We keep hearing of how the Republicans are the party of the south, and will take those morals and values to the whole country. We see bigots like George Allen take up the mantle, and Trent Lott suggest things would be better if Strom Thurman had been able to protect Jim Crow and segregation. They fight to keep the confederate flag on government buildings (heritage, not hate my ass) and run TV ads saying if you vote for a black man he'll sleep with the white women.
In short, they would like to be and act like the decedents and inheritors of the Confederate States of America.
But how would the Confederates feel about George Bush, the Republican's standard bearer? Would they be proud, honored and thrilled that this Texan brought back their great efforts at self-government and freedom?
Not according to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. The following snippet is from his final address to the Provisional Congress of the CSA just after he was popularly elected to the Presidency he had been filling on an interim basis. I heard it in the car from a book on tape on the Civil War, and was blown away by how prescient he was in describing our current President.
Not only do the causes which induced us to separate still exist in full force, but they have been strengthened, and whatever doubt may have lingered in the minds of any must have been completely dispelled by subsequent events. If instead of being a dissolution of a league, it were indeed a rebellion in which we are engaged, we might find ample vindication for the course we have adopted/ in the in the scenes which are now being enacted in the United States. Our people now look with contemptuous astonishment on those with whom they had been so recently associated. They shrink with aversion from the bare idea of renewing such a connection. When they see a President making war without the assent of Congress; when they behold judges threatened because they maintain the writ of habeas corpus so sacred to freemen; when they see justice and law trampled under the armed heel of military authority, and upright men and innocent women dragged to distant dungeons upon the mere edict of a despot; when they find all this tolerated and applauded by a people who had been in the full enjoyment of freedom but a few months ago,-- they believe that there must be some radical incompatibility between such a people and themselves.
I added the emphasis at the end, but that seems like a perfect description of the powers George Bush has taken for himself, and the ancestors of his party used to find them anathema. In fact, Davis suggests that regardless of their original cause for rebellion the very actions George Bush and the Republicans have taken in the 21st century would be reason enough for secession.
It would be worse today. When Abraham Lincoln took on these same powers he did so in a time of insurrection, a time when the country was at war with itself on its own soil. Bush has done so when there is no invader, no enemy soldier on our soil. Instead Bush takes on these powers when he is the aggressor, he is the attacker, of a country which did us no harm at all.
The current crop of insane clowns running the Republican Party are only the inheritors of the worst aspects of the Confederacy -- the hate, the bigotry and the divisiveness -- and none of the honor or values they claimed to fight for. Even the Confederates wouldn't support their anti-freedom policies, and would see them as justification for secession.
Fortunately we have the ballot box, and began taking back our country without secession last month. In 2007 it's time to take over a few more statehouses, and in 2008 to take the country back altogether.