Idiot Nonsense about Hillary's Qualifications
President Obama last nite repeated his preposterous claim that no man or woman has ever been more qualified to be President of the United States than Hillary Clinton! How outrageously, contemptibly absurd! George WASHINGTON was not better qualified? Thomas JEFFERSON? Abraham LINCOLN? Theodore ROOSEVELT? Franklin Delano ROOSEVELT? Dwight David EISENHOWER? John F. KENNEDY? Lyndon Baines JOHNSON? Ridiculous.
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Let me say plainly to anyone inclined to repeat that disgraceful slander of great Presidents: STFU!
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Hillary Clinton may be able to handle the job, but she is NOT better qualified than the eight great Presidents I list above. And no one on Earth believes she IS. If it was your purpose to demean Hillary by making a ridiculous claim that no one believes, you've done a great job.
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Hillary Clinton is a woman of middling accomplishments. She didn't hold together a ragtag army thru extreme hardships to win an eight-year war against the greatest empire of the time, refuse a crown, and step down after two terms, establishing a precedent that was violated only once before it was entrenched in the Constitution. She didn't write any of our basic documents, nor double the area of the United States. Nor did she hold the Union together against a catastrophic attempt at mass secession, and lead the charge for emancipation of slaves everywhere in the reunified Nation. Nor did she bust the trusts and create the national parks. Nor help the Nation fite its way out of the greatest economic calamity in our history, and bring us within months of total defeat of the worst challenge to our freedom since the Revolution. Nor did she command Allied forces in World War II, send troops into Little Rock to enforce civil rights, nor warn us of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Nor put a man on the moon and inspire us to secure, first, universal voting rights, and then full civil rights across the South. Nor did she pick up the mantle of an assassinated predecessor and push his program thru Congress. NONE of Hillary Clinton's accomplishments even BEGINS to equal the achievements of the eight great men I list above. Nor is she even better qualified than a number of other Presidents, such as the Adamses and even Woodrow Wilson.
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So cut the extravagant praise. Hillary can't live up to it, and instead of adding to her reputation, you make her look small and unaccomplished.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:13 PM

 
Republican 'Morality' (Voting Your Conscience Is Bad); Republican Defense Policy (Destroy NATO)
At last nite's session of the Republican National Convention, Texas Senator Ted Cruz had the effrontery to address only (his version of) the defense of "freedom". At the end of a brilliant delivery of a litany of (absurd) assertions about personal freedom being under attack by the 'Establishment' — of which he is part — Cruz urged people not to stay home in November but to vote their conscience all up and down the ticket. For that, he was roundly booed by the anti-American slime that filled the hall, because he did not urge everyone to vote for Donald Trump. To today's Republicans, voting your conscience is not just inadvisable as a partisan matter but downright EVIL! Since when is voting your conscience evil, and to whom?
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It's a pity no one flooded that arena with poison gas last nite, as to kill everyone inside and save us from what is looking more and more like the start of a violent revolution, or another civil war — our third — that could kill far more than the few thousand subhuman scum in "the Q" center.
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Our First Civil War. The first American civil war is more commonly termed the "American Revolution", but make no mistake, it was indeed a civil war, between people faithful to the vile British Empire — "Loyalists", also called "Tories" — and people in what were, for all practical purposes, 13 separate countries governed separately by that Empire who were only then coming to see themselves as having not just an identity apart from servants of (the British) King and country, but as having a new, cross-colony identity as "Americans".
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Make no mistake, that first civil war was devastating, a fact not reflected in what seem to us today small numbers of dead. Statistics as to total soldiers and total deaths (battle and other) are a little sketchy, but one online source, "FAQ about the American Revolutionary War" provides the statistics I cite here. Considering that the total population of the 13 colonies in 1775 was only about 2.5 million, the numbers of military servicemen — "231,000 men served in the Continental Army, though never more than 48,000 at any one time, and never more than 13,000 at any one place. The sum of the Colonial militias numbered upwards of 145,000 men" — was impressive, as were total deaths and injuries ("6,800 Americans were killed in action, 6,100 wounded, and upwards of 20,000 were taken prisoner. Historians believe that at least an additional 17,000 deaths were the result of disease, including about 8,000–12,000 who died while prisoners of war.

"Unreliable imperial data place[] the total casualties for British regulars fighting in the Revolutionary War around 24,000 men. This total number includes battlefield deaths and injuries, deaths from disease, men taken prisoner, and those who remained missing.

"Approximately 1,200 Hessian soldiers [mercenaries] were killed, 6,354 died of disease, and another 5,500 deserted and settled in America afterwards."
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To get a sense of what those figures would be with today's populations (about 321 million for the United States), you have to multiply American statistics by 128: 870,400 killed, 780,800 wounded, 2,176,000 dead from disease, including 1,024,000-1,536,000 who died while prisoners of war in the atrocious prison ships and other prisons the monstrous British Empire put Patriots into, which were practically designed to kill the prisoners.
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Britain's population was around 8 million in 1775, as against 65 million today, so Imperial stats for the Revolutionary War would have to be multiplied by 8 to give approximate equivalents to today: 192,000 casualties (but that includes deaths and injuries) for British regulars, 9,600 combat deaths among Hessian soldiers, and 50,832 Hessian deaths from disease.
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Our first civil war was no trivial matter.
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Second Civil War. Some 620,000-850,000 Americans, on both sides, were killed in the official "Civil War" (1861-65), equivalent to about 6.2 million to 8.5 million today.
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The treasonous scum in "The Q" last nite were making very bellicose noises. They chanted that the presumptive Democratic nominee for President should be arrested and sent to prison. Some people outside the hall called for Hillary Clinton to be SHOT DEAD. That is the rhetoric of civil war. Let me remind them of what happened the last time ignorant yahoos went to war against the United States. Here is a historic foto of Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Confederacy, at the end of that conflict.

Foto from the National Archives.

Destroying NATO. "The Donald" said today that if he were President, the United States would NOT automatically live up to its treaty obligation to regard a military attack upon any NATO member as an attack on the United States! Has he finally done it? Has he finally found a way to guarantee his defeat in November?
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I observed here on February 25th that Donald Trump appears to be trying desperately to lose the Republican nomination, because he really doesn't want the job, knows he is not up to it, knows that if he got the job he would be miserable in it and become universally recognized as the worst President in U.S. history. Other people came to the same conclusion, as witnessed by Seth Meyers of NBC Television's Late Night With Seth Meyers talk show's pretending to offer Trump a TV program on NBC in which he PLAYS a President, to be called Chicago President. But, try as he might — saying one thing one day and the opposite the very next day — Trump has been unable to shake the yahoos who comprise his core constituency from rabid, blind allegiance to a Trump presidency.
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Has Trump finally found something so insane that no serious person could even entertain the thought of voting for him for President?
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The NATO alliance has been fundamental to the maintenance of peace in Europe since its founding in 1949. Every President, without exception, has affirmed the commitment to defend every NATO member from military attack, and every serious person on planet Earth has understood that any waffling on that commitment would invite aggression from (originally) the Soviet Union / (now) Russia that could plunge the planet into World War III, even entailing a full-scale nuclear exchange that could obliterate all combatant nations and produce tens of millions of deaths. Donald Trump today issued an INVITATION to Russian President Vladimir Putin to attack the Baltic countries on Russia's borders. If that does not turn off all but the most insane of his supporters, what can?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:04 AM