AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

As Williams stated, slavery was a gross violation of human rights and a great injustice with nothing to commend it. Yet not all slave owners were terrible people. And there were all kinds of situations involved. And while our nation, as does every other nation, has slavery in its history, it is time to appreciate that we have learned and grown and evolved from that history, and it is time to move on.

Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity.

Washington Post: “Southern Republicans have seceded from sanity”
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Posted in category Establishment Rightists1 CommentNeocon Kathleen Parker has written an amazing piece of tediously conventional, anti-Southern trash out of sheer ignorance. Parker blames the dereliction of the GOP " which has become a party with barely noticeable distinctions from its Democratic opponent " on “ignorant, right-wing, Bible-thumping rednecks.” Miss Parker, in her bigoted sketch making modern Southerners look like slaveholder wannabees, refers to a “sense of a resurgent Old South and all the attendant pathologies of festering hate and fear.”

Miss Parker hilariously hallucinates with politically-correct fantasies that bring forth visuals of the glorious North still fighting the Civil War, trying to end slavery in the South. Perhaps she is fantasizing about a new version of Abraham Lincoln, a known racist, when she comments that the Republicans should collectively “drive a stake through the heart of Old Dixie.” According to Parker, her GOP " the GOP that gave us the Security State, the Patriot Act, myriad wars, a militarized police state, a corporatist Wall Street, and the worst budget snafus ever " is the good GOP, yet it has been co-opted by these roving bands of skeptical Southerners fighting the mega-socialist state being put forth by Obama and his committed minions. How dare they! If only they could all just get along and play the partisan game, we could move forward swimmingly and enjoy our lives under tyranny in unity and peace.

As one who has grown up " and lives " in the land of the glorious, triumphant Union, and has one who has traveled extensively throughout the South since the early 1980s, learning about its people and its culture up close and personal, I have witnessed no greater polarization and hate and racism than right here in the North. In fact, I invite Miss Parker (born in Florida, living in South Carolina) to come up here to Detroit if she wants to see hate and fear and racism " of both the black and white variety.

Or perhaps she can take the time to breeze through U.S. census data. It is well known that the most segregated cities in the U.S. are northern, and in fact, most data shows that they are Midwestern industrial cities. Whether or not you use the 1990 census data or the 2000 data, the cities on the list remain consistent: Detroit, Milwaukee, Ceveland, Chicago, Buffalo, Gary, Newark, Cincinnati, etc. Yet since a few scattered Southern Republicans oppose the merging of the minds for a Republicrat-Demopublican joint force to subdue liberty once and for all, it must be that hate-racist thing rearing its reptilian mind again.

Since Miss Parker is in fact ignorant of history and can only recite modern scuttlebutt that will please her colleagues in the media and Washington D.C., I’ll remind her of the scholar Alex de Tocqueville, who said: “Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.” Some things haven’t changed in the last 150+ years, Miss Parker. Y’all come on up here and learn for yourself instead of flinging rhetoric from the establishment pulpit known as the Washington Post.
http://karendecoster.com/washington-post-southern-republicans-have-seceded-from-sanity.html

A Tip for The GOP: Look Away
By Kathleen Parker, Washington Post, August 5, 2009)

Southern writer Walker Percy liked to poke fun at Ohioans in his novels, just to even things out a bit.

"Usually Mississippians and Georgians are getting it from everybody, and Alabamians," he once explained to an interviewer. "So, what's wrong with making smart-aleck remarks about Ohio? Nobody puts Ohio down. Why shouldn't I put Ohio down?"

Percy, the genial genius, laughed at his own remark.

Now, apparently, it's the Buckeye State's turn to poke back. In a fusillade of pique, Ohio Sen. George Voinovich charged that Southerners are what's wrong with the Republican Party.

"We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns," he told an interviewer with the Columbus Dispatch, referring to GOP senators from South Carolina and Oklahoma. "It's the Southerners. They get on TV and go 'errrr, errrrr.' People hear them and say, 'These people, they're Southerners. The party's being taken over by Southerners. What the hell they got to do with Ohio?' "

Down South, people are trying to figure out what "errrr, errrrr" means. Jack Bass, author of eight books about social and political change in the South, speculated in an e-mail that Voinovich really meant grrrr, grrrrr, as in "growling canines whose bark scares more than do Obama's purrs, especially with the Dow at a nine-month high."

Whatever Voinovich's sound effects were intended to convey, his meaning was clear enough: Those ignorant, right-wing, Bible-thumping rednecks are ruining the party.

Alas, Voinovich was not entirely wrong.

Not all Southern Republicans are wing nuts. Nor does the GOP have a monopoly on ignorance or racism. And, the South, for all its sins, is also lush with beauty, grace and mystery. Nevertheless, it is true that the GOP is fast becoming regionalized below the Mason-Dixon line and increasingly associated with some of the South's worst ideas.

It is not helpful (or surprising) that "birthers" -- conspiracy theorists who have convinced themselves that Barack Obama is not a native son -- have assumed kudzu qualities among Republicans in the South. In a poll commissioned by the liberal blog Daily Kos, participants were asked: "Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?"

Hefty majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West believe Obama was born in the United States. But in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten, only 47 percent believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren't sure.

Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity.

Though Voinovich's views may be shared by others in the party, it's a tad late -- not to mention ungrateful -- to indict the South. Republicans have been harvesting Southern votes for decades from seeds strategically planted during the civil rights era. When Lyndon B. Johnson predicted in 1965 that the Voting Rights Act meant the South would go Republican for the next 50 years, he wasn't just whistling Dixie.

A telling anecdote recounted by Pat Buchanan to New Yorker writer George Packer last year captures the dark spirit that still hovers around the GOP. In 1966 Buchanan and Richard Nixon were at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Nixon worked a crowd into a frenzy: "Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, 'burned the paint off the walls.' As they left the hotel, Nixon said, 'This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.' "

That same rage was on display again in the fall of 2008, but this time the frenzy was stimulated by a pretty gal with a mocking little wink. Sarah Palin may not have realized what she was doing, but Southerners weaned on Harper Lee heard the dog whistle.

The curious Republican campaign of 2008 may have galvanized a conservative Southern base -- including many who were mostly concerned with the direction Democrats would take the country -- but it also repelled others who simply bolted and ran the other way. Whatever legitimate concerns the GOP may historically have represented were suddenly overshadowed by a sense of a resurgent Old South and all the attendant pathologies of festering hate and fear.

What the GOP is experiencing now, one hopes, are the death throes of that 50-year spell that Johnson foretold. But before the party of the Great Emancipator can rise again, Republicans will have to face their inner Voinovich and drive a stake through the heart of old Dixie.

People who owned slaves were not Americans until the United States of America was established

It probably won't matter to those who think anybody who owned slaves at any time under any circumstances are disqualified to be admired or appreciated in history.

Before the establishment of the USofA, America existed and the people living there were referred to as Americans. They may have been British subjects but they were still Americans.

People who owned slaves were not Americans until the United States of America was established when all 13 states adopted the Constitution of the United States of America March 4, 1789. Therefore, Americans did not own slaves until March 4, 1789. But some north americans owned slaves prior to March 4, 1789. All Americans who owned slaves prior to December 6, 1865, stopped owning slaves December 6, 1865.

Thomas Paine refers to "Americans" in Common Sense in 1776.

Southern Democrats were the racist supporters of slavery and, subsequently, racist supporters of the rotten principle of "separate but equal." Southern Republicans were in the minority then.

ican711nm wrote:

Southern Democrats were the racist supporters of slavery and, subsequently, racist supporters of the rotten principle of "separate but equal." Southern Republicans were in the minority then.

there were no republicans in 1776.

DontTreadOnMe wrote:

ican711nm wrote:

Southern Democrats were the racist supporters of slavery and, subsequently, racist supporters of the rotten principle of "separate but equal." Southern Republicans were in the minority then.

there were no republicans in 1776.

Gently pointing out that even cut and paste is preferable to assuming that Ican is referring to 1776 here.