Copperheads
Mark Steyn has a very good piece over at one of America's more conservative papers the Chicago Sun Times (for those of you from the area - quite a reversal, eh?).
If the present Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have mustered the will to win World War II or, come to that, the Revolutionary War. There would be no America. You'd be part of a Greater Canada, with Queen Elizabeth on your coins and government health care.What Steyn leaves out is the history of the Democratic Party when it comes to slavery and the Civil War. Or the War of Southern Stupidity if you prefer.
Copperheads were Democrats who wanted to make a deal with the South and end the endless cost and dying.
Fortunately we had a few good Generals in the field (Grant, Sherman, hell even Meade) and one traitorous Democrat General - McClellan. Well he wasn't a traitor in a legal sense. But, certainly in a moral sense.
There is a reason that the South was Democrat for over one hundred years after the War. There is a reason that most of the KKK resides in the Democrat Party. There is a reason Robert Byrd is in the Senate and David Duke is out on his ear.
Well this time the Democrats couldn't find an acceptable general. So we will have to make do with a Navy Lt. Who served in the war.
Let us look at the Copperheads (Peace Democrats) they hated black equality. Funny, huh?
The Copperheads believed that:
...the Republicans had provoked the South into secession; that the Republicans were waging the war in order to establish their own domination, suppress civil and states rights, and impose "racial equality"; and that military means had failed and would never restore the Union.Things haven't changed much have they? One point: they now adopt racial equality while still opposing religious equality. They hate Conservative Christians and all pro-Israeli Jews.
As was true of the Democratic party as a whole, the influence of Peace Democrats varied with the fortunes of war. When things were going badly for the Union on the battlefield, larger numbers of people were willing to entertain the notion of making peace with the Confederacy. When things were going well, Peace Democrats could more easily be dismissed as defeatists. But no matter how the war progressed, Peace Democrats constantly had to defend themselves against charges of disloyalty. Revelations that a few had ties with secret organizations such as the Knights of the Golden Circle helped smear the rest.You know you can learn a lot by studying history. And what do we learn:
The most prominent Copperhead leader was Clement L. Valladigham of Ohio, who headed the secret antiwar organization known as the Sons of Liberty. At the Democratic convention of 1864, where the influence of Peace Democrats reached its high point, Vallandigham persuaded the party to adopt a platform branding the war a failure, and some extreme Copperheads plotted armed uprisings. However, the Democratic presidential candidate, George B. McClellan, repudiated the Vallandigham platform, victories by Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman and Phillip H. Sheridan assured Lincoln's reelection, and the plots came to nothing.
With the conclusion of the war in 1865 the Peace Democrats were thoroughly discredited. Most Northerners believed, not without reason, that Peace Democrats had prolonged war by encouraging the South to continue fighting in the hope that the North would abandon the struggle. [bold by ed.]
The Democrats are reverting to form. Except this time overt prejudice (except for Conservative Christians and all Zionist Jews) is out. We instead see the soft bigotry of low expectations on a whole range of issues.
You know: blacks can't compete so they need affirmative action. The wogs are incapable of democracy, so let us install a strong man to our liking and have done with it. People are not smart enough to deal with their own every day medical needs; what we need is total insurance and government control, risk free. We should not be allowed to defend ourselves. The list is endless.
Well any way the Copperheads need to be soundly defeated. Because by giving our enemies hope they are prolonging the war.
Vote Bush.
And back to Steyn just to prove my point with a sledge hammer:
One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.
Over at Winds of Change there is a nice piece dealing with whose house the bigots are living in. Especially the comments.
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03:21z 02 Nov 2004
Wretchard has done a nice piece on this theme. Have a look.
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4 comments:
Excellent post! I have a friend who talks about the effects of a "lust for peace," and how it has led many Israelis to mistakenly the hope that land can be traded for it. There are some large-scale social pathologies that can only be remedied by defeat.
I don't think it's useful to suggest that either of the two major parties are today the same as they were fifty years ago or one hundred fifty. I think it's pretty clear that between, say, 1950 and now some sort of freaky friday swap happened and on many issues they switched bodies. Yes, the Democrats were once the party of the Klan and racism: that is no longer their purview. Yes Republicans were once the party of fiscal discipline: that is no longer their purview.
The reality is that the Republicans were the staunch isolationists during the first half of the 1900's, and it was the Democrats who brought us into WWII. That is a fact that's easy to remember because Republicans often beat them over the head with "It's always a Democrat that gets us into war" then they go on to list the litany of Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, etc. I don't know if that refutes Mark Steyn's theory but it certainly calls into question the relevance of his point.
The past few years have seen the rise of the neocon wing of the Republican party with its emphasis on big government, profligate spending, interventionist policies, use of religious values as a litmus test, and anti-libertarian positions. To survive by defining themselves as an opposition party, we are seeing a Democratic platform that talks of balancing the budget, highlights civil liberties and religious tolerance, keeping taxes low for the middle class, and other issues that were the antithesis of the Democratic party over the last century and a half.
In short: today's Democrats are yesterday's Republicans, broadly speaking.
Learning from history is great, but the lessons need to be applied correctly.
Windhorse
War for southern stupidity? How classy. Learn your history, buddy boy. I bet you'd be more of a southern sympathizer than you realize. (that is, if you are anti-big government, believe in states rights, and find the Declaration of Independence of any value) The war had little to do with slavery. Look it up, its true.
Democrats are for religious tolerance? For everybody BUT Christians. They are responsible for removing teh Christian God from every public aspect they can.
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