Ikki Nikki

States' rights are wonderful.

States' rights are the reason one state does things differently from another.  They're what enable Pennsylvania to run a chain of "state stores" at which to buy alcoholic beverages, enable Maine and Nebraska to proportionally award some of their presidential electors, enable Hawaii and Utah to ban gambling, and enable New Jersey to require expiration dates on water, which doesn't really expire, which means that expiration dates get printed on water bottles in all fifty states because it's too expensive to print dates on only bottles sold in New Jersey . . . oh, and it's illegal only in New Jersey to pump your own gas.  (Okay, maybe New Jersey is a bad example here.)

States' rights are guaranteed in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, written by Founding Father Roger Sherman of Connecticut, the only state with a stand-alone gift tax (and it's Connecticut's right to have one!), which reads as follows, and I quote:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

So, the rights of the states matter a lot.  But the states do not have the right to withdraw from the Union in defiance of federal policy regarding the restriction in federal territories of a practice legal in certain states and banned in others, because secession under any circumstances is unconstitutional.  No state has the right to secede on the basis of issues regarding federal powers and individual liberties, and that was especially the case regarding . . . slavery.

But Nikki Haley, campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in New Hampshire, seems to think that the cause of the Civil War  was a issue over states' rights, personal liberty, and federal government overreach.  

Which is particularly strange when you remember that her home state of South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union after Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, said it was doing so because "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution."

Haley has since tried to backtrack on her statements, but the very idea that she could talk about the cause of the Civil War and not acknowledge slavery would be laughable if not for the fact that she will happily dodge any inconvenient realities of American history to avoid offending Trump supporters whose votes she doesn't have a prayer of getting anyway.  How bad it is for her?   She has Ron DeSantis - who approved educational guidelines in Florida to suggest that slavery provided skills to those in bondage - criticizing her, and she has Chris Christie laughing at her!  

We seem to be in an Alice in Wonderland situation when a South Asian woman married to a white man in the state where Bob Jones University is located can't talk openly and honestly about race.

Then again she is a Republican . . . 

Sic Semper Proditores

The statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia was finally removed.

And some people have a problem with that.

Lee has been memorialized by Southerners and by conservatives in other parts of the country as an honorable, religious gentleman who fought for the lost cause of his people, despite his opposition to succession and his description of slavery as "a moral, political evil."  Donald Trump, in condemning the removal of the statue, called Lee a brilliant general who, had he been alive today, would have won the war in Afghanistan.

Umm, yeah.  Lee participated in armed insurrection against the government. And despite his feelings about slavery, he continued to own slaves and treat them rather badly.  And oh yes, he lost the Civil War.  He may have fended off McClellan, Burnside and Hooker, and he may have escaped Meade's pursuit from Gettysburg, but he met his match with Ulysses S. Grant, the greatest American general not named Dwight D. Eisenhower.   

As Andrew Jackson told the people of South Carolina when they nullified a tariff law in 1832, "Disunion by armed force is treason.  Are you ready to incur its guilt?"

Thirty-four years ago, I wrote a letter to my local paper making the same points.  It was the first of many letters of mine that would published in the newspaper.  I got an anonymous hate letter in response.  But it turns out that I was actually well ahead of my time.

Now they ought to find something to full the space on that pedestal.

How about a Buffalo Soldier? 😊  

Nullifying History

"Why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?"

So rhetorically asked Donald Trump in a recent interview, during which he theorized that Andrew Jackson, a staunch Unionist, never would have let the Civil War happen.

Old Hickory, Trump said, "had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said 'There's no reason for this.'"

There's just one problem: Andrew Jackson died sixteen years before the Civil War began.

Trump apologists quickly stepped in to do damage control, musing that Trump meant to point out that President Jackson had to deal with the Nullification Crisis of 1832 - in which South Carolina nullified a federal tariff law - and moved to establish the sovereignty of the federal government over the states.  (In his "Proclamation to the People of South Carolina," Jackson wrote, "Disunion by armed force is treason.  Are you really ready to incur its guilt?")  Trump himself sought to clarify his position with this Twitter statement:

In fact, Andrew Jackson, the first Democratic President, facilitated the coming of the Civil War because, for all of his manly blustering on the need to preserve the Union and despite his break from his original heir apparent, South Carolina's pro-nullification John C. Calhoun, in favor of Martin Van Buren, Jackson was a slaveowner who supported the expansion of the institution and supported annexation of the slaveholding country of Texas in 1844, seven years after leaving office.  When Van Buren, having succeeded Jackson as President in 1837 and then having been voted out of office after one term, tried for a comeback in 1844, his refusal to endorse Texas annexation led Jackson to support James Knox Polk for the Democratic presidential nomination.  Polk was nominated and elected, and Texas was brought into the Union.  Jackson, like Polk, also opposed federal infrastructure projects, and he killed the Second Bank of the United States as President.  Both an infrastructure program and the Bank might have helped the slave states diversify their economies and led to the abolition of slavery without a war.   Yet Trump still lauds Jackson for seeking compromise to prevent a war.

No, that was Henry Clay.

Clay was also a slaveowner, but he nevertheless supported infrastructure spending, the Bank and tariffs to help American industry,  and he brokered compromises in Congress over slavery to preserve the Union.  Clay died in 1852 thinking he'd done that, and, as historian David Jacobs noted, was "spared the knowledge that nothing at all had been resolved by his compromises."

As an ironic footnote, Fort Sumter was fired upon on April 12, 1861 - what would have been Clay's 84th birthday.  As for the second Democratic President, Martin Van Buren, who lived to see the Civil War, he supported Stephen Douglas - who supported Kansas's decision to outlaw slavery by popular vote despite objections from the national Democratic establishment - for President in 1860 and, when the Civil War began, announced his support for President Lincoln.

If there was ever a possibility that a President could have prevented a civil war, Jackson's policies made sure that such a time would never come.  That we have a President who knows nothing about the history of this country beyond the sanitized Disney version - and he probably didn't know anything about the Nullification Crisis before someone told him about it the other day - is an absolute embarrassment.   

Thoughts on Fort Sumter

Fort Sumter was fired on by the rebel army seeking separation of the slave states from the Union 150 years ago today, and though the Civil War that resulted ended with the United States being restored, it looks like we're on the verge of repeating history.

Maybe we won't have an all-out war, with armies, like the Civil War was. But with different parts of the country at odds with each other - and with Republicans and Democrats in Washington playing the most cynical partisan games that help no one and hurt too many of us - the disunion over what kind of nation we want to live in is growing more heated. It's more heated, in fact, than at any time since the late 1850s, when battle lines were drawn over extending slavery in the territories and Supreme Court rulings that favored states' rights, like the Dred Scott decision.

The anger and the resentment over government in the Tea Party and toward the wealthy and the powerful in progressive groups as well has led to a powder keg ready to explode. The emerging details of the budget deal might just set it off.

Meanwhile, Fort Sumter sits in an ironically quiet place in the middle of Charleston Harbor.

We Don't Need Southern Men Around Anyhow

Robert McDonnell, the governor of Virginia, is aware of his state's history, and he seems to be bent on honoring the past by living in it.

McDonnell issued a resolution reinstating the celebration of April in Virginia as Confederate History Month in honor of the people of Virginia "who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth." He called for Virginians "to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War, and to recognize how our history has led to our present."

Oh yeah, and he forgot to mention that Virginians fought to preserve the sanctity of slavery.

What planet is McDonnell on? He wants to cast the Civil War as a conflict between the states over "states' rights," but he seems to forget that the Southern states started the war as a reaction to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States. The South opposed Lincoln's policy not allowing the extension of slavery to the frontier. (He had no intention to abolish slavery where it already existed, because he didn't have the authority; ironically, the Civil war gave him the ability to do so.) Although McDonnell apologized for failing to acknowledge the horror of slavery and said he never meant to condone it, it's worth stressing that the Southern states seceded from the Union. The idea of the Civil War from the Southern perspective was to form a new country, the Confederate States of America, not preserve state sovereignty within the framework of the Constitution.

McDonnell has only gotten many prominent black Virginians to speak out against him, including one of his own supporters from last year's gubernatorial campaign, Black Entertainment Television co-founder Sheila Johnson. The Republican party to which McDonnell belongs looks even more out of touch with people outside the Tea Party movement, and he may have sunk his own presidential ambitions.

Speaking of the Presidency, did you know that Virginian John Tyler, the nation's tenth president, served in the Confederate Congress just before his death?

I do agree that Virginians who fought in the Civil War for their country should be honored, though. So let's honor George Thomas, a hero of the . . . Union. (Thomas is famous for having destroyed a Confederate army under the command of John Bell Hood at the Battle of Nashville in 1864.)

Welcome Back, My Friends, To the War That Never Ends

A brief explanation of the five civil wars of Afghanistan:

In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to shore up the Communist government that had taken over the country a year earlier by installing their own chosen Afghan leaders and helping the local Communist Party keep the populace in line. The Mujahideen Islamic rebels took up arms - many supplied by the United States - to defeat the Afghan Communists and the Soviet invaders who supported them, forcing the Red Army out after nearly a decade. Once the war was over, a new one began two minutes later to oust the Communist president, Mohammed Najibullah.

The second civil war lasted three years, from 1989 to 1992 until President Najibullah was overthrown and executed. Two minutes later another civil war started among factions of the Mujahideen for control of the country.

The third civil war found Islamic factions trying to start an interim government and getting a quorum of Mujahideen supporter on one side. This went on for some time until the Taliban formed and gained strength, eventually taking Kabul in 1996 and establishing themselves as the new Afghan government. The third civil war was over.

Two minutes later, anti-Taliban factions and the Northern Alliance started a new civil war to retake Kabul and the countryside. This went on for five years. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden took up residence in Afghanistan, and, because of the "scandal" involving President Clinton's private sexual affairs, no one paid attention. Except President Clinton himself, who was trying to get bin Laden. No one cared, least of all the next President, George Walker Bush. Then, on September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Mas'ud, the one anti-Taliban leader in Afghanistan who could unite much of the country behind him, was assassinated. Two days later the same people who assassinated Mas'ud blew the World Trade Center in New York to kingdom come. The United States entered the fourth civil war in Afghanistan and won a huge victory by helping the anti-Taliban forces take over Kabul. The Taliban fell, and the war was over.

Two minutes later, the Taliban started a counterrevolution, beginning the fifth civil war that has lasted to this very day.

So, we're in Afghanistan to bring a lasting peace and a solid, stable government to a country that has only had eight minutes of peace in thirty years.

And oh yes, when the Soviets invaded in 1979, they had the previous prime minister executed, who had had his own predecessor executed after taking over in a coup.

We boycotted the Moscow Olympics for these people?