“The heroism and losses of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated…”
No they should NOT. They should be remembered as a fearsome example of what evil has wrought in our country. They should be remembered as AT BEST fools who fought for a treasonous insurrection.
See any monuments to “brave soldiers” all over Germany these days scrubbing any mention of Nazism? Nope.
Indeed; most of these are not historical, but in fact used to placate racists during desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement. These are not heritage, they’re junk
That’s what cemeteries are for.
The heroism of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated? What’s heroic about soldiers who revolt against their country and kill their fellow citizens so that the rebels can remain slave owners?
If I had predicted a year ago that William Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Jennifer Rubin, and John Podhoretz would all be regularly issuing scathing criticism of a new Republican President, and that the National Review would come out with a forthright call for the Confederate monuments to be taken down, people would have called me nuts, and with good reason.
Trump really is a uniter.
“The monuments should go. Some of them simply should be trashed; others transmitted to museums, battlefields and cemeteries. The heroism and losses of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated, but not in everyday public spaces where the monuments are flashpoints in poisonous racial contention, with white nationalists often mustering in their defense,”
I think this is a reasonable approach. Yes, the question of “heroism” is debatable within the larger context, but I don’t see anything wrong with historic acknowledgement of the tremendous losses on both sides of the conflict as long as there’s no attempt to continue the whitewashing of the essential goals of the Confederacy.
Robert E. Lee wasn’t a Nazi, and surely would have had no sympathy for the white-supremacist goons who made his statue a rallying point in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend. That doesn’t change the fact that his statue is now associated with a campaign of racist violence against the picturesque town where Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia.
Well I can’t get through the first few sentences without thinking WTF. Lee wasn’t a racist or violent? Are you shitin’ me? He lead a war that killed people to try and keep black folks as slaves! WTF dude?
And then there’s this BS story about Bush didn’t lie, Saddam had WMD
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390517/bush-didnt-lie-deroy-murdock
And then this one bitching about Neil deGrasse Tyson because he smarter than us and tries to teach us stuff.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/384081/smarter-thou-charles-c-w-cooke
I’m glad they realize the south needs to quit putting confederates literally on a pedestal but they have a long way to go before I want to pick through BS to find a few meager kernels of decent corn.
I listen to Lowry regularly on Left, Right and Center, and more often than not he just does the knee jerk conservative think tank bullshit. He is in the mode of David Frum - sometimes I find myself half agreeing with him, but I seldom agree with his reasoning for how he got there. He has been staunchly anti Trump, but mostly because Trump is not a true conservative. But at least he is intelligent and generally civil, something that is becoming more and more of a rarity in modern conservative politics.
I think the “establishment” Republicans were willing to remain quiet until the first national emergency came up and 45 could be judged on how he handled it. 45 failed. Totally. The gloves are now off.
But at least he is intelligent and generally civil, something that is becoming more and more of a rarity in modern conservative politics.
There is a vast difference between cretins like Limbaugh, Savage, Levin, Hannity, Jones, Cernovich, Posobiec and Fox & Friends on one hand, and Frum, Bartlett, Lowry, Rubin, and Rick Wilson on the other. Those in the latter group are well-educated, widely-informed about the larger world beyond our shores, and it’s possible to have a rational discussion with them that’s reasonably based on reality and fact. That’s simply impossible with the former group, who would have mightily enjoyed cheering on the brownshirts beating up Jews in the streets of 1930s Berlin.
What really stumps me is how often I find myself agreeing with William Kristol, whose only claim to fame is being the son of Irving and being comically wrong with every prediction. That’s how far things have gone off the rails for Trump.
Hmmm…Only a hundred and fifty years late to the party. You realize these are traitors that fought for the ability (and constitutional right) to own other human beings? And sure, there are hundreds of thousands of everyday soldiers that had really no other option but to fight in the war, but those aren’t the people that have 20 foot statues made of them.
Why do people always vote for conservatives? They are constantly on the wrong side of history.
Slavery, Equal rights for non-landowners, Equal rights for blacks, Equal rights for women, what constitutes rape/sexual assault/harassment, segregation, Equal rights for LGBTQ, Free speech, (hopefully basic common sense gun control), Separation of church and state, Due process…the list goes on and on.
So many of these things we look back on and take for granted, but liberals have been fighting tooth and nail for these things for hundreds of years, while conservatives fight just as hard against change!
Almost all of these statutes went up long after the war was over. The motivation was Jim Crow and that’s the era that saw all these monuments to slavery and treason go up.
I didn’t think I’d see them come down in my lifetime but they are coming down. Finally.
Yeah they fought and died - so did the goddamn Union = they fought and were killed by traitors. Enough with the monuments to traitors.
Melt them down. No, no one from the confederate side should be memorialized. Period. They fought to enslave humans.
Well, his transparent response to Charlottesville happening the same week where T-rumpus was playing a high profile game of nuclear chicken with N. Korea seems to have shaken some of them loose.
Rubin is amazingly on point these days…
I recommend everyone read that piece - it’s great.
Lets see how long it takes for Lowry to backtrack and eventually apologize. His readership knows exactly the meaning of those monuments and want to keep it that way.
We live in interesting times. Rarely these days do I ever find myself disagreeing with Rubin, Jolly, Kristol, Schmidt, Steele, etc. I really don’t know how I feel about that, but lately I do feel the need to shower multiple times a day.
This is further evidence that the conservative movement is now scared sh*tless of the neo-nazi/white nationalist movement. They know that the GOP will be forever tarnished by this movement and it’s shitstain of a leader in the WH.