Category Archives: States’ Rights

Jim Webb, Salt-Of-The-Earth Democrat

Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, States' Rights

I think it’s fair to call Jim Webb the last of the Southern Democrats (propaganda from both parties, notwithstanding, Southern Democrats were salt of the earth, states’ rights advocates). Another who’d qualify as such is the late great Robert Byrd, an old Southern gentleman, and an admirable and “stern constitutional scholar.”

Webb, formerly a senator from Virginia, “is genuinely thinking about a White House bid in 2016”: “I’m seriously looking at the possibility of running for president,” he said in a speech last week.

I have a soft spot for Sen. Webb. [In 2007], he was a junior senator and a defecting Republican who had served in the Reagan administration as Secretary of the Navy. When I first began writing against [W’s] war for WorldNetDaily.com, he had e-mailed me in approval and sent along some of his own anti-war editorials. Sen. Webb’s motives for safeguarding [the military] were always beyond reproach: love of country and kin. The Senator comes from a military family; he himself is a Vietnam veteran, son of a World War II warrior, and father to a marine who fought in Iraq. According to “ThinkProgress,” Webb’s son had a brush with death in Iraq in 2006.

It’s a shame that dumb Democrats will not give Webb the time of day and will, instead, cleave to dynastic nominee Mrs. Clinton.

Read:

* Webb on “‘The Myth of White Privilege.”

* Wonkette against The Webb.

* How Webb Walloped ‘W.’

UPDATE IV: Jealous Of The Scots (What Would Lincoln Do? Drop Daisy Cutters)

Britain, Nationhood, Socialism, States' Rights, The State

Envy ought to animate America, as it watches the push for the decentralization of power—radical federalism—across Europe and in Canada. For here in the US, the legacy of Lincoln has prevailed. He carried out a violent constitutional revolution (instead of pursuing peaceful emancipation like every other nation did), a revolution, which, in turn, sired the modern imperialist, interventionist and highly centralized American State, and outlawed peaceful political divorce.

The sweet sounds of of Scottish secession (to shamelessly mix metaphors) have fallen silent. For now. Scotland voted against leaving the United Kingdom and becoming an independent nation. But only just. The “No” campaign won 55.3 percent of the vote. The Scots hardly “rejected independence,” as Fox News put it. The tyranny of democracy has meant that a simple majority won the day.

Afrikaner secessionist Dan Roodt summed up my sentiments, in an email:

The Scottish referendum is a big disappointment to me, as I had hoped that a “Yes” victory could have unleashed a whole series of independence movements, in Europe, but also here in SA. More and more the Zulus control South Africa, with the media waging a futile campaign against Zuma. So ultimately ethnicity has triumphed over all these other clever theories.

Contra broadcaster Mark Levin—who clings for dear life to an anti-secession sentiment, so as to better love the unlovable: war criminal Abe Lincoln—the healthiest and most intuitive response to deep-seated unhappiness—political or personal—is not a constitutional convention, but a divorce; to exit the abusive relationship.

If Americans try what the Scots have have just done, our states and neighborhoods would be invaded by the federal government. People could die.

UPDATE I: To continue the theme of majority makes right, via Butler Shaffer at LRC.COM:

The mainstream media informed us that David Cameron was greatly pleased by the outcome. It is the nature of politics that this statement is true. Political thinking has trained people to believe in the 51% principle: no idea is worthwhile unless 51% of the public believes in it. But imagine a man with nine children, and four of them dislike the father so much that they want to vote to have all siblings leave home. The vote is held and, by a 5 to 4 margin, the pro-big daddy side wins. Would any loving psychologically-healthy man consider this to be a great personal victory?
Opponents of this measure were quick to announce that the question of Scottish independence has been settled, “once and for all,” words that mean “when we get the outcome we want, the issue can never be brought up again.”
All-in-all, the outcome of this vote was a referendum on the ageless choice people must make between individual liberty and collective security.

MORE.

UPDATE II: If “1 in 4 Americans are open to secession, what does it say about this freedom which Lincoln waged war to abolish? It tells you that secession is intuitive to a very many ordinary folks.

Secession, political divorce, peaceful separation: these are the most natural and best ways to solve disputes. Walk away. This tells you just how aberrant was Lincoln’s war against the South.

UPDATE III:

Nikola Dzhilvidzhiev on Facebook:

In the past week, I heard a lot of arguments from neoconservatives that Scottish secession was ‘because they wanted to be even more socialist than the UK’. Maybe I was a bit optimistic but I believed that the sudden leftward surge in Scottish policy and resultant loss of living standard would have shocked the people and policymakers into understanding that capitalism and free markets are the way to prosperity, á la China.
Until the next referendum, at least, you’re all welcome to join me in shouting Alba gu bráth from the rooftops of the world.

To Nikola Dzhilvidzhiev:

Yes, the secessionist would have had to learn whence come their subsidies and, for freedom’s sake, they would have had to cease and desist the country’s march toward complete socialism. Nevertheless, the CORRECT libertarian view is to support the impetus of decentralization. (Reason magazine is left, Beltway libertarianism).

UPDATE IV (9/19): WHAT WOULD LINCOLN DO? Drop Daisy Cutters. That’s what he’d do.

Rafi Farber emails EPJ editor Robert Wenzel:

Before we decide what to think about Scottish independence, let’s consider what our beloved forefather, Abraham Lincoln, Honest Abe, would do if he were head of the UK in the event that the Scots secede from the United Kingdom tomorrow.
Answer: He would make some stupid but eloquent speech about how a House Divided Cannot Stand…and then proceed to bomb the living crap out of Scotland, murdering as many people as possible man woman and child, burning their property and salting the earth. And after he broke their will to fight, he would force them back in the UK and tax the living daylights out of them. Then we would all celebrate him hundreds of years later for saving the country.

MORE letters to editor.

UPDATED: Masada on Mount Sinjar (ISIS Crisis Continued)

Ancient History, Europe, History, Iraq, Israel, Jihad, Media, States' Rights

“Masada on Mount Sinjar” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Purportedly, forty thousand refugees, among them 25,000 children, were said to be stranded on the parched terrains of the Sinjar, in scorching heat, without sustenance. That is until Barack Obama broke up the gathering. Overnight. “That’s enough, Yazidis. Go home, now. The crisis is over.” Yes, the president and his minions have pronounced the catastrophe on the Sinjar Mountains over. However, just because the Obama machine declares it so, does not make it so. I would point BHO believers to Channel 4 veteran reporter Jonathan Rugman, who questions—even mocks—the administration’s rapid, fact-finding methodology:

Crisis, what crisis? The Americans have ruled out a military airlift of Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar on the grounds that the situation is not as bad as previously thought. … Are the Americans saying that the refugees are not spread out any more but have either been shepherded or moved into a concentrated area where they can be counted?

Let us, then, stick with Mr. Rugman’s findings, shall we? As the courageous correspondent has discovered, the Kurd-coordinated airdrops are executed by only four helicopters (one has since crashed), allotted by Baghdad. Emergency supplies are available in abundance at various nodal points; not so the means to deliver them. Priorities set by the central government do not include “rescuing a little known Yazidi minority in Kurdistan, a region which wants to break away from Iraq and become its own country.”

The Kurds assisting those marooned on the mountains would like to secede from the morass that is Iraq. Alas, the master puppeteers in Washington have hitherto been wedded to a unified (at the point of a gun) Iraq, dominated by a strong (sectarian and corrupt) central authority. This White House, and the one before it, fetishizes Iraqi national unity. It believes that to succeed, Iraqis should be like Americans, forever imprisoned in an arranged, unhappy political marriage. …

… Read the complete column. “Masada on Mount Sinjar” is now on WND.

UPDATE (8/15): If there is one constant you can trust it is that he lies. They all lie. “Break it up, Yazidis. Go home, now. The crisis is over,” Obama announced to the world, Thursday. I guess the president was attempting to will a new reality with words. The American media bought it and scattered. I was quite comfortable that “Masada on Mount Sinjar” was closer to the truth than Obama’s agitprop, even though it was submitted before his “Yazidis disperse” injunction.

Indeed, the ISIS crisis continues. Thirty miles from Sinjar, on Friday afternoon, reports BBCNews, “Militants in northern Iraq … massacred at least 80 men from the Yazidi faith in a village and abducted women and children.”

MORE.

Ghostbuster Of Yankie Propaganda

America, Federalism, History, States' Rights

It’s 4:17 AM. Sleep has never come easily. I reach for one of the books I delve into for relaxation—non-fiction always. Facts, nothing but facts are my preference; well-reasoned opinions I have in abundance. I get to “Civil War America, 1850-1870,” in Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People. Facts? Perhaps in the strictest sense of the word: timeline, dates, etc. Otherwise, the section is simplistic and biased. To wit, Lincoln was as pure as the driven snow (his wife thought otherwise, describing him as a good-for-nothing lay about around the home). Southern secession was undemocratic and nonsensical. Jefferson Davis was an imbecile. The dispute between North and South was purely about slavery, no more; the South being steeped in that Original Sin, but not the North.

“If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!” The Ghostbuster of this dross is my friend, historian Clyde Wilson. In “Derailment of Civil War History,” Prof. Wilson muses about the rigidity of “fixed and eternal dogmas in the interpretation of the past”:

… the Civil War sesquicentennial has received slight public interest and produced little in the way of new knowledge and perspective. This is true despite the fact that the great war of 1861—1865, with its prelude and sequel, arguably remains the most significant (as well as the most interesting) part of American history. Is it possible that this lack has something to do with the now official and pervasive dogma that the Civil War was “about slavery” and “caused by slavery”? Any challenge to this understanding is, in the Marxist language now prevalent in American academic discourse, condemned as “revisionism,” no longer a good thing but defined as the conniving of evilly-motivated people to challenge the party line established by the all-wise experts. There has even been created a whole literature dismissing dissidents as deluded victims of a “Lost Cause Myth.” Gary Gallagher, one of the celebrity historians of present Civil War historianship, describes such people as suffering from a mental “syndrome.” [1]

But, in fact, it is impossible to find any qualified historian of the first half of the 20th century who accepted the current party line of “slavery and nothing but slavery” in regard to the Civil War. This current dogma is nothing more than a replay of the early partisan presentation of the war as a morality play about the suppression of slavery and treason by the forces of righteousness. A little Marxist class conflict and racial vengeance has been mixed in to update the tale. Responsible historians before the present era realized that no large human event can be understood in such a trivial way, and that “about” and “caused by” are deceptive terms when applied to great happenings. Historians of the not-too-distant past realized that their proper task was to go beyond the claims of partisans. In pursuit of such a mission, a large literature was created treating the Civil War as a thing of great complexity and moral ambiguity. This great scholarly achievement has been washed down the Memory Hole. Thus the study of history is no longer a matter of cumulative knowledge. To control understanding of the past has always been an objective of power-seekers. We live in a time when such control flourishes.

MORE of Prof. Wilson’s intellectual sanity.