The most recent excretion of treasonous stunts is Texas governor Abbott’s attempt to resurrect states’ rights in a showdown with the national government over the border with Mexico.
What Asshat Abbot is doing, is, well, the same sort of stuff the leaders of the southern slave-holding states did in the 1850s, leading to secession and an actual hot war. Here are a few links explaining this point:
I am not at all optimistic that there is any good ending to all this. I still think there are too many people who think that if we can defeat Trump in November, everything will go back to “normal.” I’m sorry, folks, but Trump is only a symptom of the rot and sedition that the conservative and libertarian movements, and the (anti)Republican Party have been cultivating and promoting for several decades now. Hatred of the national government and, even hatred of compassion or “appearing weak” has become a bedrock belief among almost a third of our fellow citizens.
When the shooting starts — and I feel it’s almost inevitable at this point — then one of the important questions becomes: what side will people in the military take? They, after all, are the ones who will do most of the shooting and killing.
Will they choose to follow the example of Robert E. Lee? Or will they follow the example of George H. Thomas?
Both Lee and Thomas had been born and raised in Virginia. Both were distinguished graduates of the United States Military Academy at West Point. And both served with noticeable merit as junior officers in the War on Mexico.
But when the shooting started at Fort Sumpter, Robert E. Lee decided to fight to “defend” Virginia against the national government. Lee decided to commit treason, though he was never tried and convicted of it. That’s what he did, and everyone at the time knew it. And Lee remained wildly popular with the soldiers of the defeated Confederate armies, and generally with the people of the southern states. It’s one reason Article 3 of the 14 Amendment was written and passed.
George H. Thomas, despite being a slave owner, decided to fight for the United States and put down the Confederate rebellion led by Lee. In the army before the Civil War, Thomas stood out as one of the few officers who had led troops in all three combat arms—infantry, cavalry, and artillery.
When the Civil War began, Thomas was with the 2nd U.S. Cavalry in Utah. 19 of the 36 officers in the unit resigned to serve in the Confederate armies, including three of Thomas’s superior officers: Albert Sidney Johnston, William J. Hardee, and Robert E. Lee. His family in Virginia basically disowned him, and never spoke to Thomas again. His sisters fell into poverty during the war, and Thomas sent them money, but they refused to accept it, declaring they had no brother.
But despite the terrible pain of his family’s anger against him — and the cloud of suspicion that followed him everywhere for being a Virginian and having served with Lee, Johnston, and Hardee — Thomas was one of the most brilliant and militarily successful generals in the Union Army. He won one of the sole Union victories in the first months of the war, at Mill Springs, Kentucky.
In September 1863, when a misunderstood maneuver order opened a massive hole in the Union line during the Battle of Chickamauga, it was Thomas who rescued the Union Army, and the entire Western theater of war, with his quick organization of a defensive position, completely surrounded by the Confederate Army. His masterful leadership in this desperate situation, beating back one Confederate assault after another, earned Thomas the nickname The Rock of Chickamauga. Were it not for Thomas at Chickamauga, the entirety of Tennessee and Kentucky would have probably been occupied by the Confederates, and the war continued for two or three more years than it did.
Two months later, it was Thomas who led a decisive breakthrough on Missionary Ridge in the Battle of Chattanooga, finally dislodging the Confederates from the area and securing Union control of the crucial railroad junction as well as of Tennessee River
A year later. in December 1864, Thomas led the Union Army in another massive victory, at the Battle of Nashville. In fact, at Nashville, Thomas annihilated the army of Confederate General John Bell Hood — the one and only time in the Civil War that an entire Confederate army was destroyed on the field of battle.
So as our country once again grapples with the treasonous “states rights,” anti-federal government ideas and philosophies of the conservative and libertarian movements, I have to wonder. Who will they follow? When the time comes, who will they decide to be: Robert E. Lee or George H. Thomas?