The Civil War Never Ended

I came across this NYTimes essay today, which says the Civil War persists to this day. It's less simple than you think. The Civil War changed more than the slave issue; it recast our nation as an economy in which larger players dominated. Those who lost out economically were instructed to blame the freedom of the black man for their reduced status. The old hatred was recast and became very useful. The battlefield was still in the South.

The pleasure of old hatreds explains a lot about our present dysfunction. Hatred is a great business model; consider FoxNews. Disinformation is another wonderful profit engine, and Fox knows that too.

Here’s an example of how people’s ignorance and easy gullibility can be shaped into an eager and militant constituency.

A Union Soldier's grave allegedly predicted the disaster of having a black president.

What this dead Union Soldier and Republican did not know (and this ignorant readership would rather not know) is that the Democratic Party that favored slavery in the 19th century would repudiate racism in the 20th and that his and Lincoln’s beloved Republican Party would seize the opportunity to invite those white racists to become Republicans. Nixon’s White House would formally devise The Southern Strategy, which adopted all those unhappy worshippers of the Old Confederacy and made them diehard Republicans, who would vote down their own economic interests for the pure joy of suppressing black and brown people (…and women… and foreigners… and non-Evangelical Christians… and Muslims… etc.) “I may be poor and ignorant but I still get to feel superior to somebody!”

That is the legacy of the perpetual Civil War. Today’s Republicans are actually the New Confederacy. As a recent Washington Post essay pointed out.

It’s worth noting that Nixon, whose minions came up with the Southern Strategy also invented FoxNews.

The Washington Post reports on the invention of FoxNews by Nixon's backroom boys.

Bloomberg on the invention of the Southern Strategy.

Diagramming the Modern Confederacy

Think of this as a map of the Civil War. Picture America as if that sad conflict never really ended. What you’re looking at is the last die-hard remnant of the old Confederacy.

(From VOX)

For 150 years we’ve continued oppressing Americans of color, compounding 450 years of organized theft.

(Yes Magazine has put all of America's racist injustices into a simple illustrated story.)

An interesting graphing of the Confederacy's… I mean the GOP’s… demographic trend. Whoa! Can that really be happening?

(Graphs courtesy of the Washington Post)

Of course, a lot of Americans are unaware of America’s lack of racial uniformity because they get very blonde news.

(New York Magazine examines FoxNews's complaint that we envy their gorgeous blondness)

The Supreme Court is there to fix problems. Say, for instance, you’re frustrated that it’s getting harder every year to keep darker people from electing non-white and non-conservative people into office. Say you preferred it when America looked like the boxes of whiteness in the opening credits of the Brady Bunch. Realizing America isn’t Wonder Bread would make you very sad and disoriented. The Supreme Court is there to make sure people of different colors don’t upset your narrow racist right wing notion of how America should be…

(SLATE analyzes the judicial gymnastics of the Supreme Court in aid of white folks and rich folks)

Think of the Supreme Court as the Big Way Back machine. The Big Fixeroo. A sanctioned Do-Over for people born with privileges who feel cheated by life. Like in 2000 the way they kept the guy who got the most votes from being president on the grounds that letting the votes be counted would deprive George Bush Jr. of “equal protection.” Letting votes be counted would harm the wealthy heir of a political dynasty that had conspired to overthrow FDR back in the thirties. The Supremes worried all kinds of bad things might happen if Bush were not appointed president.

"Whatever It Is, I'm Against It"

What do you call it when a person or a party refuses to believe facts because they dislike the person who presents them? Bloodymindedness is one word. Damnfoolish will also work.

In two states now, Florida and now Wisconsin, Republican governors have forbidden state employees to acknowledge climate change in any way. They are required to ignore science––in other words they're told to lie. (Bloomberg reports this story)

The Republican Party has a policy of putting polluters of the environment in the job of protecting the environment. Polluters are not good at cutting or regulating pollution….and that is the whole point. Walker is doing this in Wisconsin, or trying to. (Associated Press)

The Republican Party prefers to advance peace by dropping bombs. Does this have anything to do with the massive support they get from the armaments industry? Not only is this corrupt, it’s also deranged and dangerous. The latest cheerleader for war is Tom Cotton of Arkansas. The same guy who wrote the Iranians and told them not to sign a treaty on nuclear disarmament. "Give War a Chance" (NPR reporting)

Where does this insanity come from? What causes this dangerously disordered way of thinking. If it were a person you'd look at the home. What's wrong there. Here it's about the party culture. The Republican Party is the party of ugly bullying and deep corruption. Why is the GOP this way? Because it wins for them. (Here is a sad example from Missouri politics. Again, reported by NPR)

There are a lot of deep old hatreds in the Republican culture. Hatred of other races and religions and of women. Hatred comes from fear and suspicion. It dates back as far as Nixon, a singularly hateful and suspicious man. Was it all about his manhood? (Here's an interesting story from VOX.)

Hatred of “the Other” means all terrorism is Muslim or Communist and foreign born. Homegrown Christian terrorists are not terrorists. (Salon has a short list of the Christian terrorist groups we're supposed to ignore.)

The Republican Party is a machine to serve the 1%, but they get votes from a lot of working people too. Mostly white. Having a black president has confused them. It has at least supplied a worry the 1% can exploit. Working class Republicans find it easier to follow the instructions of the 1%, the gilded rich, who tell them who to hate and who to oppose, rather than make an alliance with other working people who have shared interests and grievances. It’s the old divide-and-conquer strategy of Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The values are deeply Confederate too: keep the other races down and hate the federal government. (Politico reports on the South's devotion to Confederate principles. Which we never got around to calling treason.)

This is a recipe for dysfunction. But the small group of wealthy people who own the Republican Party aren’t concerned. They would rather the United States were more like Mexico or some banana republic where the elite ruled the impoverished majority. (Salon has a story from a former Republican who got sick of it.)

Despite presiding over a rebellious kindergarten of a Republican Congress, Obama has succeeded pretty well. (FactCheck has the numbers on Obama. They're good to great, but you'd hardly know it from how much half of America hates him.)

So they hate him even more. It’s like the Groucho Marx song:

Your proposition may be good,
But let's have one thing understood,
Whatever it is, I'm against it.
And even when you've changed it or condensed it,
I'm against it.

(Here again is that Washington Post article about how the Republican Party is organized around the idea of making sure we fail as badly under Obama as we did under their guy.)

What do you call it when a person or a party wants the United States to fail?

Are they Nixonians or Confederates?

47 Republican senators sent a letter to Iranian leaders warning them not to sign any nuclear agreement with President Obama, saying they would not honor such an agreement after Obama left office. This sort of thing is not supposed to occur. Party politics are supposed to end at the water’s edge. But this sort of thing has happened before.

Vox does a good job of summarizing here.

In 1968, the Nixon campaign worried that President Johnson’s peace negotiations would succeed in ending the Vietnam War and win Humphrey the election. So Nixon sent an envoy to South Vietnam and persuaded the South Vietnamese to scuttle the peace talks, saying Nixon would give them a better deal when he was elected. He was elected, probably because the talks failed (it was a very close election) and the war went on for several more years, costing hundreds of thousands more lives, and ripping our nation apart.

When the evidence became public years later, Politico reported it here.

In 1980 the Reagan campaign worried that President Carter might be successful in negotiating the release of the hostages held in Iran, helping his re-election effort. So Reagan sent an envoy to persuade the Iranians to hold the hostages because Reagan would give them a better deal when he was elected. He was elected. The hostages were released the day he was sworn in.

The fairly complete story of the Reagan scheme is told here.

Reagan went on to do other deals with the Iranians who took American hostages. He traded arms for hostages. Those arms were used by Mideast terrorists. The profits from the arms sales were funneled to our own terrorist death squads in Central America. When he was elected, George H. W. Bush pardoned everyone involved in this illegal activity. Some of them served in the George W. Bush administration, where they were involved in the justification of torture and other unAmerican policies.

Because the Iran Contra Affair played out in public, we can see the film footage. Reagan pled forgetfulness and was anointed a saint by the Republican Party.

Is Dishonesty The Best Policy?

Scott Walker is so good at driving Wisconsin into the ground he’s become a Republican superhero. People in Wisconsin love him for what he’s doing to them. Lower wages––hooray! Fewer jobs––hooray! Dumber citizens––hooray!

A conservative from the Daily Beast explains why this is so exciting(!!!)

“We create our own reality” ~Karl Rove (Meaning torture is what they say it is. If they do it it must not be torture.)

The New York Review of Books has an article describing how hard it was for the CIA to believe the White House really was giving them permission to torture.

If it takes a top scientist to understand how Republicans are lying, does it mean most people will keep believing the lies?

An interview in Salon explains a lot, but it won't be read much by people in working class bars.

Conservatives are beginning to worry that Google will begin giving a higher ranking to pages that don’t contain lies and misinformation about things like science, math, economics and law. Lying about these things is the GOP’s best strategy.

"Save us GOOGLE! You're our only hope!"

(Or: Can a kid who closes his eyes while he flies really blow up the Death Star?)

Republicans will need to hope Americans will stubbornly ignore the truth. The diehard Republican voters are a safe bet. They’re obedient. They ignore what they’re told to ignore. For them, dishonesty is the best policy. Ignorance is bliss.

Republican leadership says to states: ignore the federal laws you don’t like. The Confederacy lives!

Evaders, Seceders, Confederates and Outlaws

The Houston Chronicle reports on a meeting of Texas secessionists who got a surprise visit from local police, Texas Rangers and FBI. No mention of Walker, Texas Ranger being among them.

Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican congressman (and father of the moppet-haired presidential candidate) thinks it’s a great idea to secede from the United States.

Unlike these characters in Texas, the big secessionists are the large corporations who only secede their money. They don’t secede completely. They live here. They own properties here, and run companies here, and their companies use our roads and other public systems paid for by taxpayers. They enjoy all the things US citizens enjoy, but they have the option of not paying for those things, at least not at the rate working people do. Some corporations don’t pay any taxes at all. They keep one hand in their pocket. Their other hand is always out for government contracts and subsidies.

A CNN piece on corporate tax evaders.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' lists the top ten corporate tax evaders and corporate welfare recipients.

Flip The Debt is running a meter on the billions these tax cheats are making off with.

Some little known facts about the biggest corporate freeloaders.

The other Walker isn’t a Texas Ranger, he’s a governor. His secessionist trick is to secede taxpayers’ money, which is intended to pay for Wisconsin state government, infrastructure, education and the general welfare of Wisconsin’s citizens, and to pay it instead to out-of-state corporations like Koch International and to wealthier Wisconsinites (most of whom winter in the South each year) in the form of tax breaks and refunds. Wisconsin does owe for the things that have been done and billed but Walker has decided he can simply not pay for things he doesn’t like. Wisconsin has become an a la carte state where paying the bill is optional. Nobody writes about this more entertainingly than Charlie Pierce.

Your Weekly Reader

Kiss Up/ Kick Down (How to remove the poor)

A child told her mother she wanted to be a libertarian when she grew up. Her mother said she can’t be both. (A funny story about Ayn Rand)

Modern Christianity (How not to convert the unbeliever)

(How Republicans are harming the Christian brand)

Adventures in Republican Misogyny (The meat market of Republican thought)

O’Reilly’s make believe war journalism (Bill O'Reilly has an amazing imagination)

Ron Paul celebrates the New Confederacy (Secession and violating the Constitution are patriotic!)

The Giuliani Story (Giuliani explains how he cannot possibly be racist)

(Guiliani's Inspiring Tale of Patriotism)

“They’re all around us” (The strange secret club of vigilantes who are the guardians of Freedom)

(They even have a secret handshake)

We went to war to stamp this evil out in Europe and Asia. (It was called WW2. What do we do when it happens here?)