The Fart of the Deal

 The great oracle of today’s Republican party has just announced that Abraham Lincoln could and should have been made to disappear from history, if only some stable genius of a negotiator had been around to avert the Civil War.

It’s possible that tough-lady Haley’s recent back-and-forth on the cause of that war provoked some interest in the subject on the part of Donald Trump and that one of his flunkies actually scrounged up enough knowledge to put together a large-print brief for him, describing the Peace Conference of 1861.  All right, I only said it’s possible.

The Conference was a veritable Who’s Who of the bipartisan Establishment as it existed before the rise of the Republican Party, and the proposed “Peace Amendment” it produced would have perpetually enshrined slavery in the slave states and written both Dred Scott and Stephen Douglas’ “popular sovereignty” into the Constitution (effectively enshrining it throughout the rest of the country) – all in hopes of keeping the border states that had not yet seceded from doing so in time to join Jeff Davis in hoisting the Confederate battle flag.

The Americans of that day who had a hard time envisioning negro slavery prevailing through the Nineteenth and into the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, along with those Southerners who were skeptical about an unamendable Amendment, were less than impressed.  But that’s only because those benighted folk lacked a Leader and divinely inspired Deal-maker with the fantastic skill and vision of the founder of Trump University and Trump Casino.

Gosh, how different all of history might have been!

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/peace.asp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Conference_of_1861

What Color Is the Yellow Peril?

Politco.com article on GOP candidate for special election to US House

In light of this report, who can deny that the Republican Party (in Nevada, at least) has become the vessel and willing tool of dangerous reactionary demagoguery? And on what basis can one rate the Republican Party of any other state superior to that of Nevada?

The only difference between reactionary and revolutionary demagogues is that the former simply pander to the ignorant prejudices of the masses as they find them, while the latter attempt to manipulate and rearrange them. In the long run both are equally dangerous to any system of ordered liberty.

With “conservatives” like this, who needs Bolsheviks? (Indeed, did Lenin cause default on the Czar’s debt with any less insouciant contempt than Amodei threatens default on “Obama’s”? But Lenin was not a fool, and unlike Amodei and the Nevada GOP, he really had nothing to fear from the bondholders … )