Battle Lines

By Eddie Howell

As if the sickening movement to remove all traces of the Confederacy weren't already bad enough, now, “activists” want to change the name of USC's mascot, the horse Traveler, because its name is similar to that of Robert E. Lee's horse Traveller.

General Robert E. Lee on his horse Traveller

Of course, if its name is Traveler, that must mean it's an evil horse of hate and racism. Also, the horse's color happens to be white. This probably makes it doubly evil. Maybe it should be replaced by a colorful donkey to represent the Democrat Party. This whole business is now beyond idiotic. Again, another thing showing that colleges are becoming the stupidest places in America.

This anti-history movement is not only anti-Confederate, it is anti-American, and ultimately anti-human. Let's erase the parts of history we don't like. Well, I'm not fond of the growth of criminal gangs during Prohibition. Should I therefore advocate removal of all traces of Al Capone? He wasn't really a very nice guy. I'm not a fan of Woodrow Wilson. Can we expunge him from our history? He re-segregated the military and was a bully, a dictator, and an unapologetic racist. Oh, but wait, he was a Democrat. Of course it was Democrats who started and supported the KKK and opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But that was OK, because they were Democrats.

George Orwell's 1984 oppressor, Big Brother, believed that whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past. Revising history is a popular tool of dictators.

A major point I'm trying to make is that taking down Confederate monuments will do nothing to stop racism, and could very well provoke more. It's an insult to the people of the South whose ancestors fought for a cause they believed in, which encompassed more than slavery. Very few, a very tiny minority, today, believe that slavery was OK or that white supremacy is a good thing. The slavery issue was settled at great cost and so should no longer be an issue. The fact that it existed should not be hidden, however. The Orwellian movement to remove Confederate reminders, whether monuments or things named after Confederate figures smacks of the Soviets' actions to remove disliked persons from the historical record, as though they never existed. It is not substantially different from Big Brother's memory hole in 1984.

The whole business is a threat to our constitutional rights of free speech and free expression, and is sometimes a provocation to violence. As reprehensible as the neo-Nazis and KKK are, they are a very tiny minority in America. Whatever threat they might represent can readily be countered by law enforcement. But the left isn't satisfied unless they can demean America and stir up needless controversy. The masked antifa thugs are exactly that – thugs – like Mussolini's black shirts or Hitler's brown shirts. They themselves are about as fascist as you can get. Their purpose is to bully and harass and beat, and possibly murder people and destroy property in the name of – what? They are definitely no better than any of their opponents. Any attempt to intellectually defend or justify what they do is actually laughable.

Of course, race hustlers like Black Lives Matter and Al Sharpton want to shake down anyone they can over false accusations and threats. And many legitimate conservative organizations are labeled by the despicable Southern Poverty Law Center as “hate groups,” while few organizations on their list are more hateful than they.

The globalists pulling the strings of this sorry business may find that America is not Europe. We are serious about freedom and constitutional rights. We care about our heritage. We regret slavery. We're against racism and white (or any other racial) supremacy. We don't hate Jews or any other minority. We don't, as a people, condone violence in the streets. But Americans have been and are willing to fight against tyranny, against globalism, and against socialism – and actual fascism (a form of socialism). Americans have generally been quiet about these abuses, but we won't be pushed too far. The election of Donald Trump and the rejection of Hillary Clinton should demonstrate that there is a limit to how much we will take from the adversaries of freedom or the corrupt Swamp.

Also, no one should rejoice over Mr. Trump's troubles. He will be fine. His voters still support him, and his opponents will lose support among the American people because of their hysterical hatred of the president and their disdain for his supporters, and America in general.

PCers in a Frenzy: The Confederate Flag Flap

By Eddie Howell

Confederate battle flag

It's remarkable that the horrible shootings in Charleston, SC, by a demented lunatic are being used as an excuse for the PC police to pursue their worse-than-worthless agenda, i.e., cram their thuggish, bullying nonsense down everyone's throat. Now the moronic left is trying to remove all traces of the Confederacy from our history, because they find it unpleasant. Maybe they like the mottos in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, “Most historical facts are unpleasant,” and Henry Ford's quote “History is bunk,” used by the authorities to discourage people from inquiring into the past.

The brainless attempt to eradicate the Confederate flag is one of their latest efforts, and now they have the Supreme Court's lawless decision to legalize gay marriage everywhere to work with as well, plus, of course, Donald Trump's comments about Mexican immigrants, which may have lacked tact, but not truth.

Gen. Robert E. Lee

Common sense is becoming rarer and rarer with these self-righteous, sanctimonious ninnies, whose main purpose in life seems to be just to be offended and scream out at things (e.g., the Confederate flag) which have nothing to do with what they're supposedly protesting (e.g., the shootings in SC by a deranged person). That flag has been around for a century and a half following the Union victory in the Civil War. All of a sudden, because of some crazy man's murder spree, now we're supposed to rewrite history and cleanse it of many important facts.

Lt. Gen, "Stonewall" Jackson

I'm not a racist, but I am a Southerner, and, like it or not, that flag represents things greater than the sins of slavery and racism. It calls to memory the thousands who fought and died for their homeland. It helps us remember men like Robert E. Lee, a great and honorable man who only reluctantly led the rebel forces, after concluding that it was his moral duty to do so; Lieutenant General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, brilliant commander, and other brave Confederate fighters who felt that it was worth putting their lives on the line to defend their homes. Yes, the South was wrong about slavery, and the Civil War settled the issue at great cost. Because the war was fought on American soil, unlike the World Wars, and involved Americans fighting each other, sometimes brother against brother, it left an emotional residue that was very slow to recede, and is still around today.

But the South has, to very great extent, grown away from racism, albeit with some unpleasant incentives (Reconstruction, Supreme Court rulings, National Guard deployments, etc.), but grow it has, and, especially since the end of legal segregation, the great majority of Southerners accept the fact that people of all races share equally in legal rights, and merit respectful treatment.

Removal of the Confederate flag brings to mind George Orwell's novel 1984, and the memory hole which was the destination of historical documentation to be removed and never seen again. The Soviets practiced their own version of this, revising history books and altering photographs to try to wipe out the memory of people or events they didn't like, as though they never existed.

The "General Lee" from "The Dukes of Hazzard"

Today, we have some genius ordering that “The Dukes of Hazzard” be taken off the TV Land channel. John Schneider and others are right in their criticism. They can do what they want with their network. The market will respond, “Dukes” will likely find another TV home, and TV Land's ratings will be affected. But it was a dumb decision, helping nothing.

Now Al Sharpton wants the military to remove all traces of the Confederacy. How he can be taken seriously any more, given his track record, is beyond me. He owes millions in taxes, but has access to the White House of President Obama, our Deceiver-in-Chief. What Sharpton asks is ridiculous on its face, and to comply would take extremely stupid, un-American, and unconstitutional orders. We may hope our generals have better sense, but I'm not so sure about Obama.

This July Fourth, let's celebrate and exercise our freedom. We're going to have to defend it against the leftists.

Related articles

• The Strange Demise of the Confederate Flag
• National Cathedral In The Crosshairs

Needed: Effective Opposition to the Democrats by the GOP

President and Mrs. Obama

By Eddie Howell

Ever-increasingly for the last several years, it has become evident that people who truly cannot be trusted with political power have been the ones in charge. Barack Obama has shown himself to be the communist-mentored socialist-fascist that he actually is, as well as, it seems, a race-baiting hate monger not much different from his “spiritual” mentor “Rev.” Jeremiah Wright. As a Christian, the president is a strange specimen indeed. If all this weren't enough, he has actively worked to undermine the American economy with his crackpot schemes on “climate change” (such as the failed cap and trade bill, and now the evil new EPA regulations), weird financial regulations that keep “too-big-to-fail” in place while making things tougher on smaller banks.

His administration has seen a mind-boggling increase in public debt (which can never be paid) and annual deficits. He has been a far bigger promise breaker and liar than Bill Clinton, which is really saying something. (“If you like your health-care plan you can keep your plan,” just for starters.)

Jonathan Gruber should be thanked for shedding some light on the thinking of the administration during the development of Obamacare: it was designed to be sold to the “stupid” American people, who were smart enough to recognize that it was not a good plan, and mostly did not support it. Yet they suffered from it in millions of cases by receiving a severe downgrade of their insurance coverage and are set to receive even more insulting and injurious blows from it as time goes on.

Obama presided over an IRS that deliberately went after his political enemies. His claims of ignorance are not believable. He fiddled while the American outpost in Benghazi burned. Nor did his secretary of state Ms. Clinton bother to respond to repeated requests for security help there. And why was Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi on September 11 anyway? That episode in itself should have resulted in deep apologies and major resignations, but the administration basically blew it off, and lied to the families of the dead Americans that some cockamamie video was responsible, then went after the producer of the video with a vengeance.

Political careers should have ended over the items mentioned above. Obama and his cronies have shown themselves unfit to serve in public office. And so far, I haven't even mentioned Michelle Obama's school lunch disasters, by which it's hard not to think of her as just mean. And her endless vacations. I have suggested before that the president and his family be budgeted for about a billion dollars annually for vacations in the hope that they would stay out of the country more of the time.

* * *

Meanwhile, the GOP has some troubles of its own. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out, the leadership doesn't like their base. Just when Republicans, fresh from strong mid-term election victories, need to be at their best, the leaders are afraid that something conservative might happen if the dissenters get their way and that would, well, mess up some things for the cocktail-circuit “leaders.” Apparently, most of the House members didn't want to upset the apple cart, so they were contented to support Speaker John Boehner. I would prefer to see Louie Gohmert as speaker. But all that is minor stuff in the big picture compared to the disaster the Democrats have foisted upon us.

Patrick Buchanan points out that Democrats have plenty to worry about regarding their people, some of whom, including the president, to the chagrin of most Democratic voters, miss few opportunities to stir up racial turmoil, and who regard “Rev.” Al Sharpton as a guiding light on racial matters. Most Americans, as Buchanan says, have sided with the police (even more so after two officers were murdered in New York) and against the rioters whose “protests” were often far from “peaceful,” and against DeBlasio, Sharpton, etc.*

So, except for the things mentioned here and some others, like ISIS terrorists, Iranian leaders playing Obama for a sucker in the worst way, the mistreatment of Israel, and a good many other issues, things aren't too bad. Republicans have an opportunity to show some backbone and some leadership in Washington if they so choose. I hope they have the courage to be the opposition party they're supposed to be.

*Paragraph updated 01/13/15. Highlighted portion was corrected. Previously, it read as though I was painting Democrats in general as race hustlers, which, of course, they are not. The leaders who are represent a problem for the party.