Friday, June 23, 2006

This is kinda creepy

Follow the links at Pink Flamingo. Reagan would be spinning in his grave.

34 comments:

buddy larsen said...

I hgavcen't felt good about being a hard conservative ever since it dawned on me I didn't like the tone of the "heritage" talk.

Not that it's wrong, just that my own heritage here on the border is closer to the Latinos who fought for Texas against Santa Anna than it is to the Englishmen who stepped onto Plymouth Rock. I know, I know, the "heritage" tone isn't directed against anyone but illegal aliens. I know all that. Still, the sudden exuberent hysterics over a way-of-life older than the nation itself is jarring and perplexing. I can't help but blame the magnet of freebies Uncle Sam's liberals have built up over here on our side, and I can't help but think of the perversity of tempting the desperate and then hating them that takes the dare.

Unknown said...

Buddy:

I knowexactly what you mean. It is just kind of an uncomfortable feeling.

I think the thing that sent me over the edge was when I started hearing that Bush was supposed to have made some secret deal with Fox to turn the southwest over to Mexico and Malkin ran some posts about Bush deliberately screwing America etc and I thought how is this different from no blood for oil and Moore's 9/11 conspiracies? It is one thing to say you disagree with a policy, it is another to accuse the president [of your own party] of treason for not saying how high when you say jump.

Like Dubai and all that. Really, did Malkin and the crew really think Bush would sell ports to terrorists?

There is something else here and I don't like it, not at all.

I mean come on, when Tancredo starts screaming at Mike Pence [R,In] for not being firm enough in the battle against amnesty something is amiss. Pence is a very solid conservative.

buddy larsen said...

yep--something is a little "off" somewhere. I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's us, maybe we don't get it.

Luther said...

Nah, you get it Buddy. We are all naturally empathic. Grown to root for the common man. Way before 1917. Now where split's that difference? At base, we all believe in our constitution, we just have trouble in knowing who's in, and who's out. And we have to make that decision. Hurt as it does.

Coisty

Saw your post(s) as I previewed mine. First impressions, harsh. Will read again and reevaluate. Though I think my statement stands.

My main beef may well be that, I have seen no one here argue for "open borders."

vnjagvet said...

Wow:

Whodathunkit? My almost 100% Pennsylvania German forbears got to the Colonies between 1700-1720. A little late for Coisty, it would appear.

One of the others, a jew, got to Philadelphia in 1745.

Hence my word verification jwbooy.

Luther said...

Perfect, vnjagvet.

Syl said...

It proves that political correctness doesn't work. ;)

Hasn't changed people's minds one teeny tiny wee wittle bit.

And, Coisty, you don't get America. It's not that 'common heritage' thang and it's not about ethnicity, race, or even culture. America is built on an IDEA that we the people, whoever we are, are the government and the government is accountable to us. We can believe what we want, say what we want, and be what we want. No matter who we are.

I think we all need to be reminded of that sometimes. If America became 60% Chinese and 40% Hispanic, it would still be America!

Unknown said...

coisty:

Like I am going to read all that. Heard it before. over and over and over and over and over again.


On one side of my family the people were Cherokee and English and Irish. I had ancestors who walked the Trail of Tears, fought in the Revolution and War of 1812 and fought on the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War. None of them came over here and registered to pass anyone's heritage test. None of them would be considered "legal" by today's standards, except maybe the Indians and look what happened to them.

On the other side of my family was woman of dubios ethnic and racial background named Jemima who died on the prairie and the Germans who got off the boat in the 1850's and went to work without asking anyone's permission and who then went to fight for the Union in the Kansas Cavalry.

Now these people are America. They do not share the same race or ethnic background, but somehow they are the kind of people who took a risk and decided to make a new country based on the concept of liberty and oppurtunity.

I am not promoting open borders, I have never promoted open borders, but so far the only thing the hardliners have accomplished is attacking Bush, attacking anyone who disagrees with them and passing no bill, no border secuity, nothing. Just one big fat zero. In fact open borders is what they have given us because they refuse to compromise. Bush inherited this problem he did not create and he is the first presdient in history to actually consider a wall on our southern border.

Which makes me wonder if Tancredo troopers are really after something else here other than border security. Because if that was what they wanted, they could have gone to conference and come up with something that provides border security, a guest worker program, some sort of normalization for at least some of the folks here, increased detention centers and courts to process and deport more people and overall reform to a broken system..but noooo, they prefer to cherry pick provisions out of the Senate bill, mischaracterize them and use that as an excuse to not even attempt a compromise. Such as complaining that immigrant workers work too cheap and then when the Senate puts in a provision that these folks have to be paid the prevailing wage the hardliners turn that into a complaint that the Senate Bill says we have to pay illegals more than legals. That is stupid and dishonest. As far as I am concerned they can go to Conference and strip all that out of the bill if they do not like it, fine with me, but this constant bitching for no reason other than promoting themselves for the upcoming elections and dragging the country through a devisive battle that results in no bill, well that is not right.

That makes me doubt their motives. And I wonder how many Americans know that Gilchrist of the Minute Men has been associated with neo nazi groups. Speaking of America and what it is and is not America, the last time Pat Buchanan ran for office he got less than 1% of the vote. It seems the vast majority of Americans do not feel comfortable with antisemitic racist xenophobic isolationists. And this is the odor I am getting from some of these folks.

And by the way if you are so worried about open borders maybe you should be dealing with your own in Canada. Glass houses and all that.

Unknown said...

Hey buddy, bet it was news to you that you were an Anglo hating open border kind of guy.

buddy larsen said...

Right you are, Terrye--Coisty seems to know me better than I know myself.

I understand what he's worried about--the vision of America turning into some tribal balkanized perpetual petite civil war Bronze Age charnel house, is pretty grim indeed.

Which is of course precisely *why* he (and others who concur with him) ought to be a little careful with the "blood & soil" argument. It leads ultimately to the very thing they fear. Unless of course somewhere along the line someone--a charismatic of some sort--rises up and cleanses the place of all the ethnics.

buddy larsen said...

Great-grampaw Larsen was a scandahoovian sailor who jumped ship in the port of Houston and became a rice farmer in Eagle Lake, Texas. An Illegal. The north Louisiana Gills on mom's side are Scots/Irish with a Cherokee bride (you and me is cousins, Terrye) and several Confederate soldiers (including a doc in General Lee's Medical Corp).

So, whatever this pristine, art-deco, single unified-field-theory America is, my people have been its enemy on the field of battle, already, several times, and my dad flew a B-17 (and was shot down and held POW) against vnjagvet's people (a few of whom were also trying to kill-off another branch of vnjagvet's people).

Point--this joint is a ummm, "melting pot".

That reminded, there is no room for criminals among any of these groups. Celebrating the melting pot seems to inspire some to cut and paste police blotters. Point taken, but--please--let's take the right point.

buddy larsen said...

GWB gets excoriated on his Texan-ness, but he is what he is--and Texas--being free lo these many years of a social-fabric-ripping Sacramento statehouse (apologies to the Californians, but...), and having been an independent nation after wresting free of Mexico, and having later joined the USA just in time to secede from it and then lose a war to it, all rolled together, just can't help but be a little less absolute about the immigration laws as written by eastern seaboarders in the interest of the Mayflower America, in the idea that the Mayflower America is the only America.

All that said, the story of the 1776 Revolution, and the Founders, and the Constitution, is so powerful that everyone--anyone--will always, forever, want to be part of it.

If only they will be taught it.

Unknown said...

buddy:

I remember reading years ago about the Texas firsters. I think they are still down there, demanding their sovereignty.

Yes, the criminals can go, God knows we have enough of them. In fact some of them are even in Congress.

Btw, my ancestor, last name of Wilson, died at the battle of Appomatax. he followed Lee for all those years and died in the last battle of the war. He left a widow and nine children.

buddy larsen said...

...a widow and nine children destined to live the next decade under an onerous occupation known as Reconstruction. And history being that which belongs to the victors, an ordeal the widow and nine children must've deserved.

Like what Clint Eastwood told Gene Hackman (in The Unforgiven), as he was about to kill him and Hackman was pleading that he didn't 'deserve to die': "Deserve's got nothin to do with it".

Unknown said...

buddy:

Yeah, life ain't fair. I thought that was a good movie. How can you go wrong with Clin Eastwood and Gene Hackman?

The rebel Wilson had come home early in the spring of 1864 on furlough. He was home in Alabama long enough to help get the crops in and get his wife pregnant.

His oldest son was 14 and years later as he lay dying my grandmother would remember hearing him say that he could recall his father in his butternut uniform walking off under the poplars for the last time. As he was leaving he turned and told his son, take care of the family..you are a man now.

Years later that boy would cut his foot with an axe while splitting wood and get blood poisoning, they cut off the foot and the poison spread so they cut off the leg to the knee and then to the thigh and that was all they could do. So he lay dying and remembering and he wanted to tell my grandmother who was a little girl at the time what her great grandad had said to him the last time he saw him. It makes you wonder what your last thougths might be.

buddy larsen said...

Oh, Lord, the copious volumes of sadness that still permeate the backwaters of the Old South. One thing to lose everything, another to lose everything in defeat. As a kid spending summers with the grandparents in Pleasant Hill, Louisiana, where a great battle had been fought, I remember well the old folks' stories of those last farewells.

Unknown said...

Buddy:

Sabine Parish.

The folks of the south did not lack in courage. I think that defeat helped create some great writers.

People think there is hatred today, or divided politics today. My God, the fact that the country was able to come back together at all was amazing. But if you look at the years following the Civil War, most of those folks in the thick of it had to pass away before things could really change.

We think VietNam left a scar, imagine Gettysburg, Vicksburg, the Battle of the Wilderness, Andersonville and Antietam.

vnjagvet said...

Regarding the criminals:

In the early eighteenth century, many of Georgia's early settlers were criminals "transported" from England. They landed in Savannah.

At the other end of the world, Australia was being settled by the same class of characters.

vnjagvet said...

So much for Anglo-American purity.

buddy larsen said...

around Memorial Day, I was reading about Sgt. Alvin York, WWI hero. seems both he and the mrs. lost grandparents, in the Tennesse hills near the West Virginia border, to murderers set off by hard-feelings from the Civil War.

"So much for Anglo-American purity."

Unknown said...

Well my several greats back granmother was an Indian who married a white man and had 13 children with him. Andrew jackson still forced her to walk from the Smokey Mountains to Oklahoma. She and the rest of the clan went back east later and she hid in the house and kept herself covered for the rest of her life so that people would not see her and know she was Indian.

Now that was criminal.

But then again I had another ancestor who took a 22 to the fields in case of roving Comanches.

buddy larsen said...

I feel bad for the Indians, but it's pretty clear that keeping the western hemisphere as an open hunting ground with a near-zero population-density, was never a realistic hope.

Unknown said...

buddy:

No it was not. Sooner or later it was gonna change.

Some people say that the Indians were dying out. but how can we know that?

buddy larsen said...

It's really mind-boggling, when you think about it, how little time has passed since actual stone-age tribes were living in a state of nature all over this country. Just two lifetimes back, the Plains Indians were running free in the Wild West.

buddy larsen said...

If I had one wish--besides world peace natch--it'd be to've been borned a hundred years earlier.

Luther said...

Terrye

I have not done the research necessary to substantiate what I am about to say;

But... I have a little bit of old history laying around myself. It was a different world, a different mindset, just totally different than what we imagine today.

From my meager readings, AJ thought he was doing what was best, for all concerned. He was wrong judging by our modern context.

But... in the end, I do believe his major motivation was the continuation of the "United States." I just can not hold that as bad.

Now-a-days that is damn near blasphemy.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that without him and his like we would be living in a much different world. It might be better. it might be worse. But, ultimately, it doesn't matter, we are where we are.

Just saying, he was not evil.

buddy larsen said...

Luther, "deserve" had nothing to with it. The Trail of Tears was for them that couldn't put the other to walking it.

Decry it all we want, (that too is part of human nature).

Like Black Elk, and Chief Joseph, and Sitting Bull all said, in one way or another, "white man's medicine is stronger than ours".

Luther said...

Buddy, perhaps I misread, but I don't think I used the term "deserved" anywhere.

Yes, I know the "trail of tears" was a result of force. But I believe it was seen by AJ as being inevitable. And was put into place by him (deluded or not) in an attempt to cause less misery, not more. I may be wrong.

And, yes, there were 'wise' men on both sides of the equation back then.

Perhaps I am prejudiced, my father's middle name was Jackson, I went to Andrew Jackson high school in Jacksonville. Ah hell the ID thieves will be after me now. But nonetheless, we are where we are. To denigrate where we came from, makes us less. I don't think that is fair. Last time I checked there was no one who could control the inevitability of destiny. Wherever that may lie.

buddy larsen said...

Luther, "deserve" is just the universal subtext, unavoidably, when regarding history, what was right, what wasn't. Andy Jackson is the great hero of New Orleans, Jackson Square in the French Quarter is the center of the city--I grew up near there, in Lafayette, soaking up the great lore about how he whipped the British in the Battle of New Orleans. He is for sure an asmerican hero. But we still have to cry over the Trail of Tears because, for whatever reason it happened, it was a great sadness and hardship upon the Cherokee. These are all true things that don't co-exist that easily in the mind, but still must, because they are what they are. We shouldn't denigrate the past, I agree with you 100%.

Luther said...

Thanks Buddy.

Yes, there are events which we can regret, but there is no changing history. We just have to live with what is, and carry on in the spirit of freedom. Sorry for getting pedantic, but I am, after all, just a simple man.

buddy larsen said...

--never read a post of yours yet that was anything but interesting and novel, and way non-pedantic.

Unknown said...

Luther:

I agree. It was the way it was. It took a lot of courage to settle thiscountry and that should not be forgotten.

buddy larsen said...

Climb in that Conestoga and rattle off into the Great Unknown, with wife and children to protect and nothing but your two hands and a Winchester between you and disaster?

(word verifier--kid u not--"rxotxan")

Luther said...

Yeah Buddy, them were different days. And they just did it, because..well it had to be done, that's why. Manifest Destiny and all that. Where would the world be now, without those brave men and women.

rox an eh! lol