News-Record.com

Pete .. bring my pipe and saddle the horse. We're going to town to celebrate!

http://www.towncalleddobson.com/?p=1111

Lincoln was an exponentially greater constitutional usurper than Bush has been. Yet because history associates his name with "freeing" the slaves a nobility has been assigned elevating his character to the reverence of a Founding Father.

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union" --Abraham Lincoln, August 22, 1862

Great post! Thank you for reminding everyone.

Bill,
I always enjoy your letters!

*****************************
Hugh,
On another topic but one you and I have had many discussions upon, I thought you might find this of interest. Hope others will excuse this "off topic" discussion:

Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran, Officials Say
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: May 5, 2008
BAGHDAD — Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran, according to American interrogation reports that the United States has supplied to the Iraqi government.

An American official said the account of Hezbollah’s role was provided by four Shiite militia members who were captured in Iraq late last year and questioned separately.
The United States has long charged that the Iranians were training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran, which Iran has consistently denied, and there have been previous reports about Hezbollah operatives in Iraq.

But the Americans say the reports of Hezbollah’s role at the Iranian camp offer important details about Iranian assistance to the militias, including efforts Iran appears to be making to train the fighters in unobtrusive ways.

Material from the interrogations was given to the Iraqi government, along with other data about captured Iranian arms, before it sent a delegation to Tehran last week to discuss allegations of Iranian aid to militia groups.

It is not known if the delegation confronted its Iranian hosts with the information, or how the Iranians responded.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government announced Sunday that it would conduct its own inquiry into accusations of Iranian intervention in Iraq and document any interference.

“We have experienced in the past that Iran interfered and has special groups in Iraq, but Iran also had evidence that they were participating in positive ways in security,” Ali al-Dabbagh, a senior Iraqi government spokesman, said in an interview.

“We would like the Iranians to keep their commitment, the commitments they made in meetings with the prime minister and with other groups that have visited them,” he said. “They had made the promise that Iran would be playing a supportive role.”

There has been debate among experts about the extent to which Iran is responsible for instability in Iraq. But President Bush and other American officials, in public castigations of Iran, have said that Iran has been consistently meddlesome in Iraq and that the Iranians have long sought to arm and train Iraqi militias, which the American military has called “special groups.”

In a possible effort to be less obtrusive, it appears that Iran is now bringing small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants to camps in Iran, where they are taught how to do their own training, American officials say.

The militants then return to Iraq to teach comrades how to fire rockets and mortars, fight as snipers or assemble explosively formed penetrators, a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb made of Iranian components, according to American officials. The officials describe this approach as “training the trainers.”

The training, the Americans say, is carried out at several camps near Tehran that are overseen by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Command, and the instruction is carried out by militants from Hezbollah, which has long been supported by the Quds Force. American officials say the Hezbollah militants perform several important roles for the Iranians.

First, they say, the Iranians believe it is useful to have Arabs train fellow Arabs. Second, Hezbollah has considerable experience in planning operations and using weapons and explosives in Lebanon.

According to American officials, the four Shiite militants who provided the information on Hezbollah’s role were captured between last September and December after they had returned from training in Iran. They were questioned individually and provided similar accounts, the American officials said.

The captured men described themselves in the accounts as part of a class of 16 militants who crossed into Iran from southern Iraq and were taken to a camp near Tehran, where they studied in a classroom and in the field. Some had been in Iran several times as part of a program that American officials said was aimed at turning them into “master trainers” and which could last several years.

According to their interrogation reports, the militiamen believed that militants from other countries were also being trained at the camp, an impression based on hearing snippets of conversations in other dialects and languages. But the group was kept separate and was not allowed to mingle with others.

American officials say that they believe that similar classes have been arranged for other groups of Iraqi militants, but that the effort appears to be compartmentalized to ensure security.

****
Now, Hugh, take a look at this article and see how we are going down the same road again!! More cloak and dagger operations to start war with Iran?

http://www.prwatch.org/node/7294

"Thank you for reminding everyone." Reminding them of what? That it's your heritage. That the South took part in slavery. Or, that the South fought a war it could possibly not have won. This same stubborn attitude is the reason that wages in the South are the lowest in the country. And test scores, especially the SAT, mirror this 1860s mentality towards being lerned (sic) and progessive. Keep fighthing the Civil War. Eventually, the South will pull it out.

Wow, I really liked the part about those "perishing ...constitutional restraints on powers of the federal government." I guess calling the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the constitution which abolished slavery and, at least in theory, ensured that the states provide equal rights to all their citizens were a real drag from this county. LTE section bristles with the reactionary lot today.

I highly recommend the book "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men" as a balanced look at the War. The author suggested that an alternative way to free the slaves would have been to:
1. allow the Deep South to secede, meaning that they would no longer have votes in the US Senate and congress
2. without southern votes, the Fugitive Slave Act could have been repealed
3. with the FSAct repealed, slaves would only need to escape to the USA, not all the way to Canada--more slaves would have made it to freedom, making it more costly and difficult for slave owners to keep their slaves in the CSA and encouraging ever more slaves to make a run for it.

We will never know, of course, but might this course of action have freed more slaves sooner and with less bloodshed? The Underground Railroad would only have had to get folks across the Ohio River.

Lincoln- a flawed man that did great things. Great things being, of course, freeing the slaves. Whether this was ancillary to other goals isn't quite as important as the fact that he did do it. To me, anyway. I'm a flawed man, I wish I could do great things. Even accidentally.

If the "noble" Jefferson Davis had seized the opportunity to capture the moral high ground, perhaps history would have judged the 2 men differently.

Anyway, if anyone needs me, I'll be off celebrating my southern heritage with a straw hat, ragged overalls, a banjo, some moonshine (hope I don't go blind) and some roasted 'possum on a stick. Sans shoes, of course.

"...Reminding them of what? That it's your heritage. That the South took part in slavery..."

As I recall, it was not just the south that participated in slavery. Many Union generals owned slaves, including Ulysses S. Grant. Not forgetting, many countries in African still participate in selling their own people while every southerner born in the last 143 years has never personally owned a slave.

In addition to understanding Hugh's quote, everyone needs to realize that Lincoln, on the eve of the war, wanted to make slavery "irrevocable." 2/3 of Congress and three non-southern states tried to make it so. More non-southern states may well have ratified this constitutional amendment as well had war not broken out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_amendment

Conundrum points out, "That the South took part in slavery." So did the North.

Critical Thinker says, "I guess calling the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the constitution which abolished slavery and, at least in theory, ensured that the states provide equal rights to all their citizens were a real drag from this county."

Actually, Thinker, the 13th Amendment says that government may enslave people. All they have to do is convict someone of a crime, and then they may enslave them:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

That's great, huh?

Read up on the 14th Amendment. It wasn't a good thing. Prior to 14, the states were sovereign nations who were in a union for mutual defense. The 14th amendment turned that union into a single nation by saying that the people of the union were now citizens of the UNION, not just citizens of the respective states. This was one major step in creating the unbridled mega-state under which we suffer today.

I have no problem with number 15.

Justsomedude claims:

"Lincoln- a flawed man that did great things. Great things being, of course, freeing the slaves."

Great things such as starting a war that killed 620,000 people, lobbying to make slavery "irrevocable," suspending habeas corpus, destroying any newspaper who was the least bit critical of him, imprisoning hundreds if not thousands of innocent people on mere suspicion that they opposed him and/or the war, etc? Remember too about your claim of him freeing the slaves that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves held by people in "rebellion." He didn't free them because he felt sorry for them; he did it to wreck the southern economy. Why didn't he just include the entire union if he were such a great man?

John Wilkes Booth.

National Hero.

LC, I have no doubt that the decision to take out Iran was made 7 years ago.

The reasons proffered to the American public when this happens will be Iran's Islamic fundamentalist paramilitary meddling in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries. IMO, the Iraqi's will be the ones to fire the first shot or we'll open fire on one those Iranian speed boats that get to close to our ships in the gulf.

Orchestrated, planned to the "T" and supported by our President and military?--Yes.

Does that bother me?--No.

Here's how I see the scenario unfolding. Blitzkrieg invasion of the oil province around the NE gulf area. these extend inland for only 20 miles or so. Massive air and sea bombardment and spec ops on coastal missile batteries and naval facilities.

While we are securing the oil fields, airdrop troops and armor will seal off the passes from the mountains to the coastal plain.

There's no way Iran can reinforce from the north as the supply line would be hundreds of miles long and would bottleneck at the mountains separating the interior plains from the coast. We will have complete air superiority within a couple of days except for stingers.

Insurgency armed and supported among the young and educated in Tehran against the fundamentalist Mullah theocracy and their pawn army. Conscripts will likely desert and join the fight against the Mullahs.

Kurdish operations against the NW Iran territories.

Possible Spec Op deployment along mountain passes to the north of Tehran to cut off Iranian troop retreats.

Basic overall mayhem and destruction of any and all Iranian Army bases, depots, defensive installations.

Don't know the date, but it's coming.

I suspect Israel will take a few missile hits of nerve agents and chemicals. Israeli restraint will be the only thing that keeps Tehran from evaporating.

Great man, schmate man.

A man that did, what history considers, great things. We should all be so lucky to go down in history as such.

America is a great country. I love the United States of America and am glad that it was preserved. I believe that we are all better off with the union than without it, but I understand your points. I view this as a great thing.

I also know that the EP was a good piece of politiking at it's finest. It freed the slaves in the South, a region that he had no control over as it was in rebellion. The genius of this, however, is that with this decree, he gained the moral high ground. He turned an issue of states rights, tariffs, aggro v. industry into an issue of human rights and slavery. Pretty freakin' smart, if you ask me.

That the civil war did, in fact, have the direct result of ending slavery is rather important. Again, a man that accomplished something great.

Oh, and you forgot, AC, that Lincoln arrested the Gov and state Senate of Maryland as he suspected that they were going to suceed as well. He didn't relish the idea of DC being surrounded by hostiles, for some reason.

He did what he did to preserve the union that we all know and love today.

Justsomedude says:

"He did what he did to preserve the union that we all know and love today."

I don't love the union. I'm much worse off for it than I would be under a smaller, less powerful government.

As for saying that Lincoln was great for preserving the union, that's like saying that a husband who beats his wife to within an inch of her life to stop her talk of divorce did something great because he saved his marriage.

"The genius of this, however, is that with this decree, he gained the moral high ground."

So you're saying that if you're doing something evil and telling the truth about why you're doing it, your actions become moral if you just start to mislead people about why you're doing it.

I respected historian Shelby Foote’s perspective on the Civil War. He was a Southerner, but, he knew that the war was fought over slavery, and not this states’ rights nonsense. Here are some of his quotes on the South and the Civil War.

"The South has got some sins on its soul that it will never be able to get clear of. But so has the nation. And quite often the attempt to correct these sins leads into still greater sins through the method in which they were corrected. Slavery for instance. I don't suppose that sin will ever be removed from our souls."

"You can see some ugly things in the South, entirely aside from the racial thing, that's the ugliest of all. You see some real cruelty. And it comes from a particular regional kind of ignorance. It comes from a misplaced machismo like you're showing yourself a man if you hurt somebody. Those things are present in us as they are in other places, and maybe more present.”

"The American Civil War is a wonderful example of good coming out of evil, of strength coming out of suffering. The American Civil War was where this country became this country. The Revolution got us free of England, established us an independent nation, but the Civil War was the one that decided what kind of nation we were going to be. There were a lot of bad things that went along with a lot of good things. And it's that combination of different points of view that somehow found a way to get along with each other and learn from each other and contribute each in its way to the American character that has given us our strength.”

"By a paradox of having this dreadful thing in which we tried to tear each other to pieces, we wound up in the end with a Union that has been stronger than it was before the war started. That war settled a couple of things very strongly. One was the right to secede. That was settled. And the slavery issue was settled once and for all and probably could not have been settled any other way. There were things about that war that couldn't be settled apparently except by bloodshed."

"People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.”

With respect to Foote, slavery was an American institution. Harping on the last four years of southern slave owning vs. 70+ years for the country as a whole, including northern states, is disingenuous and deceptive to the reality that it was a fact of life for the entire country at one time, then slowly became socially unacceptable.

As equally as Lincoln used the slavery issue to "save" the union did the founding fathers do by excepting it from the "All men are created equal" declaration yet allowing it to remain lest some states not agree to sign on.

Does anybody remember The Confederate Air Force"? I joined this group as a child in about 1959 or so? Still have my membership card. "The south will rise, again" was the battle cry. The Dog's outa here.
Crime Dog

So you're saying that if you're doing something evil and telling the truth about why you're doing it, your actions become moral if you just start to mislead people about why you're doing it.

I'm not saying this at all. History has been saying it for years. Hence why Lincoln is viewed in such great terms. Like it or lump it, he brought about the preservation of the union and the end of slavery. History has judged him in that manner.

Ending slavery was the morally right thing to do. That is what he did. Ergo, he gained the moral high ground on this issue. Jeff Davis was the head of a government that wanted to continue to recognize the right of some peoples to hold others in forced bondage. He lost the moral high ground.

You have absolutely no way of knowing what your life would be like under the CSA. None whatsoever. Fragmented nation-states may not have been able to effectively stand up against fascism, nazism or communism. Or smaller nation states may decide periodically to resolve their differences not through the SCOTUS but by armed conflict. Balkans.

Or, life could be a utopia had the south won, as you seem to expect. World history is too complex for us to predict with any accuracy which would be "better". The rest of the world isn't static.

As it is, though, I'm rather pleased that the union was preserved. Warts and all, we still have the best thing going today. In my humble opinion, of course.

Lincoln won. Get over it.

Crime Dog, the Confederate Air-Force's name got PC'd out of existence.

They are now called the Commemorative Air Force.
http://www.commemorativeairforce.org/