The modern-day Democrats sounds eerily like the hateful lunatic and Lincoln supporter named Thaddeus Stevens. "Brother" Thaddeus promoted Southern genocide; and Lincoln's war criminals, Sherman and Sheridan, and their subordinate generals, along with the "Reconstructionists," carried out the genocide:
"In the Congress, there was a significant group of South haters, with murderous demands. The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives, Thaddeus Stevens, was willing that the South "be laid waste, and made a desert, in order to save this Union from destruction." Before a Republican state convention in September 1862, he urged the government to "slay every traitor-bum every Rebel Mansion.... unless we do this, we cannot conquer them." The New York Times wrote in March 1861 that the North should "destroy its commerce, and bring utter ruin on the Confederate states," and this was before the bombardment at Fort Sumter."
"Congressman Zachariah Chandler expressed the spirit of so many in the Congress: "A rebel has sacrificed all his rights. He has no right to life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness. Everything you give him, even life itself, is a boon which he has forfeited."
Such sentiments found their way to the European observers of the war, who found them hard to believe from a civilized people. A correspondent for the pro-Northern Macmillan Magazine, in December 1863, wrote, "How can you subjugate such a people as this? And even supposing that their extermination were a feasible plan, as some Northerners suggested,I never can believe that in the nineteenth century the civilized world will be condemned to witness the destruction of such a gallant race."
"On 5 May 1861, this genocidal passion against the South found analysis in the New York Herald. It quoted the views of the abolitionists: "When the rebellious traitors are overwhelmed in the field, and scattered like leaves before an angry wind, it must not be to return to peaceful and contented homes. They must find poverty at their firesides, and see privation in the anxious eyes of mothers, and the rags of children."
"Another radical editor noted that the New York Herald called "for the punishment of all individuals in the South by hanging, and the confiscation of everybody's property in the seceding States." "Richmond," said another, "must be laid in ashes," and as for Baltimore, "it must become a heap of cinders and ashes, and its inhabitants ought either to be slaughtered, or scattered to the winds." Virginia and Maryland deserve to be "laid waste and made desolate" and 500,000 troops should "pour down from the North, leaving a desert track behind them." The editor responded, "Submission on the part of the South would not satisfy these bloody journalists of the Republican party. Far from it. They cry out: 'We mean not merely to conquer, but to subjugate.'" The editor then adds, "The people of the North are prepared for no such extremities as the brutal, bloodthirsty journals of the abolitionist school suggest."
"On 24 May 1861, the Daily Herald in Newburyport, Massachusetts, said that "if it were necessary, we could clear off the thousand millions of square miles so that not a city or cultivated field would remain; we could exterminate nine millions of white people and re-settle-re-people the lands. There is no want of ability; and if such a work is demanded, there would be no want of a will."
"It is no wonder that the Civil War generated hatred for the North and the Republican party among Southerners for well over a hundred years the bloodthirsty rhetoric of the radicals in the North in time found expression in the devastation of civilians and civilian property by Sherman, Sheridan, Grant, and the commander in chief-Lincoln. It didn't end with the war, for it was then carried on in a less violent form in the Reconstruction laws for the South by the radicals. The object was to exterminate the culture of the Southerners, and to subjugate then destroy the political force of the Southern establishment, and not just the planter-slave owner class. There was to be a new order in the South, excluding the established Southerners of all classes. The radicals succeeded for a while and then moved on, leaving a wasteland in which secret societies and lawlessness prevailed. Thus, in a sense, the Northerners did exterminate a society in every way except genocide. By contrast, no such genocidal threats were made by Southerners against the North.
[Charles W. Adams, "When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession." Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, pp.54-56]
The Northern "republican" leadership was despicable, to say the least. Historian James Thurslow Adams described Thaddeus in those same "Democratic Party" terms:
"Cities [in the Civil War North] grew rapidly. Everywhere there was a"boom," although labor did not fare as well as capitalists and speculators. There was scarcely any fighting on Northern soil, and almost no damage from that source. Unfortunately, on Lee's dash into Pennsylvania, the ironworks of a man whose one idea had been to get rich as quickly as possible were destroyed. They belonged to Thaddeus Stevens, perhaps the most despicable, malevolent, and morally deformed character who has ever risen to high power in America."
[James Truslow Adams, "The Epic of America." 3rd Ed, 1938, p.275]
Perhaps Bernie and Maxine learned their rhetoric from Thaddeus.
Mr. Kalamata
Have you ever been tested for rabies? Just curious.