Special Edukashun (Updated Fer Retards Edition!1)
Representative Ted Poe (R – Hixas) quotes Nathan Bedford Forrest on the floor of the House.
Lefties are appalled.
Special Ed of Crap N’ Quaaludes blog says it’s much ado about nothing and implies that Lefties are faking their outrage. In his capacity as master of Cartesian logic, he makes his case with the following rationale:
The quote may not have even been Bedford’s, Rep. Poe was just trying to convey a military principle, and what the hell does the quote have to do with the Klan anyway? Also, there’s this:
For instance, do lawyers who reference Hugo Black support the Klan as well? If not, why not? Poe referenced Forrest’s military strategy, not his views on race. Referencing Black’s viewpoint on law should also then connect to his activities in the Klan … right? That’s the Carpetbagger standard.
Special Ed, above: “These’n heauh vittles is from an ol’ Confederate recipe!”
Predictably, Perfesser Corncob of the Tennessee Recovering Alcoholic Confederate Jugband notices Special Ed’s post, approvingly links, offers the requisite Robert Byrd reference, then opines that all this Lefty pseudo-outrage is a conspiracy to excuse that negro Al Sharpton’s bigotry. Because, see, Al Sharpton is a slave trader and a terrorist who founded a society dedicated to destroying the rights of a certain race of citizens and.. wait, he didn’t?
Now I like Special Ed; and as one Retardo to another I offer the following in affection and drool:
The military sentiment Poe wanted to convey, banal as it was, could have been communicated without explicit reference to Forrest — especially since, as Special Ed says, it’s not certain that the quote originated with the founder of the KKK. But Forrest’s name was uttered, approvingly and gratuitously: a tacit endorsement of the quote’s historical context. It is the equivalent of a wink and secret handshake from one member of the Society of the Lost Cause to another. Wingnuts like Special Ed, who pretend to be servants of the Party of Lincoln but are actually hacks for the Party of Strom Thurmond, like to present dog whistle messages like Poe’s as not code but simply good-hearted gaffes. Ed’s excuses are self-evidently stupid but it’s his analogy to Hugo Black that betrays his bad faith.
Hugo Black, really now. Hugo Black grew up in Alabama and in the 20s, when he was a young man, the Klan was effectively gatekeeper to all state offices. You simply had to join if you wanted to be in government. Black joined, never participated in the gruesome rites with which the Klan terrorized the black population, got out of the Klan as soon as it was feasible. Black repudiated the Klan and all it stood for, and then putting his money where his mouth was, had a fine career as one of the few true leftists who’ve ever served on the Supreme Court. Black was a radical desegregationist, and stood up to weaselly fucktard brethren like the atrocious Felix Frankfurter whose ‘Sensible Jurisprudence’ (a legal-world analogue to our own era’s awful ‘Sensible Liberals’) provided with flowery and obscure language a shield by which the racists could delay delay delay desegregation. If Special Ed’s logic holds, then Nathan Bedford Forrest, butcher and terrorist (though, admittedly, a great military tactician) must also have repudiated his nasty association with the Klan, But of course he did not; he, like Strom Thurmond, lived and died a dedicated racist. Thus Hugo Black is a ‘clean cite’; Nathan Bedford Forrest is not.
I was waiting for a major wingnut to bring up Black for the same reason they tirelessly cite Robert Byrd’s Klan membership: as a moronic pseudo-gotcha by which they hope not to paint Liberals as racists, but to cancel out our legitimate gotchas on their authentically racist public figures and historical heroes. It works for those dullards who write and comment on wingnut blogs but can’t honestly differenciate apples from oranges nor repudiation of the Klan by a former member to an homage to the Klan’s leadership by an admirer.
Idiots.
***
UPDATE: I told you Ed and I had a common bond in retardation, and I’ve proved it. I, who used to a live a few blocks from the address where Forrest traded slaves, completely fucked up on a crucial part of Forrest’s history. Forrest did leave the Klan in the “I didn’t leave it; it left me!” sort of way.
I’m certain wingnut logicians will now further insist there’s sufficient proof that quoting Forrest is just like quoting Hugo Black and Robert Byrd on the excellent grounds that they also created a racist secret society dedicated to terrorizing minorities and certain whites, they taught and organized that society in a military fashion, and then repudiated it when it used that training and organization in the totally predictable way. It’s exactly the same!
I know everybody’s blogging on this but I haven’t read them and I wanted to do this on my own because sometimes on fellow lefty sites I find things that annoy me on the subject of the Civil War.
Ugh. I’m so sick of Confederates. The war was over 120 years ago. You lost. Move on.
An oft’ over-looked, or outright ignored, part of US history is the short period of time between 1776 and ( I believe) 1781. This was the time period when the newly minted Union operated under the Articles of Confederacy, and not the US Constitution we know today.
The AoC is basically a conservative’s wet dream. The Federal government was practically useless; they couldn’t lay taxes, they couldn’t print money, declare war, or do anything, without express ratification off the individual states.
It was an abject, 100% failure. The nation was ready to tear itself apart before the end of the decade. Which is why many of the members of the Continental Congress got together, in secret, and formed the Constitutional Convention, scrapping the entire AoC and starting from scratch with the Constitution.
The bottom line is; Confederation is like Communism. They simply don’t work.
I think people should refrain from quoting military people to prove their point, because, by and large, really good historical military generals tend to be total fucktard assholes. I’m just sayin’.
Dude, don’t mention calculus…that final just gave me a savage beatdown.
Html, you’re not trying to imply that those wingnuts are hippo-crites, are ya?
Cause next thing you know, your spurious charges will lead to submarine sammich foto shopping. And charges of lookism.
P.S.
You mean *you* had a sammich war, too, Atrios?
OMG
What are the odds?
HTML Mencken | Homepage | 05.08.07 – 12:06 pm | #
All atrios’ sammich wars are belong to us.
gruesome rights by which
I’d do “gruesome rites with which”.
Hanks, spellcheck! When I get a paying gig at several ostensibly liberal publications after totally blowing the Iraq War question, I’ll be sure to use you!
ITTDGY — The Sammich will strike back soon.
As General Blondebastard Custer said: “I’ll bet a twenty on the savages blogging at Sadly No! but I don’t hafta like it, do I?”
Not only did the South lose, they were traitors. They renounced their loyalty to the US. They betrayed America.
The cognitive dissonance generated by the heirs of the Confederacy calling northeastern liberal “elites” traitors currently powers three small cities in southern Indonesia, and there are plans to expand.
You are a bit harsh on Justice Felix Frankfurter, here. He was, after all, one of the founding members of the ACLU, and was an advisor to President Roosevelt on New Deal legislation. I wouldn’t call him despicable, although perhaps he did hold fairly conventional views on race, and was one of those white liberals hesitant to push for racial equality that Dr. King so bitterly denounced in his speeches throughout the 1960s.
Dude, don’t mention calculus
I changed it; it was kinda pompous, I suppose. Please don’t call me Tacitus!
Frankfurter: It’s been years since I argued about this stuff, but “all deliberate speed”, a useless phrase Frankfurter insisted on putting in — I forget which deseg case– was seized, as Black and Douglas predicted, as a means to stall desegregation.
More broadly, I don’t like Frankfurter because … Look, Black’s weakness was where laws weren’t written plainly or explicitly, where they were written with implied language that democractic principles demand, when they are interpreted, to be interpreted generously wrt civil liberties and freedom in general. Black was terrible on the Fourth Amendment. Frankfurter is on the opposite pole, and I think he’s way worse. Frankfurter basically acted as if all laws were written with equal density, the only people able to decipher them were judges, and those judges should decipher them in the government’s favor.
It’s hard for me to argue this because I’ve forgotten examples as well as a lot of the legal vocabulary, but the best I can do is that Frankfurter comes across as one of those awful snob pomo semiotician types, but a reactionary one. Only he, not the rabble, knew what the law really said, and he knew that it ought to be interpreteted to give government and the status quo in most cases the benefit of the doubt.
In reality, some laws are written plain and are meant to be static; others are vague and meant to be dynamic. That’s one issue. The other is that when they are written vaguely with a dynamic intention, it’s shitty to interpret them with the least generosity possible with regard to civil liberties.
[…] Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) claims he was only making the comparison in an historical context and of course Conservatives like Kaptian Ed can always be counted on to come to the defence of the KKK or the confederacy. Only next week or the week after Ed will also claim to be part of the party of […]
Yeahl; Poe did make a mistake in quoting Forrest. If only Poe had quoted some anti-semites instead, Retardo would be cheering him on. By the way, Forrest DID repudiate the Klan. None of which has anything to do with anything, since Forrest was quoted as a general for his views on military strategy, not his views on race relations.
Yay, Neosporin shows up!
Hey, y’all, this is a treat: He’s like the male version of Pam Atlas, every bit as Randroid and Kahaneist as Pammy, but without the redeeming drunken sillyness and Fran Drescher accent. It’s awesome. Petition him to start blogging on foriegn policy again; it’s a real treat and something I’d like to make fun of again and share with all the rest of you wingnut afficionados.
As for his substance, a part’s predictably lame. When Neosporin doesn’t like you and you quote someone (from Shakespeare to H.L. Mencken to Dickens to whomever) who ever wrote, publicly or privately, unkindly about Jews, you’re an ‘anti-semite’. Of course you’re also an ‘anti-semite’ if you ever criticise Israel from the Left, or quote those who do. Neosporin is one of those Jewish bigots like Meir Kahane, Marty Peretz who want to have their racism and eat it too.
As for Forrest repudiating the Klan, he’s got me there. Yep, so Hugo Black *is* just like Forrest! Hugo Black founded the Klan and when it used his racial theories to even more hideous ends, he promptly declared when he was an old man, that he didn’t leave the Klan, but the Klan left him! It’s exactly the same! Thanks for pointing that out!
The bottom line is; Confederation is like Communism. They simply don’t work.
Communism doesn’t work? I didn’t think it had been tried yet.
OTOH, Neosporin is very shrewd to show up when he did. We have a history, and he hopes to draw me out on something.
This post would have been easier to write if I’d just argued that any modern reference to anyone of or in the Confederacy is racism. And that’s precisely the thing that I was think of when I wrote the first comment to this thread.
Positively citing the Confederate leadership is so acknowledgedly stupid that only racists do it, it’s true. But I don’t like coming to it in that direction because of the Lefty tendency to
a) uniformly ascribe Nazified beliefs to the rabble of the South who fought — not the leadership and not the planter class but just the common people. This tendency to my ears sounds wingnutty. It’s exactly the logic used by wingnuts who label everyone in Iraq who is physically against the occupation as a terrorist or even al-qaeda operative. Actually, the average guy in Iraq (whose beliefs aren’t exactly the finest brand of liberalism, either, odds are) fights Americans because they are invaders, have threatened his hearth and home, perhaps bombed a member of his family. Well, that — and the draft — is also why the soldiers fought and the civilians resisted in the South during the war — “because you’re here” as the Rebel told the Yankee.
b) give Northern leaders a complete free pass. And I specifically mean butchers like Sheridan and Sherman who can apparently be excused their subsequent genocide of the Sioux on the grounds that they learned such policies fighting Southern traitors who, to the last man woman and child (as Sherman wrote) truly deserved extinction. To stick up for the Indians is ordinarily a Leftist duty; but not, apparently, when it means questioning where the passions and tactics and skills and leadership for implementing the genocide of the Plains Indains came from.
There’s no such thing as righteous slaughter, and while wingnuts believe to the contrary to such extent that it’s the basis for their politics, Lefties almost always are loathe to flirt with that sort of attitude — except when it comes to posts on the Civil War. Seriously, I’ve seen Lefties more merciful to the civvies of Nazi Germany (which had a far more refined and representative democracy than the south or even America of the 1860s; and therefore more responsibility) than to the garden variety Southerner of 1860.
I haven’t gone to the books on this one, but I don’t think NBF founded the KKK — he was the first Grand Dragon.
This must be “pile on Al Sharpton month” among the Bright Shiny Object Boys. Our favorite DUI-collecting right-wing cartoonist took some time out from his Teddy Kennedy obsession to devote the last few days to the guy. (By the way: If the BSOBs are trying to imply that Sharpton doesn’t go after black rappers, they’re wrong as usual: http://diversityinc.com/public/1708.cfm)
Positively citing the Confederate leadership is so acknowledgedly stupid that only racists do it, it’s true.
Clearly you are an anti-semite, sir!
Shall we say pistols at dawn?
We can resolve this quickly by observing that Nathan Bedford Forrest was a traitor. Why is Rep. Poe quoting traitors favorably on the floor of the US House of Representatives? What’s next? Will he want to incorporate the Confederate Battle Flag into the state flag of Mississippi! What’s that you say? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_flag
[…] Posted by Phoenix Woman on May 9th, 2007 I’m not a running buddy of Al Sharpton, but it is amazing how he manages to send the wingnuts into low-altitude Earth orbit. […]
Who’s got their facts wrong here then ?
http://tinyurl.com/ytac9v
And again: http://tinyurl.com/326ovq
You’ve updated this post once. Considering so much of what you have written is either wrong or based on an incorrect assumption it would appear to deserve another (ie in that Black/Forrest comparison Forrest wouldn’t appear to differ on the issues you credit Black for).
Let’s see your credibility at work. Or no more comments about other blogs not correcting the same factual errors and arguements based on myths.
The whole civil war thing is all messed up. In some ways, the South got screwed.
I say this from the standpoint of someone who is 100% against bigotry, slavery, and general not being nice-ness.
It was a war of economics. The Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until the Civil War was almost two years old. The factories of the North needed the cheap resources from the South. Why were those resources so cheap? Slaves.
That is the ugly truth about America’s meteoric rise to power. It was built on the back of exploited Africans. We used thier labor for 100 years before we got all uppity about it, and only then because someone other than the governing class in Washington wanted control of the pursestrings.
It would be a far cleaner issue if the Proclamation had set off the war. As it is, it almost seems like an afterthought.
So I get a little tired of hearing a bunch of moaning about the Good Old Days When Rich White Men Could Do Whatever They Wanted With No Consequences Whatsoever, but the true historical context of that conflict does seem to get white-washed to make the North seem without fault. Giving jack asses like these some kind of permission to harken back to the Good Old Days When Rich White Men Could Do Whatever They Wanted With No Consequences Whatsoever. Fuck!
HTML,
Take it from a professional historian, HTML, you’re just gettin’ hit with neo-Confederate nonsense. It happens whenever any Civil War related topic comes up. And it happens most of all when that topic involves race.
Here’s some information from a recent scholarly article on Nathan Bedford Forrest (Court Carney, “The Contested Image of Nathan Bedford Forrest,” Journal of Sounthern History, Vol. 67, No. 3. (Aug., 2001), pp. 601-630…not available online unless you have access to JSTOR):
* In April of 1864, Forrest and his men were responsible for one of the worst atrocities of the Civil War. They defeated a much smaller Union force at Fort Pillow, Tenn., which included a several units of U.S. Colored Troops, including, it was rumored, some of Forrest’s former slaves. Rather than merely capture the federal force, Forrest’s troops slaughtered the African American soldiers, killing 66% of them, a much higher ration than the other Union troops. A Congressional committee later declared that it was “an indiscriminate slaughter.” This earned Forrest the nickname “The Butcher of Fort Pillow.”
* Here is how Carney describes Forrest’s relationship to the KKK:
* After Forrest’s death in 1877, he was buried in his hometown of Memphis. Soon legends spread about him:
* In the late 19th century, Forrest’s negative image in the North was mainly based on the Fort Pillow incident. Only after 1900 was his KKK involvement emphasized by his critics. Meanwhile his positive image in the South was constructed almost entirely in terms of military and civic heroism, with racial issues fading to the background. This was the spirit that surrounded the unveiling of a famous 1905 statue to Forrest in Memphis.
* In the 1930s, on the basis of a biography by Andrew Nelson Lytle, a more “defiant” Forrest came into play. Now Forrest was the righteous defender of Sounthern yeomanry, and his leadership of the Klan was played up part of his defense of Southern values.
* In 1952, two books came out celebrating Forrest, Shelby Foot’s novel Shiloh and Aileen Wells Parks’s childrens book Bedford Forrest: Boy on Horseback. This latter book turned Forrest into a symbol of American patriotism.
* During the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s, racial appeals to Forrest by white supremacists once again rose. These subsided in the 1960s, as Memphis white elites accommodated themselves to the end of Jim Crow.
* During the ’70s, Shelby Foote completed the trilogy that had begun with Shiloh. Always an admirer of Forrest, Foote now presented him as representing all that was best about the South. He was challenged by African Americans, especially in Memphis itself, where Blacks now formed a much greater percentage of the population.
* In the 1980s, Forrest’s image grew in popularity among white Southerners, in part due to Foote’s promotion of him. Unlike many of the commentators here, Foote was at least honest enough to admit that Forrest had been a Klan leader and a slave trader, but Foote even apologized for these activities. For example, in a 1985 newspaper interview…
* Foote and Black Memphians (the latter backed by the NAACP) proceeded to have a long dispute about whether or not to remove the 1905 statue of Bedford Forrest.
* Two new biographies of Forrest published in the 1990s continued to promote the Foote version of the general. Tony Horwitz in his study of Confederate memory discovered that Nathan Bedford Forrest t-shirts were outselling Robert E. Lee t-shirts by 5-1, presumably because of Forrest’s reputation as an uncompromising defender of the Southern people. “Forrest … symbolized the unrepentant rebel in a manner unlike that of Lee, who presented more of a sanctified, sanitized symbol of national reconciliation.” (p. 629)
* Carney concludes:
So, HTML, don’t be bullied into revising this post. The man who is so admired is the Klansman and slave trader. That’s in the very nature of neo-Confederate ideology. But when they get caught in their white supremacist circle jerks, they start spreading the bullshit. Pay it no mind.
Erp….that’s the Journal of SOUTHERN History
(please give us a preview button before returning to your fields….)
Hey, Kilo–
Tell us all about the Fort Pillow massacre, while you’re defending Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Whoops–thanks, IB. You’re quick on th’ draw.
IB,
I’ve got a couple of Foote’s books, including Shiloh. I went through a Civil War history phase in high school, and Foote’s style appealed. I talked to him just before I left for college, so that’s mid ’90s, and I get the impression (in hindsight) that by then, he’d been beat down on the Forrest question. He still admired the military skill of Forrest but had finally decided he didn’t have to defend the man himself. Impression I got then was he had such a love for Forrest was because everyone else were fanboys of Jeb Stuart. We Mississippians will be contrary sometimes.
DocAmazing said, May 9, 2007 at 20:37
Hey, Kilo– Tell us all about the Fort Pillow massacre, while you’re defending Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Why ? Run out of things to ignore have you ?
There’s a post here about him founding the KKK and never parting from it. I’ve pointed to some articles which contradict this. You wat the goalposts moved do it yourself nimrod.
Kilo–
You’re right. He was just its first Grand Wizard, and lost interest in the organization when he was no longer in charge. That’s very, very different.
I’ll bet you can tie your shoes all by yourself now, too! Such a big boy! Good work with those goalposts!
Shall we say pistols at dawn?
We can say it. I don’t know what it means, but we can say it.
NBF was a complex man. He was certainly a slave trader and supporter of succession. On the other hand, some of the sources report that he did an about face on race in later life, one even calling him “Memphis’ first White Civil Rights Advocate.” Lots of people on both sides use NBF to grind their axes. Incontinentia, for example, cites the Fort Pillow massacre, but neglects to mention that Forrest was cleared of any responsibility for it by an investigation lead by Sherman. Forrest’s own words indicate he abandoned the KKK because it was turning into a violent racist organization. But then some people like cartoon caricatures for villains as much as they like cartoon caricatures for heroes.
In any case, the broohaha over quoting him is just stupid. Stalin once said, “the death of one person is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.” I should be able to use that quote without hordes of righttards shouting “LEFTY BLOG COMMENTER QUOTES STALIN!!!!” If someone were citing an expert on military strategy, if would be perfectly reasonable to quote NBF (or Heinz Guderian or Subotai, frex).
What was significant about Poe’s quote in Congress is not he attributed the quote to NBF. It was that the quote made no fucking sense whatsoever. Does Poe actually think we could get to Iraq before the Iraqis get there? The cries of “REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN QUOTES FORREST!!!!” just detract from Poe’s batshit insanity.
> You’re right. He was just its first Grand Wizard,
Yeah that was mentioned twice in my post that you responded to. You remember, the one that refers to him never having been a member, never participated in the klan and having been elected as a popular figurehead for it in absentia.
> and lost interest in the organization when he was
> no longer in charge. That’s very, very different.
Very different from what ? The KKK as you know it as today ? Well I would agree, as do all historians.
I don’t know what you are referring to when you say that he “lost interest in the organisation”. Presumably that he lost interest in calling for it to be disbanded when it was a couple of years later.
Not really something that was worth text pointing out, but who’s accusing you of not being worthless here.
> I’ll bet you can tie your shoes all by yourself now, too!
> Such a big boy! Good work with those goalposts
You’re the one here not interested in discussing what this article says or the accounts that contradict it. You’re the one trying to pretend you’ve made any kind of arguement that relates to what was being discussed.
Good god, if it were a matter of quoting Forrest on race relations, you would have a point. If you wanted to quote someone about military strategy, however, that’s another matter entirely. His views on race relations don’t taint his generalship.
His views on race relations don’t taint his generalship.
His generalship tainted his generalship.
Righteous Bubba, troops under his command committed a war crime. Historians debate his responsibility for it–I’m among those inclined to think him guilty. That makes him a bad man, but not an incompetent general.
Let me put it this way–do you think T. S. Eliot wrote good poetry? If you do, does that make you a Nazi?
Let me put it this way–do you think T. S. Eliot wrote good poetry? If you do, does that make you a Nazi?
That’s a stupid analogy as none of what I’ve read (not much and Murder in the Cathedral) seems part and parcel of his political sense, and it tended not to kill black people when it was produced.
In Forrest’s case, we have a traitorous racist general who presided over a racist massacre. If you can’t understand the impropriety of a congressman invoking the guys wisdom on military matters…
Also, did you mean Ezra Pound or TS Eliot? I thought calling Eliot an anti-Semite was fine, but Nazi seems a bit of a reach. Forgive me for thinking you haven’t really thought this through.
All talks of racism aside for a brief moment…why is he suggesting we follow the military strategy of the side that LOST?