Wednesday Stuff

(I know I was moving around videos a lot yesterday for anyone paying attention so I could get stuff featuring Larry Elder in CA, who we can now just call a failed Trumpist nut and nothing more as noted here – I’ll try not to move stuff around like that again in the future.)

Robert Reich tells us more about what’s going on with the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill...so damn many reasons to “fight like hell” for this against the usual corporate criminals and their bought-and-paid-for politicians, as Reich correctly points out...



...and John and Benjamin Dixon tell us about the statue of Robert E. Lee coming down in Richmond, VA and the subsequent wingnut caterwauling that followed, with Mango Mussolini crowing that Lee would have led us to military victory in Afghanistan, aided by Laura Ingraham’s historical revisionism of course...



And as far as Lee’s postwar legacy is concerned, I give you the following from here...

After the war, Lee did advise defeated southerners not to rise up against the North. Lee might have become a rebel once more, and urged the South to resume fighting—as many of his former comrades wanted him to. But even in this task Grant, in 1866, regarded his former rival as falling short, saying that Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”

Nor did Lee’s defeat lead to an embrace of racial egalitarianism. The war was not about slavery, Lee insisted later, but if it were about slavery, it was only out of Christian devotion that white southerners fought to keep black people enslaved. Lee told a New York Herald reporter, in the midst of arguing in favor of somehow removing black people from the South (“disposed of,” in his words), “that unless some humane course is adopted, based on wisdom and Christian principles, you do a gross wrong and injustice to the whole negro race in setting them free. And it is only this consideration that has led the wisdom, intelligence and Christianity of the South to support and defend the institution up to this time.”

...

Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of black Americans, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality in the South. Lee told Congress that black people lacked the intellectual capacity of white people and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was among white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.

...and boy, did I have issues with this recent column from former Dem PA lieutenant governor Mark Singel saying that departing U.S. Senate Repug Pat Toomey from our beloved commonwealth of PA deserves respect from both sides of the aisle, as it were, presumably because Toomey voted to convict Trump in the latter's second impeachment...talk about setting the bar low...so many reasons to take issue with this (including this, where Toomey defended Trump during his first impeachment), as well as Singel saying that Repug U.S. House Rep Dan Mueser (sp?) was a “credible candidate,” even though, as noted here, Meuser once said that the “liberal left” is a greater threat than ISIS.

Oh, and there’s this too of course...



Update 9/26/21: I should ask Singel if Toomey deserves "respect" for this also (more lying BS about Toomey's beloved "tax cuts").

Update 9/30/21: Toomey is a thoroughly worthless worm, but we knew that already didn't we? (here).

...and David Pakman reminds us here about Dubya’s 9/11 speech over the weekend where Number 43 found the proverbial nut linking the 9/11 attackers to the 1/6 domestic terrorists...and finding the nut ONLY ON THAT...



...and yeah, it looks like the wingnuts were apoplectic over AOC’s “Tax the Rich” dress at the recent Met Gala (yeah, don't you hate it when high-profile women make political statements through their clothing?)...



I have only this to say in response...

...and guitarist Ed King (of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Strawberry Alarm Clock – now there’s a combo!) would have been 72 yesterday.