see the danger; but let every effort be made to allay public fears, to inspire the masses with confidence and hope, and, above all, to frown down every attempt to create a panic.

Translation: Lincoln would be against CNN spreading fake, false, phony stories of Trumprussia collusion.

As Hemingway puts it:

Insofar as a hearsay quote should ever be tweeted out or inscribed in walls, at least it should be accurate. Particularly when it’s about “truth” and “facts.”

When I use a quote, I google it first to make sure. It takes two minutes. Except that, if I misremembered it, then I have to submit to reality and re-shape the post. I’m a minor blogger and I do all that. But CNN couldn’t be bothered. They live on a higher plane. (cough)

UPDATE: The New York Times isn’t much better. They recently mistook a parody site as a source of North Korea government quotes. [Read more…]

How America’s largest cities voted

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Commentor TnnsNe1 did some research. Thanks! I didn’t realize, until the moment I saw it, that I had been wanting to know.

From ESPN: “If you are a city in America, you are a racist city,” (Michael) Smith stated.

So, I did a bit of research (all figures by county) on the election results. Here are the results for the 15 most populated urban areas:

NYC Clinton 82%
LA Clinton 72%
Chicago Clinton 84%
Houston Clinton 48%
Philadelphia Clinton 82%
Phoenix -Trump- 48%
San Antonio Clinton 54%
San Diego Clinton 57%
Dallas Clinton 61%
San Jose Clinton 73%
Austin Clinton 66%
Jacksonville -Trump- 48%
San Francisco Clinton 85%
Indianapolis Clinton 58%
Columbus Clinton 60%

Emphasis added (because I just didn’t see, when I first read it). We can re-order it by Clinton’s percentage:

San Francisco 85%
Chicago 84%
NYC 82%
Philadelphia 82%
San Jose 73%
LA 72%
Austin 66%
Dallas 61%
Columbus 60%
Indianapolis 58%
San Diego 57%
San Antonio 54%
Houston 48%
Phoenix under 48%
Jacksonville under 48%

Given the premise that a vote for Hillary was a vote for the worst human being in that 4-way race, my guess would be that people are

  • reasonable in Phoenix, Jacksonville, Houston, San Antonio.
  • And less so in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, San Jose, Los Angeles.

I’m not shocked that California has many of America’s less-reasonable people.

Finally, I must point out that this is exactly why the Framers created the Electoral College: so that America’s large cities – what with their numbers, kraziness and groupthink – would not have an overpowering influence in choosing the President (nor in the Senate).

My evolution on the topic of “war”

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Just speaking for myself. After 9-11, I supported the war in Afghanistan because:

  • Killing al Qaeda terrorists seemed like a good idea, and the Taliban was harboring them.
  • It was only one war.
  • It was legal. (Congress authorized it. As did the United Nations, explicitly.)

A couple years later, I supported the Iraq war because:

  • Killing al Qaeda terrorists seemed like a good idea, and Saddam had begun to harbor some who had just fled from Afghanistan, like Zarqawi.
  • Whether or not Saddam Hussein had ready-to-go WMD, getting him and his thugs off the world stage seemed like a good idea.
  • It was only a second war.
  • It was legal. (Congress authorized it. As did the United Nations, more or less.)

By 2008, both wars seemed almost to be won. Their endings were in sight. But then a strange thing happened.

America elected a feckless socialist (Barack Obama) as President. He promised indeed to end the above two wars. But he didn’t. He messed up our winning positions; meaning the wars dragged on.

Even worse, he started more wars. All were illegal (not authorized beforehand by Congress). All were disastrous.

  • His (and Hillary’s) Libya war destabilized all of northern Africa and eventually drowned Europe in “migrants”.
  • His Ukraine coup (and the war/tensions that followed) was an unprecedented and deliberate rattling of the Russian bear’s cage, re-opening the Cold War that had been won in the 1980s and settled in the 1990s.
  • His Syria war fueled the rise of ISIS in Iraq. (Since ISIS and the Syrian rebels overlap quite a bit, aid to the Syrian rebels quickly becomes ‘de facto’ aid to ISIS.)
  • His Saudi friends’ war in Yemen is no help to anyone.

For the first time in U.S. history, we were at war every single day of someone’s 8-year presidency. And his preferred successor (Hillary Clinton) wanted to extend those wars. The U.S. has “achieved” an Orwellian state of Continuous War. That’s bad.

Ever read Thucydides? Athens – the progressive, open, commercial-democratic society of that era – failed. Basically, she over-extended herself in too many wars. She couldn’t afford them – whether financially, militarily, politically or morally. I don’t think we can, either.

Sometimes it’s better to retreat and retrench, and patriotic to advocate for it. If you catch me striking a different tone on our wars than I did 5-10 years ago, that’s why.

We should shore up our borders and defenses, our infrastructure, our industry, our national finances, our energy independence, and our commitment to liberty, here at home. We can probably still keep our commitments to Europe, Japan, Korea and Israel (which means I’m no isolationist). But, apart from the historical commitments just mentioned, we should accept a multi-polar world order and NOT look for wars to get into.

In my opinion. Please feel free to criticize or to state yours, in the comments.