Zo of "ZoNation" is a Flaming Ignoramus on the Civil War

Zo, an alleged black conservative for Pajamas Media, has been shooting his mouth off again about the Confederate flag.  He even went so far as to denigrate Anthony Hervey, a black supporter of the Confederate flag and Confederate history, who was killed last week by other blacks, who like Zo, are ignorant and intolerant of Confederate history.

Zo's sophomoric arguments fall along these lines (my brief rebuttals are highlighted):

1.  The Confederates were Democrats
      (You had to be a U.S. citizen to be a Democrat.  Confederates did not qualify.)
2.  Democrats believed in slavery and the "right to own other human beings."
(Yankees, and Whigs, who became the Republicans, believed in the right to own slaves too.  They proved it by buying and working slaves in Northern states and by selling millions of slaves to other countries.  Zo, like many of the historically illiterate, seem to think that only the South owned slaves.  Not even close.)
3.  The Confederate flag is a Democrat flag.
(The Democratic Party did not create the Confederate flag.  The statement is erroneous and asinine.)

Zo is not the only person spouting this nonsense.  A lot of so-called Republicans are saying the same kinds of things.  They seem not to realize that millions of modern Confederate supporters are Republicans, and very few are Democrats.  Modern Democrats, on the other hand, are leading the charge to ban all Confederate symbols, flags and monuments.  They are opposed by Southern Republicans.  For example, the governor and legislature of North Carolina are Republican controlled, and those Republicans passed laws this past week to protect Confederate monuments from Democrat eradication.  The very Democrat-loyal NAACP complained and are threatening a demonstration.

In Georgia, it is Democrats who are insisting on erasing the Confederate figures from Stone Mountain, and who are planning to make it a campaign issue in the next election.

So Zo, it appears that for today, in the modern world, the Confederate flag is a REPUBLICAN flag.  Read it and weep, sweetie.

"He Who Controls the Past, Controls the Future": Reconsidering Bill Whittle

There is a tendency among modern-day politicians to misuse and misinterpret history in order to advance modern political positions.  This isn't a good idea, no matter how worthy the position.    As historian Arthur M. Schlesinger told us in his book "The Disuniting of America," history is too often used as a weapon.  Using history as a weapon generally means misrepresenting history to justify modern day partisan politics. 

This was the meaning of Orwell's "1984" slogan, "He who controls the present, controls the past.  He who controls the past, controls the future."  If you control the interpretation of history, you can create heroes and villains and justify all sorts of political positions in the here and now.

Bill Whittle demonstrates this tendency (probably without realizing that he is doing so) in his recent Pajamas TV video  "A Voter's Guide to Republicans."  Whittle begins with a worthy objective, to disprove leftist claims that we Republicans are motivated by hate, are fascist and racist. However, he uses false history to support the moral purity of the Republican Party.

Bill Whittle is a conservative writer and commenter extraordinaire. I generally enjoy his expository writing and commentary on Pajamas TV. However, when it comes to Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War and the early Republican Party, he is not to be trusted. Whittle's false history in favor of Republicans claims that the early Republican Party of 1860 was anti-racist and committed to freeing the slaves.  It was neither.

The early Republican Party was dead-set against allowing slavery into the territories, those areas that had not yet become states of the union.  However, it wasn't a Republican belief in racial equality or modern-day morality that formed the basis of their anti-slavery sentiment.  The early Republicans hated blacks and didn't want them polluting the racial purity of these new territories.  Also, they understandably didn't want to compete with slave labor.  One of the first Republican Party platforms identified the Republicans as "the White People's Party."  The new territories were to be set aside for the benefit of the white race.  Early Republicans were hardly the great moral crusaders of the 19th century.  They were pretty much like most other white people of the time period:  highly prejudiced against blacks.  In this they were no better or no worse than mainstream America of the 1860's.

Now let me be clear:  when discussing the Republican Party of the 21st century, Bill Whittle is absolutely correct:  we are neither "racist" nor fascist nor motivated by hate.  However, how we got to this point has little to do with Abraham Lincoln or the Republican Party of 1860.

The truth need not be defended by falsehood.  As the late Vaclav Havel once said, "Lying can never save us from another lie."

The Most Depressing July Fourth of My Life

Roger Simon at Pajamas Media expresses my feelings exactly:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen my country so divided and depressed on the Fourth of July in my lifetime and - no matter what Bob Dylan dreamed up - I’m not young, or otherwise. That includes the Vietnam War period when both sides at least had some conviction and excitement for the future, even if wrong. Not so now. The current situation is grim.

Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness. Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan - if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all - has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.

Read the whole thing.

I feel the same way; I have not much optimism for the future of this country or our personal liberty and economic security. We have elected a naive ideologue who hasn't a clue as to how the world works or why. Our national security is being weakened at a time when our liberties are being eroded and our economy trashed by statist schemes. The immediate future appears to hold hardship for many, a higher cost of living, more taxes, greater government intervention into our private lives (via the global warming scam), and crushing national debt. For many years into the future, many of us will be living hand-to-mouth. The path of economic self-betterment and opportunity has thus been made much more difficult for those seeking to rise.

I agree with Simon. The outlook is grim.

Via Powerline