Karl Rove on the O’Reilly Factor says it is wrong to compare Obama to Jimmy Carter’s failed presidency. Rove says a more apt comparison is James Buchanan. In over his head, the 15th President’s leadership vanished as the nation fell to pieces all around him. Perhaps Jimmy Carter will catch a break.
PJ Media appreciates your comments that abide by the following guidelines:
1. Avoid profanities or foul language unless it is contained in a necessary quote or is relevant to the comment.
2. Stay on topic.
3. Disagree, but avoid ad hominem attacks.
4. Threats are treated seriously and reported to law enforcement.
5. Spam and advertising are not permitted in the comments area.
These guidelines are very general and cannot cover every possible situation. Please don't assume that PJ Media management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment. We reserve the right to filter or delete comments or to deny posting privileges entirely at our discretion. Please note that comments are reviewed by the editorial staff and may not be posted immediately. If you feel your comment was filtered inappropriately, please email us at story@pjmedia.com.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BuchananmonmtDC.JPG
http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/toilet-new.jpg
===
Hmmm How about Buchanan 0.0001
Great, so we’re gonna have to find another Lincoln to fix the mess this jerk is making.
Well, yes. That has been obvious for some time, which is why folks are unhappy with the field of Republican candidates. We know they are not Lincoln, but they are all we have to work with.
“You go to war with the army you have.”
Lincoln was no Lincoln until he took the office. He was “the original gorilla”, ugly and misshapen, a backwoods hillbilly, despised by half the country,not a few of them in the north.
Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce who once was in movies with a chimp…. “and the chimp was the smart one”…. etc etc.
The fact is, you just don’t really know until they take the office and make it theirs. We really didn’t “know” how Obama would do, though we were pretty safe in drawing some conclusions and expectations.
We know now, of course. All our worst fears have come true, with the exception of the fact that, if we have to have a Leninist president, let’s be thankful he’s an incompetent one.
But no president can even be imagined as such until he or she is actually there.
Quote: “The fact is, you just don’t really know until they take the office and make it theirs. We really didn’t “know” how Obama would do, though we were pretty safe in drawing some conclusions and expectations.”
Only if you go with the media/pop culture portrait.
And Lincoln grew the Federal government as no president, until then or since, has grown it. He, like Marx and Engels, misread the nature of relationships. What he forced through in four years would have happened naturally in twenty, without the damage that set us on the path we’ve followed, and leading to our ultimate destruction.
Hi Sharpshooter!
I’ve been reading the claim that slavery would have ended eventually, usually cited as “another twenty years” since not long after the centennial of the Civil War when I was in grammer school.
I don’t believe it.
The simple fact is it’s damned rare in history, that people ever become more free without the expenditure of blood.
Now maybe slavery may have died away in twenty years. Why? It worked economically, and it empowered an elite. Both elements argue for long-term durability, not a dieing away of the institution.
Or perhaps, more realistically, institutions like the Underground Railroad would have eventually evolved into insurgencies. In that case the real currency of liberty would have been expended, just over a longer period of time.
in all I am of the opinion that the four bloody years of the Civil War, were an example of how history has treated America kindly, rather than with cruelty.
Lincoln did grow the federal government a whit. He exercised solely powers it already had.
Nothing wrong with the federal government today or governance in this country generally descends from Lincoln’s actions in the civil war–he solely enforced the laws pursuant to the constitution, using war powers granted the executive therein.
If I recall the campaign correctly, Obama is another Lincoln.
“Buck O’Fama” — I love it! The Irish version…
The problem with needing another Lincoln, is I am quite sure the Democrats have plenty of new Jefferson Davis’ out there.
Lincoln was a murdering little git. #needlessEndlessCivilWar
mmmm… actually, Lincoln was quite all, really.
It wasn’t endless. It was all over by July 1865. It was needless though. If the illegitimate governments of the South hadn’t thrown a temper tantrum over Lincoln’s election there would have been a whole bunch more Americans in 1870.
No, it wasn’t over in 1865; there was still a period of a war of looting and attrition through taxation called “Reconstruction.”
My great-grandfather, who fought with distinction in the Army of Northern Virginia, owned no slaves. His wife, my great-grandmother, grew up on a farm alongside two intact families of free people of color.
Slavery practiced by Europeans was ended without violence in all but two places: Haiti and the states invaded by other states. The primal European emancipating nation, England, ended slavery through a program of compensated eminent domain. So did the Northern states when they ended slavery (which they did practice); an exception being New York City, which burned leaders of a slave rebellion at the stake.
Had there been compensated emancipation in this country, it might not have taken another 20 years from the point of the start of the war. Instead, we had a radical faction of the anti-slavery movement, the “Abolitionists,” who wanted an immediate end to slavery without compensation but with the slitting of throats of slaveholders, and a system of apartheid that would keep those emancipated folks in the Southern states.
Neither Reconstruction, nor the prior rape, looting and wholesale destruction practiced by the Federal army throughout the Southern states, did the freed slaves any favors. Northern punishment of the South for declaring independence (as in 1776) was a root cause of Jim Crow.
“If the illegitimate governments of the South hadn’t thrown a temper tantrum over Lincoln’s election there would have been a whole bunch more Americans in 1870.”
That is the exact truth.
Cranston is another example of our failing public schools.
Actually, anyone who hasn’t read Jeffrey Hummel’s “Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (http://www.amazon.com/Emancipating-Slaves-Enslaving-Free-Men/dp/0812693124/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312883903&sr=8-1) needs to as part of freeing themselves from the victors’ myth.
Hummel shows that the War Between the States could have been avoided, that slaves were freed in all other western countries without violence, that the loss of tariff income was the primary motivator for Northern politicians in invading the South, and that Lincoln began the growth of the Federal government that now threatens the foundations of the nation.
Hummel’s book is one of the more entertaining oddities of Civil War history, by turns politically correct mumbo-jumbo, Viet Nam-era exaltation of the effectiveness of guerilla movements, and pro-Confederate “The South Was Right!” silliness. I read the book soon after it came out in paperback, and more or less laughed my way through it. Several years later, I went to a history conference in San Francisco, where Hummel taught at the time, and he gave a seminar at the conference. Out of curiosity I attended, and it was rather amusing. One of the other individuals in the audience was in his early middle years, wearing civvies but with a haircut that said Army or Marine Corps, and he was very knowledgeable about military theory in terms of strategy. I still remember him asking Hummel, at one point, where he thought the Confederate center of gravity was. Hummel appeared perplexed, because he didn’t appear to understand what the guy was asking. I myself tried to help Hummel in this instance, interjecting that I believed Hummel was saying the Confederates didn’t have one–which is a cop out, of course they did, but if they did then guerilla warfare wouldn’t have worked. If you can’t hold a city or geographical area, and you don’t have an army for the country to rally around, it’s hard to win a war–not lose one, perhaps possible, but win, not so much…
Anyway, I would stronly disagree with the assessment of Hummel’s book by ridgerunner. I’d agree that there was mythmaking in the aftermath of the Civil War, but unlike many other conflicts, the mythmaking in this instance was largely the work of the vanquished: the Myth of the Lost Cause. Southerners go into lots of verbal and logical gymnastics to try and reason out another motivation for Southerners trying to secede from the Union, other than the one they stated to anyone who would listen: their desire to preserve the institution of slavery. When South Carolina seceded, the legislature wrote out a proclamation the next day outlining why they’d taken the action they did. They were very explicit that the sole issue was slavery, and their perception that a Lincoln administration would try and interfere with the “peculiar institution.” Hummel and others (notably that brilliant historian Karl Marx) have tried to explain this away in one fashion or another, but it never really works.
If you are a professional historian, then you are being dishonest not to recognize that New England states convened in Hartford (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Convention) to discuss their opposition to the war with Britain, and in secret further discussed the viability of secession. All the States that entered the Union believed that they had the right to leave it; otherwise they would not have signed on in the first place. That being the case, any southern state’s reason to secede is moot as far as providing justification for another state to invade it.
Did he include the fact that the Southern Democrats had sworn to secede not only if Lincoln was elected, but even if a nonslaveowning Democrat was elected?
Revisionists. So much idiocy. So much sadness.
Allow me to be immature for a moment– you are an idiot. Immature, yes, but accurate.
America was well on its way to freeing the slaves when Lincoln provoked the South into firing on Fort Sumter. The South didnt want slaves for the same reason the north didnt want them.
“Provoked the south”? Geez, what did he do- yell ‘neener neener’? Firing on Sumter was (depending on whose interpretation you use) either an act of war or an act of treason, and the South got what it had been so badly asking for ever since the 3/5ths Compromise.
Love those slavery apologists.
THey didn’t want slaves but they explicitly put preserving slavery in their statements?
Being a Confederate Apologist means not making sense on the topic. It’s a requirement.
Being a Southern Apologist requires somehow reconciling the nobility and bravery with which they fought, with the the horrible institution they fought to preserve.
It’s fascinating listening to the ignorance of some on the subject. Not only wasn’t slavery dying in the South, but there were plans among Southerners to expand it into the American Southwest, Mexico, Cuba and Central America. Such was the hold of slavery on the South, that some Southerners emigrated to Brazil, simply because that was one of the few civilized places on earth where they could still hold slaves. It’s often said that many Southerners who fought in the Civil War weren’t even slave owners; but it’s what every Southern boy dreamed of – to own a big plantation someday.
I remember seeing a news story many years ago about one such settlement in Brazil. The town was still holding “traditional” cotillions at least into the 90s. The slaveowners must have become (more) open about their visits to the slaves quarters, because everyone at the cotillion looked either Hispanic or black. Good to know that NB Forrest and many others are rolling over in their graves about that.
The town is Americana in the state of Sao Paulo. A pleasant place. Hispanic is the wrong word. You mean “Luso-Brazilian.” Of course, the Confederados, as they were called in Brasil, eventually merged into the local population through intermarriage. But carry on with your politically-correct narrative about Southern racism if it makes you feel superior.
Those guys that fired on Sumter really pulled a boner.
“… why are the people of the United States and their government always the villains in the eyes of the revisionists? Why can’t our enemies – such as the king of Spain, and the Kaiser, and Hitler, and Geronimo, and Villa, and Sandino, and Mao Tse-tung, and Jefferson Davis – why can’t these each take a turn in the pillory?”
sorry, forgot the cite: Robert A. Heinlein, “To Sail Beyond the Sunset”
Our ancestors fought because the Yankees invaded our States.
Rebel,
You are exactly right.
But before that invasion, for 80 years New England transported and sold at Southern seaports virtually all of the slaves imported into the United States after 1776. It was called the Triangular Trade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade): Rum and manufactured goods taken from New England on New England ships to Africa and traded for slaves which were taken on New England ships to the Caribbean islands and the South and traded for sugar, rice and cotton which were taken on New England ships to New England and sold (or processed to repeat the cycle in the case of sugar to rum). That trade enriched the Yankee elite and created the wealth that funded the industrialization of the North.
So the Yankee elite was analogous to a drug dealer who sells you drugs and then “gets religion” and turns you in for a reward. Yankees will always find a way to claim the moral high ground, however unjustified.
The importation of slaves to the South was illegal after 1808, and the feds vigorously prosecuted smugglers, and participated with the Britain in suppressing the trade out of Africa. Is this an example of the “quality” of the facts with which you support your argument?
That the South wanted to buy slaves–where that was legal and judged by the Southern elite and commoner alike to be right–and it was the North’s fault because a few hundred people out of those millions were criminals?
…and firing at American-flagged military shipping and American-flagged forts (something even Democrats recognise as acts of war) had noting at all to do with anything. I see.
Shelling the fort was obviously not a good idea, but it should have been vacated. In the eyes of the CSA government and the then-sovereign State of South Carolina, having seceded, the Federal government no longer had any reason to maintain a military installation there. Under those circumstances, neither could they allow resupply nor reinforcement of the U.S. Army garrison.
Starving the foreign forces out would have been smarter, by not giving Mr. Lincoln an excuse to invade the State of Virginia, which, by the way, had nothing to do with the attack on Sumter. Please note that, at that time, it was customary to regard one’s state as one’s nation. The exception to that was in times of war between the U.S. and any power or powers external to them. In those days, no one commonly referred to the United States as “it”, but rather as “they”. The South did pick a fight that she could not win, and for a rotten cause. So sad for so many, South and North.
You are presuming the legitimacy of the South to say the United States should leave it’s property and abandon it’s constitution–is circular and conclusory argument the best you’ve got? The constitution says otherwise, and the South had signed on to it. The only mechanism to “unsign” in it is by amendment, which the South did not seek. They sought war.
Lincoln suppressed rebellion against the constitution in the South, Virginia was closest. Do you honestly think that with the South claiming to be a nation that Lincoln could only legally deal with Sumter by landing in South Carolina?
The South wanted war, they got it.
Your ancestors committed the crime of treason and were well and properly paid for it. That’s why the Americans were there fighting you, to enforce the constitution your ancestors committed treason against.
The seceding States did not attempt to destroy or to overthrow the government of the United Staes. They only declared their independence, as did their forebears in rebelling against King George III. If they were traitors, then how were our Founding Fathers different? Please explain.
Yes they did. If the South seceded successfully, the constitution was a dead letter, and likely the American revolution with it. The South attempted to violently insist the law no longer applied to it.
The actual law as opposed to their pretension to it was enforced with the force required.
You are correct in that too many among the South’s political elites were hotheaded and wanted war. That is why Sumter was attacked instead of waited out. The bulk of the southern forces, however, was made up of men who were defending their homelands (their states, their countries as they understood them to be)against invaing forces from outside those homelands. Win, lose or draw, if military forces from outside what you see as your nation invade it, you fight. Did these men have bad poilitical and social leadership? You bet. The military leadership was good, but not enough to overcome an enemy with 10-to-one material and manpower advantages. Slavery was not something that anyone should have fought or died to preserve, and it was the primary reason the States of the South seceded. Not the only reason, but the regional disagreement over slavery was the reason that passions built to the point they did. The reason that the vast majority of Southerners fought so long and so hard was, the slavery issue notwithstanding, to repel Northern invaders. I have read in the histories of the conflict that both sides thought that any such war would be short, with a sweet victory in order. Both sides were guilty of a gross error here. As to the accusation of treason: If, going into the war, as U.S. Army officers resigned their commissions to go home and serve in the Confederate Army, why were they not then arrested and charged? After all, they were plain in telling the leadership (their civilian authorities) that they were going to lead the military forces of the Southern States. Not the least of these was Robert E. Lee, who had been offerred command of all Union forces. The most likely reason was that even President Lincoln knew where these men’s duty lay. In that day and time, the States were still regarded as being at least as much their countries (if not more so) than the sum of the territory of those United States. The civil and military authorities of the Federal government, even in the face of these deeds and words, did not count them as treason. The attitude was more like “We hate to see you go. Farewell. We’ll see you in the war.” Things were not as simple as some might think. One last thing, which is only a matter of opinion: The Constitution was gravely wounded even with a Union victory. Not only the Southern states lost their sovereignty, but the Northern ones did also. Ultimately, they lost their representation as such in the Senate. It is true that that was done by a Constitutional Amendment, but, on a basic level changed what had been a federation of free States into a single Nation with one authority overseeing the states as mere political subdivisions. Some may see this as a positive development. I do not. This shift of politiacl power to Washington has made possible the concentration of power to the point that a President can now make his own laws if he can not get a bill through the Congress. (See Obama’s EPA and carbon “regulation”). He can now go to war as he chooses, without even consulting with Congress, much less obtaining a Declaration of War. (See Libya). This concentration of power in the nation’s capital is bad. This much power in the hands of one man is positively dangerous to this country and to the rest of the world. Sooner or later, we may elect a man to that office who is so unfit to serve, or who has a positive animus against portions of our population and its culture, that he is willing to “punish” or humble whom he wishes. We could even get a President who wants to fundamentally change America into something that we (or the majority of us) find to be alien or evil. If so, he may find that he has that much power. If Obama is that man, we will find that he is far worse than either Buchanan or Carter. Let us HOPE for the best, lest we be CHANGED into slaves ourselves.
Let’s not forget the assassination attempt on Lincoln before he took office.
Lincoln won with a plurality, not a majority in the electoral collage, and the Republicans hadn’t won a majority in either house of Congress. Nonetheless, the Southern establishment felt the ground shifting beneath it feet, and knew that the legitimacy of the secession option was fading away. The public proclamations and newspaper editorials make it clear that preserving slavery was their driving concern, and if the Union had let them secede, then the South would have embarked upon a campaign of conquest with the natural limit of the tip of South America.
What is your reference material to any plans by the Southern States to invade Latin America?
Heh. Thought not.
Can we talk about Obama as Buchanan?
Good idea. Obama is worse than Buchanan because Buchanan, though he failed at it, intended to heal the division between North and South. Obama set out to pull the country toward European-style socialism just as that model was failing. Obama seeks to divide the citizenry for his personal political gain. He is far below Buchanan’s quality as a man or as a patriot.
The reason Buchanan is the worst of all the US presidents, is that he failed to give the South Jackson’s answer to South Carolina, when that state first threatened the crime of nullification.
Obama may be worse, or he may have already beaten Carter for the 2nd worst slot.
why don’t one of you smartass yankee defenders read the emancipation proclamation and explain to all of us lesser mortals why it was that only the states in rebellion to the fed govt had to free the slaves – what about Kentucky and Maryland and why “the great emancipator (enslaver of the 10th amendment)” exempted some of the parishes around New Orleans altogether?
That’s simple Robin, the federal governemnt had no war powers to declare emancipation in area that were not in rebellion. It was taken as a war measure declaring the property–in people–of the rebelling areas confiscated.
Got any more softballs back there for us?
“ridgerunner If you are a professional historian,…blah…blah…blah…state to invade it.”
The Hartford Convention talked about treason, but didn’t actually do it. I’m not surprised you choose not to observe the very great distinction between the two.
“Lincoln did grow the federal government a whit.” /= “Lincoln did not grow the federal government a whit.”
The arguments made about the “brave” soldiers of the confederacy are similar to those I have heard from revisionists about the whermacht.
And there was no “War Between the States” there was a vile inexcusable and treasonous civil insurrection which is called the “Civil War” and, it was most uncivil.
As to the argument slaves would have been freed in another 20 years — perhaps not something enslaved people — or those with a shred of human decency — were willing to bet on or wait for.
A traitor is a traitor. As to Reconstruction: Waaaaaaaaaah. As you sow, so shall you reap.