In terror of being called a racist by people who they would disdain on all other issues and since they no longer hold office, you see many on this forum who now are anxious to toss Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms over the side - in the fantasy of picking up a handful of black votes. I see it as possibly succeeding unless the Democrats overplay their hand. Plenty of hints of that too. Looks like pretty soon anyone who voted against anything even vaguely connected with civil rights and for whatever reason will be pitched over the side too, principle be damned. It's now almost totally forgotten that one of the reasons for white Southerners abandoning the Democratic Party in the'60s was the national party's strong anti-military stance.
The smart thing to do - and I doubt his handlers will allow it - is for Bush, as a regional transplant himself, to talk about the courage it took for Southerners like Trent Lott to change parties early in the realignment. This would point out that America is forward looking, that we play the game hard, then shake hands and move on. The 'R' word was a dirty word for generations of white Southerners. As rational actors, this generation acted in their own self-interest and gravitated to and influenced the Republican Party. Bush should seize the opportunity to invite rational blacks to do the same.
On the National Park Service: this article conveniently forgot to mention the names of the three "historians" on its advisory panel:
Eric Foner, known as 'Eric the Red.' His father and uncle were Communists as is he. You might have seen his name as part of the conspiracy to withhold relevant facts from the Bancroft Prize investigation.
James McPherson, another socialist. Here’s what McPherson said in an interview on the World Socialists Website (a venue he appeared on numerous times) about news coverage on the Bosnia situation: I get most of what I know out of the New York Times, and the Times is generally more balanced and recognizes more of the complexities of the situation probably more than some of the other popular media.
McPherson also stated the Clintomn impeachment was a personal vendetta.
Nina Silber received all three of her academic degrees from UC Berkeley. Virtually every one of her published works is along the lines of women's role in the Civil War.
And let's not forget that the Park Service was ordered to undertake this task - by a group with a Jessee Jackson, Jr. staffer riding herd. It was his office specifically insisting on this approach. Smells bad, huh, just by association. So, what do we have then, a committee composed of two socialists and a libber. Any surprise they would issue a report along the lines stated in the article? Not to me.
Wait until they "update" the Yorktown battlefield park. There they can demonstrate that since Britain abolished slavery early in the 19th Century, that we should have lost the Revolution since we were fighting for slavery.
On Gettysburg visitation - how many repeat visitors are interested in the military aspects rather than the social interpretation? How many blacks go to non-battle related national parks?
Thanks for filling in the blanks on who these characters were. Lefty types, naturally.
Not that there was ever any doubt...
BTW one of my ancestors served in the First Florida. A cousin still has the signed oath which he had to take in order to vote. I am going on memory but I think he was originally in the 6th Fla. then later merged into the First.
On Gettysburg visitation - how many repeat visitors are interested in the military aspects rather than the social interpretation? How many blacks go to non-battle related national parks?
Excellent question. Answer: very few.
So, the whole "blacks don't go so we have to make things nicer for them" is a red herring. No matter how PC and revisionist they make things, blacks are not going to be going to national parks or Civil War battlefields in any greater numbers than they are now. That's their choice as to what kinds of recreation appeals to them; it has nothing to do with a lack of PC groveling on the part of the Park Service.
Of course, there are those who say that the lack of blacks in national parks and campgrounds is itself de facto evidence of "white racism", rather than simple differences in black preferences for how they spend their recreation time. Everything is about white racism, you see.
Never mind that on a visit to the Sequoia National Park in California that I took a few years ago, the vast majority of the people stopping to admire the giant redwood Sequoia trees were foreigners - Germans, French, Japanese, Israelis, etc. Does the lack of Americans at these sites mean that the Park Service is deliberately discouraging native Americans from coming, or is it rather that Americans take these giant trees more for granten, than do foreign tourists?
I see it more as an effort to split the GOP on regional lines, although I see how the issues could be used to sow division between Southerners and Republicans recently arrived from the North.
The response of the GOP has followed the advice of Christopher Caldwell, an editor of the neocon Weekly Standard, who wrote that article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1998 that I refer to frequently, "The Southern Captivity of the GOP". Caldwell basically argued that the GOP needed to purge its Southern image that the DemonRats were laboring hard to put on it. I would strongly urge anyone who is interested in these issues and in national politics more generally, to look up and read Caldwell's article. I have sometimes wondered whether it was an advocacy piece, or whether it was more an all-hands read-and-heed notice from the Wall Street Wing of the GOP, to the faithful (mostly not Southerners) who read The Atlantic Monthly. If Caldwell had been speaking to Southerners, instead of about them (thank yuu ver'a much, Mr. Caldwell, fo' yo' cuttisy), he'd have published a similar article in Southern Living or some other publication widely read in the South, or in leading regional papers. He didn't.
Guess we know now what the GOP strategy to do that will be. Adios, Trent.
If I were Tom DeLay or another Southerner involved in political leadership, I would be deeply unhappy and somewhat apprehensive about how Dubya moved on Trent Lott. Lott opened the door, to be sure, but it sure illuminated with a lightning-flash what Dubya really thinks about Southern conservatives in the Party, viz., that they are a liability and a drag. He wants them to vote for him, but otherwise to shut the hell up, stay out of sight, and speak only when spoken to. That attitude, I think, is there. And I furthermore think that it comes as easily as second nature to a born-and-bred royalist like George W. Bush, or to neoconservatives like Caldwell and his boss, Bill Kristol.
It would seem to me, then, that it's time for Southern conservatives to make medicine together in their own caucus of the GOP, and to decide now to act in concert the way the DemonRats do, and to insist that a) the GOP move against 'Rat assets in media (the current bill allowing more conglomeration and monopolization of media is a perfect example of something that needs to be turned inside out into a weapon against the 'Rat mass media), and b) not take Southerners for granted and c) finally begin to engage in serious political and intellectual competition against the 'Rat Leftist intellectual opinion factory (which includes both "defunding the Left" and finding a way to purge faculties of committed Marxists and liberal political activists), and stop rolling over for the Democrats every 10 minutes. In the last two years, Bush has rolled over at least half a dozen times on issues that were important to Southern conservative Republicans without even so much as a whimper.
And if that won't do it, we're all in serious trouble, even the Northerners who don't think so yet.
If you will search on posts by GOPcapitalist, I believe it was he, who posted some very interesting material about McPherson and his playmates at Pacifica, here on FR.
You might also communicate with him directly, a pleasant chore, and let him point you to his materials. He really did a job in digging up McPherson's lovely credentials.