House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced on Thursday that, per an order she made, four portraits on display at the Capitol depicting House speakers who served in the Confederacy would be removed.
Right Wing Blogosphere reacts predictably:
Remove McConnell and youâve got a Fifth.
Maybe weâre finally hitting the end of the Civil War.
Took damned long enough.
Yeah, those traitors have hung around long enough. About 155 years too long.
Agree with her or not, Speaker Pelosi knows how to lead.
Yes, itâs starting to look a tiny bit hopeful. We need an official, national repudiation of Jim Crow.
Well done Nancy! Will Moscow Mitch will object?
Perhaps brave or foolhardy to suggest, but I wonder whether Crisp of Georgia, if as stated he served as Speaker post-Reconstruction, might be a different case? His Confederate treason not being disqualifying to become Speaker, is he, for purification purposes, necessarily more of an ogre than others of his era? I will duck now.
Now is the time to really pour it on the Treason Party. Brand todayâs GOP as the racist apartheid party that they are. They will be glad to help. If you are a Republican, you are a racist.
We actually do.
Floyd opened up the floodgates of activism. We didnât start activism after Trumpâs Ukraine Impeachment trial or his false acquittal.
Or William Barrâs assault on the Rule of Law
Or COVID-19
We energized the one group in this society with the energy and passion to protest: younger people.
AdMan/Reality-Alterer/Born Liar Trump would love to be able to run a con on the protesters and make âem stop by snookerinâ 'em.
Failing that, roundinâ 'em up (Boltonâs China section on Concentration Camps in his Book).
The German youth in the sixties forced their parentsâ generation to own and admit that they were complicit in the Holocaust and the near destruction of Europe. We have not done that here re slavery and Jim Crow. This is the chance to get it started. I think people are sensing that.
A helpful reminder to the government that having tens of millions of people unemployed and with nothing to lose and plenty of time and energy on their hands rarely ends well for the government. Floyd was the spark, but there were a lot of contributing factors in this being the one that went nationwide.
Absolutely.
I respectfully submit that itâs not portraits of traitors that need to be âhungâ.
âThe portraits of Robert Hunter (VA)â
Nancy could always replace it with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, just to troll.
The conservative reaction to this really makes it clear that not much has changed since the Civil War, Reconstruction, or the 1960sâŚconservatives still want to keep their symbols of white supremacy in place, and see any challenges to that as a challenge to white power. This should be easy, reallyâŚanyone who joined the Confederacy as a leader should be treated the same way as Benedict Arnold, who really was a good leader in the early Revolution before he turned. Anything else they did is really irrelevant compared to that, and anyone who turned rebel should not have any place of honor in the nation.
Arguing for these traitors to have that place is arguing for the goals of the Confederacy, which were slavery and white supremacy, thereâs just no other way to put it.
Howell Cobb, a piece of work . . .
In the closing days of the war, Cobb fruitlessly opposed General Robert E. Leeâs eleventh hour proposal to enlist slaves into the Confederate Army. Fearing that such a move would completely discredit the Confederacyâs fundamental justification of slavery, that black people were inferior, he said, âYou cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.â[
Love this:
During Shermanâs March to the Sea, the army camped one night near Cobbâs plantation.[11] When Sherman discovered that the house he planned to stay in for the night belonged to Cobb, whom Sherman described in his Memoirs as âone of the leading rebels of the South, then a general in the Southern army,â he dined in Cobbâs slave quarters,[12] confiscated Cobbâs property and burned the plantation,[13] instructing his subordinates to âspare nothing.â[
[14]](Howell Cobb - Wikipedia)
Iâm torn, frankly. Yeah, by joining the CFA, they forfeited the right to being honored by the USA. But, if they were Speakers if the House of the USA before they joined the Confederacy, maybe their portraits should remain, accompanied by prominent explanations that they later became TRAITORS to the country they had previously sworn to serve, with additional historical context about the primary reason for the Civil War being the desire to preserve slavery. Make it a learning experience rather than an honor.
Yes, and the Confederacy lasted only FIVE years. Iâve got beauty products that have lasted longer than the Confederacy.