Posted on 10/12/2018 7:13:42 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
President Trump praised Confederate Geader Robert E. Lee as "a great general" on Friday during a campaign rally in Lebanon, Ohio.
"So Robert E. Lee was a great general. And Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia. He couldn’t beat Robert E. Lee," Trump said before launching into a monologue about Lee, Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
"He was going crazy. I don’t know if you know this story. But Robert E. Lee was winning battle after battle after battle. And Abraham Lincoln came home, he said, 'I can’t beat Robert E. Lee,'" Trump said.
"And he had all of his generals, they looked great, they were the top of their class at West Point. They were the greatest people. There’s only one problem — they didn’t know how the hell to win. They didn’t know how to fight. They didn’t know how," he continued.
Trump went on to say, multiple times, that Grant had a drinking problem, saying that the former president "knocked the hell out of everyone" as a Union general.
"Man was he a good general. And he’s finally being recognized as a great general," Trump added.
— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 13, 2018 Trump has drawn criticism for his defense of Confederate statues, including those of Robert E. Lee.
He drew widespread condemnation last year following a deadly rally in Charlottesville, Va., saying that white nationalist protesters were there to oppose the removal of a "very, very important" statue.
"They were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said at the time. “This week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
Trump, speaking at another rally in Ohio last year, said that he can be one of the “most presidential” presidents to hold office. "…With the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office,” he said to a crowd in Youngstown.
"Legislature"? You mean Congress, or state legislatures?
I would guess by now, after many years since Roe v Wade, that Congress and all the state legislatures have long since caught up to Supreme Court rulings with many clauses in various laws & regulations fully implementing what the courts required.
Such laws & regulations were not put in place overnight and will not be revoked in just a single stroke.
You get the wrong impression because you don't actually read what other people write to you. You just see they left you a message, and you're off galloping at the keyboard to respond.
The point was that freeing slaves was illegal. While you can make a specious argument for doing so during the war, you cannot make a legal argument for doing it after the war. Of course restricting it to slaves also undermines it's claim of validity as a war tactic.
At the Civil War's end former Confederates were not allowed to vote or hold political office.
Which is an illegal act pulled completely out of Lincoln's @$$. States determine who is allowed to vote, not the Federal Government, at least that's the way it was prior to the Civil War.
Disenfranchising the legal and valid citizens of a state is a dictatorial move, not a constitutional one. It is a clear usurpation of the powers reserved to the state under Article I, Section 2.
The claim that the South started the war is not "well said." You just happen to agree with it. Throw that out, and the rest falls apart.
Secession was neither democratic nor orderly,
More orderly than the US departure from the United Kingdom.
It was also as Democratic as was necessary.
and eventually the secessionists already declared war on the US: not what respectable US citizens usually do.
Well sure, after Lincoln called for an army to march into their capital and subdue them. Some people take awhile to get the hint, but eventually they catch on that people want to hurt them.
As for the master-slave thing. People "rebel" when they think they are oppressed
Which only occurs when one side has power and the other side is feeling the whip. When they are of equal status, they can simply depart like gentlemen.
Diogenes thinks they were being oppressed.
Exploited, not necessarily oppressed. They were paying the bills, and getting mostly squat in return for the money they pumped into the Government.
Seward might not have won. He would have lost Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, and California.
Would have still likely avoided a war.
If Democrats had run a single candidate against him, they could conceivably have beaten him, but secessionists didn't want to win. They wanted an excuse to secede.
You think their poor political planning is actually a cunning master plan to secede? Even if it were, what is wrong with letting them leave? By what authority does anyone claim to have the right to prevent states in a nation founded upon the principle of secession, from leaving?
Why should anyone be forced to associate with people whom they no longer wish to associate?
And assuming that Seward did win, what would he have done differently from Lincoln?
What could he have done worse?
I’m not going to let you drag me into your Pearl Harbor chaos.
I would say, rather, by early April both Seward & Lincoln thought resupplying Fort Sumter realistically might result in a Confederate attack, or it might not, but the alternative was abject surrender and neither could accept that, politically, if for no other reasons.
I suspect Lincoln understood just as well as Jefferson Davis did that any Union response to battle at Fort Sumter, no matter how minor, would instantly flip Virginia from Union to Confederate.
So Lincoln must therefore have believed Virginia was effectively lost anyway and any conceivable alternatives would produce even worse results.
Plus he thought the Fox mission had a good chance of success which would purchase several more months to deal with other issues.
If by early April Seward's views still significantly differed from Lincoln's, we don't know of it.
Just my opinions...
So what then were those armies doing invading the South? I suppose you are sorta right. They obviously weren't forcing the US Constitution on them, because they were breaking all sorts of Constitutional requirements by their actions, so I guess they were just enforcing diktats or something.
Those rights were then restored after loyalty was reconfirmed through either pledges or pardons.
And after they had been forced to "vote" for things they would never have approved without a gun in their back.
Look, I can understand gun-in-the-back power, but let us not pretend it's "democratic" or that it represents "consent", or that it is even slightly constitutional.
Let us call it what it is. Dictatorship.
Puppets on strings pulled by the ruler in Washington. That's what they were at that point. No free will. Just obedience.
But the Constitution was never intended as a suicide pact which must self destruct whenever clever legal minds like DiogenesLamp can poke enough holes in it.
I thought the "Constitution was never intended as a suicide pact" argument was one the Southerners put forth. It was certainly suicide for the sovereignty they had in 1776.
Or if they had been more careful. You want to tag the Confederates with a cannon loading accident which occurred after all hostilities had ceased. Disingenuous that.
And i'm not going to get dragged into your Pearl Harbor chaos. I responded to your silly argument many moons ago, and I don't see any need to give it any consideration now.
When does that happen in real world politics? Secession movement start out with a sense of grievance that can become ulcerous. You of all people ought to know that. And when feelings of grievance become intense enough, people don't "depart like gentlemen."
Sometimes, when nothing is at stake, one party may let the other go, as happened in the later days of the British Empire. But even that was accompanied by much rancor in the newly independent states. When things of value are at stake, things get even uglier.
Exploited, not necessarily oppressed. They were paying the bills, and getting mostly squat in return for the money they pumped into the Government.
1) Same difference. 2) Not true.
Me: Seward might not have won. He would have lost Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, and California.
Diogenes: Would have still likely avoided a war.
If he lost the election, he wouldn't have much say in what happened afterwards.
Me: And assuming that Seward did win, what would he have done differently from Lincoln?
What could he have done worse?
He could have fecklessly dithered like Buchanan and let his underlings ship weapons South to be used against US troops. He could have surrendered forts and territory to the enemy and let the slavers take over the capital. And malcontents today would scourge him for that.
(5) Resolved, etc., That said commissioners be further instructed to present to the Government of the United States assurances of the sincere wish on the part of this Government to preserve the most friendly relations between the two Governments and the States comprising the same, and to settle, by peaceful negotiations all matters connected with the public property and the indebtedness of the Government of the United States existing before the withdrawal of any of the States of this Confederacy; and to this end said commissioners are hereby fully empowered to negotiate with the Government of the United States in reference to said matters, and to adjust the same upon principles of justice, equality, and right.
Officers of the Confederate government seized these ships? Tell us more.
Among those seizures were at least half a dozen Federal ships, especially revenue cutters.
Were they pestering people about paying revenue to the Fed Gov? If so, I could understand why they would put a stop to that. They had no jurisdiction and they were hassling the citizens.
Absurd, typical propaganda, a resupply mission is not an "invasion" regardless of how often you lie about it.
300 riflemen might be a small invasion, but most people would still consider it an invasion.
But at that time Confederates were already invading Union states like Maryland and Missouri.
Maryland might have been a Confederate state but for all of Lincoln's troops and Lincoln's threats. Missouri was a border state with outside interlopers trying to sway it one way or the other. I think it furnished troops for both sides in the war, as did Maryland, Kentucky and Tennessee, etc.
Porter sounds to me like a "loose canon" on the Powhattan.
DiogenesLamp: "It also doesn't make any sense how you can use your "entire force" if your plan is to stay safely out of range of the guns.
Perhaps you can explain what "force" would be employed in such a situation? "
I wouldn't read anything into the term "entire force" beyond the orders saying none of those ships were excused from duty if he needed them.
DiogenesLamp: "And how much attacking would that have required?
If you have read about the Confederate preparations you would know that those small boats would have been massacred.
They had floating bonfires in the channels, and mortars sighted in to rain shrapnel down on anything in the channel."
Impossible to say today what they did or didn't really have.
But the Doubleday/Fox/Lincoln plan was small boats under cover of darkness and maybe even fog, which should have reduced the threat from Confederate shore batteries by 90% or more.
What about "floating batteries"?
If they were close enough to Fort Sumter, they could be sunk by the fort's guns.
If they were far enough away to avoid Sumter's guns then they could be sunk by guns from the Union ships.
Or maybe simply harassed enough to let the resupply boats slip through unnoticed...
Point is, it was indeed a realistic plan but did require Major Anderson to hold out a few days longer, until conditions were favorable, and of course, that didn't happen.
It doesn't say "fugitive" and it doesn't say "slaves." It says anyone held to service by the laws of a state.
You may chose to interpret it very specifically and in a way that isn't actually written in there, but the gist of it is clearly that those who owe service by the laws of another state must be returned to the person to whom their labor is lawfully due.
Nobody, not even crazy Roger Taney himself, fantasized it referred to permanent residents in non-slave states.
I don't think it mentions "permanent", or "residents", or "non slave states." Those terms are not in there. I think it applies to any place where the US Constitution holds jurisdiction.
Look, if people don't want to be held to what is written, they shouldn't have agreed to it.
I don't think many courts accept the argument, "But Your Honor! That's not what I thought it meant!" The Judge will say "What is written in the contract is what will be applied. What you thought it meant is irrelevant."
Is that more of your god-like powers of declaratioin, or simply a weak, pathetic, unsupported-by-facts opinion??
It's more of not putting stuff in there that isn't written in there.
You didn't see the part about counterfeit tickets? You didn't see the part about dealing in political favors to get nomination support?
Rewarding supporters after the fact is one thing. Bribing public officials before the fact by offering them Jobs in an Administration is quite another.
Right, especially so long as the Court was dominated by leftists.
But I have already heard Democrats complaining about alleged conservative "judicial activism", and that was even before Kennedy retired.
So now with, we expect, a solid conservative majority, expect Democrats to complain to the rafters about how the Supreme Court is actively overturning laws Democrats worked so hard to put on the books.
Of course it's just nonsense, but when did that ever stop a good Democrat?
DegenerateLamp: “My country, wrong wrong wrong! Only I know what’s right!”
But recruiting more slaves-states into his new Confederacy had everything to do with why Jefferson Davis decided to start war at Forts Sumter and/or Pickens.
Surely by now you understand that, right?
When states exercise their power to leave and reassume their sovereignty, it isn't "rebellion." Again, Salmon P. Chase. "Secession isn't Rebellion."
And Lincoln never "invaded" until long after Confederates declared and began waging war against the United States.
Anderson invaded Sumter in December of 1860. The property ceased to be that of the US government when South Carolina voted to secede. Lincoln also sent a force of riflemen to strengthen his garrison in April of 1861.
A fake quote with no provenance at best taken out of context and merely expressing the basic idea that government, like everybody else, must concern itself with its income.
I have actually found what I regarded as a pretty good source for that. Of course I have forgotten where I put it, but I may run across it again.
But the point here is that the vast bulk of the Federal "income" was the consequence of the Southern trade routed through New York. If the South left and established it's own trade while cutting out New York, Washington would be revenue decimated.
The fact is Lincoln's government found plenty enough revenues to wage & win the Civil War, and his concern for such matters is entirely appropriate.
Bonds, Wealthy industrialists, Forced monopoly on trade, inflation, and all sorts of borrowing.
Without the blockade of ships preventing the South from trading with Europe, the North would have been economically devastated.
Rewarding supporters after the fact is one thing. Bribing public officials before the fact by offering them Jobs in an Administration is quite another.
Who's naive now?
That happened all the time with the convention system.
Now that primaries make the difference, the offers are much larger and made to whole classes of the population.
P.S. I like how sometimes it's "all about money" and sometimes it's only about money with the people Diogenes doesn't like.
Cart before horse is not the legal process in this nation. Horse first, then cart.
Congress makes law. Supreme Court applies law. No law creating a right to abortion, no right to abortion.
Respecting the wishes of a state that you should leave is "abject surrender"? I hope you never have any unwelcome house guests.
I suspect Lincoln understood just as well as Jefferson Davis did that any Union response to battle at Fort Sumter, no matter how minor, would instantly flip Virginia from Union to Confederate. So Lincoln must therefore have believed Virginia was effectively lost anyway and any conceivable alternatives would produce even worse results.
I've read an account of Virginia officials meeting with Lincoln to offer him the assurances that he sought regarding Virginia remaining in the Union if he removed the garrison from Sumter.
He responded to the effect of "Too D@mn late sir! You are too late!"
If by early April Seward's views still significantly differed from Lincoln's, we don't know of it.
One doesn't continue to disagree with the boss and stay employed for very long.
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