I Guess I'm Not Allowed to Get Tired of Denouncing Fake Republicans

Dear William Cristol:

Thanks for wadding up your credibility, and your decades of otherwise qualified service to America, into a small, compact ball, and then setting that ball on fire in your bathroom and flushing the blackened, ashy mass down the toilet.  Are you... offended by this?  You should be - but America should be even more offended by you because you have the insane, putrefying hubris to suggest running a third-party candidate to syphon votes away from the legitimate Republican nominee, Donald Trump.   I'm sorry you don't like his Twitter feed.  But there are a lot of worse ones out there.  Like the ISIS, Al-Queda, and Hamas Twitter feeds, which you might as well be re-tweeting for, given all Hillary Clinton's track record for protecting this country from terrorists.  Like I've said, why not just create a triune political alliance of moderate Republicans, Hillary Democrats, and Islamic terrorists?  Just admit where you effectively stand and we can have an up-and-down debate on the subject, rather than pretend that this is about Trump's supposed lack of qualifications.

Again, it doesn't matter what Trump is like, as long as he's better than Hillary!  Even if it's only by 0.1%, *we are morally obligated to vote for him.*

You know what, I remember when I was a 20 year old college kid and I voted for Ralph Nader because I couldn't tell the difference between George Bush and Al Gore.  Oh, wait, I don't remember that because I voted for a candidate who could actually win, the way anyone with even a flyspeck's of understanding or concern for the American political process would.

As a disclosure, I voted for Al Gore in 2000 because I was an raised by hippie parents into an insane, brainwashed college kid on an ultra-liberal campus.  Still no excuse, and I own my mistake.  I considered voting for Bush on a pro-life mindset, and that's what I should've done.  But the past is the past.  I made my mistakes and I am transparent about them.  In my defense, see the above paragraph where I explain that I was an insane, brainwashed college kid wielding a ballot I had been handed by a drunk Benjamin Franklin when he argued against property rights as a qualification for voting.  I'm sorry and I own it - and by the way, I wasn't a 63 year old editor of a major, albeit poorly formatted news blog and national magazine who is allegedly an old Conservative standby!

So who's crazy now, Bill?  Who's crazy now?

I hope Trump wins and appoints you Dishonorary Secretary of Misplaced Be-Clownery.

Black People Suffered 345 Years for Freedom Because the Founding Fathers Were Bad at Getting It Done

Let's take the number 1964 and subtract it from the number 1619.  The result is 345, and that's the number of years that people from Africa were legally oppressed or enslaved in America.

With all due respect to the Founding Fathers, love is an action word.  If they’d wanted to end slavery, they would have just ended slavery.    I’ve had it with conservatives who say that the Founding Fathers somehow had a glint in their eye and really, really just wanted to end slavery but were so afraid of dividing the country that they just couldn't.  High-flown theories about a civil war in the 1790's or other disunity are merely a papering over of the truth about the Founders: many of them were deeply compromised by their economic interest in keeping slavery going.  

And yet, liberals would have us believe that, because many of the Founders owned slaves - Madison, Jefferson, and Washington spring to mind - that we can never admire them, that naming elementary schools after them is racist, and that they have to be carefully boxed off and all but purged from history, other than as cardboard cutouts who are manipulated in a shadow play about the glories of the collectivist State, used to demonstrate "how far we've come."

The truth is far more complicated, interesting, and invigorating.  The Founding Fathers were great men who risked everything to bring liberty and the principles thereof to an entire nation, and the effects of their weaknesses in not ending slavery were multiplied. They held power, and yet, essentially wrung their hands in ineffectual concern for the institution they'd carried from the colonies into what was supposed to be free Republic where all men were created equal.  Paradoxical?  Of course it is.  This is America - have you met us?  And the even deeper paradox is that the Founding Fathers - even the ones who enslaved people really did pave the way with both words and actions for eventual freedom.  I think history books say that, sort of, but we should shout it out and restore the Founding Fathers to their proper place of respect and admiration while living in and indeed loving the intellectual tension created by the fact that they *weren't* perfect.  Sort of like, "love the sinner, hate the sin": Hate the enslavement, love the ideas that led to eventual freedom.

Abraham Lincoln was a cool-handed dictator who had a tidy, Victorian moral disgust with slavery and yet little love for the actual liberation of enslaved black people.  Just look at his actions:  proposing an end to the expansion of slavery so that it would slowly wither - and what's a few decades under the Confederate lash, anyway?  You're up for that, right Malcom X's grandfather?  Another action: The Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that slavery was ended in places that were rebelling against the United States *because they were rebelling*.  Hey Confederacy, just trade in your muskets for ballots, and we'll allow you to commit a Holocaust for another 43 years or so?  Great deal, right? What, you still want to be your own nation-state?  Aww, maaaan!  Or passing the 13th Amendment under duress - I don't care what Spielberg and Daniel Day Lewis cooked up, good movie guys, but a tad idealistic - simply so that Radical Republicans would not embarrass him politically while he was trying to craft Reconstruction.

Look, I don't hate Lincoln.  His relative-to-the-times political courage was off the charts, A+, good job, stovepipe hats for everybody.  But his absolute political courage when held against a defined standard of All Men Created Equal is a C- at best - we'll let you graduate to twelfth grade, Abe, but you're lucky Common Core watered down the curriculum so much!

The irony, of course, is that Lincoln is recognized as a martyr for a cause he only sort-of believed in - black people's freedom.  But Lincoln's true passion, the idea of United States as a unified republic - survived as well.

Leaders whose real passion for abolition - the active, positive destruction of slavery and the liberation of our fellow humans - had such names as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.  These men and those they inspired organized others by the thousands and then the millions, nurturing the political culture that empowered Lincoln and other Republicans to at least say they were against the expansion of slavery. In relatively bright moments in 1863 (Emancipation Proclomation) 1865 (Thirteenth Amendment and abolition of slavery nationwide) and 1868 ("Radical", i.e. popular Reconstruction - as in 'you mean, there were so many Radical, true-and-blue anti-oppression Republicans that they overrode a moderate President and ran the entire Federal government out of Thaddeus Steven's boarding-house parlor?  Why, what were they, a majority that represented America's genuine mass political culture against stodgy 'regular' politicians?  No way!'), the whole system came crashing down in 1877 after a brokered Presidential election, and black American suffered under Jim Crow for 87 years.

Finally, we got the Voting Rights Act in 1964.  And if you want to talk about a politician who couldn't crowd surf - who was squished to the front of the room by passionate civil rights activists when they locked arms, singing and marching, and who forced this politician to then, pop - sweaty, stumbling, and disoriented - out the front door, where he would then have the temerity to claim to have led us there, why, that politician would be America's single worst President, Lyndon Baines "how many kids have you killed today" Johnson.  Yup, Mr. "we lost the South for a generation" Johnson - and why would enfranchising black people lose the South for a generation, which it didn't?

That, my friends, is a story for another blog.

Because it's been a big sarcastic night for this history major and it's time to go to bed.

Maybe the Benghazi Terrorists Will Join #NeverTrump Because They're Big Hillary Supporters

Today, whiny "conservatives" everywhere are pretending that they can't tell the difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  So, what I think they should do, is grow up, put on their big boy pants, and vote for the candidate who is running against the candidate who allowed four Americans to be murdered at the hands of Islamic terrorists.  It's pretty simple.  You think you can do that for me, guys?  Because, I mean, it doesn't seem that hard.  Or maybe just vote for the candidate who, be it ever so small a possibility, is less likely to appoint a Supreme Court justice or six who will sanction the murder of millions and millions of children.  I mean, I can't believe we're even having this conversation.  If Trump has stepped on your toes, get some steel toed boots.  I would rather have a candidate who is at least nominally opposed to terrorism, child murder, and an incessant flood of illegal immigrants, however offensive he may seem, than a candidate whose actions demonstrate she has no problem with any of those things at all.

I guess what's really funny is that, as far as I can tell, I'm the most conservative person I know on a lot of topics, and I don't find Trump offensive at all (although I can see how other people do find him offensive, because he certainly does not sound like most politicians.)  I am in favor of gun rights, up to and including the infamous 100 round clip.  I am opposed to the murder of children, period (it's often given the sanitized, 'medical' name of "abortion", a term I suggest we all stop using as it tends to cloud one's reasoning on the subject.)  I am against illegal immigration, period.  I think, in fact, that the U.S. should put in place an immigration moratorium for five years while we figure this out.  I am pro-military - whatever that means - but it's important to point out these days, because generally liberals seem like they want America to lose every war.  I am in favor of free market economics within a context of reasonable trade policies, especially with third-world, developing economies and I don't think the government should simply tax and spend.  I'm aware that Donald Trump isn't a perfect, by-the-numbers conservative.  I'm aware that his political views hewed liberal for a lot of his life.  Well, so did mine.  People can change, and I'd like to think Trump has.

Still, I carry no illusions.  From my archly conservative perspective, Donald Trump, if elected - and I strongly hope he is - will probably be an annoying, centrist, dishwater President on most important policies other than immigration, and candidly, the voice of experience tells me he's likely to waffle on that.

But politics is the art of choosing the lesser of two evils.  And Donald Trump is vastly preferable to a lifelong feminist radical who sat back and did nothing while Americans were murdered, and who, without question, will go on supporting the murder of millions of children.

Four years of Hillary.  Four million children murdered.

Think about that.

So come on, guys.  Get rid of the hashtags, swallow your hubris, and do the right thing for America.  I'm sorry Trump didn't stroke your egos.

But this one is a no-brainer.