Southern Civil War lies continue

And, with the sesquicentennial on us, and wingnuts all about it, stuff like this will surely only continue.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans continues the lie that the war wasn't ultimately about slavery:

“We in the South, who have been kicked around for an awfully long time and are accused of being racist, we would just like the truth to be known,” said Michael Givens, commander-in-chief of the Sons, explaining the reason for the television ads. While there were many causes of the war, he said, “our people were only fighting to protect themselves from an invasion and for their independence.”

Let's count the most obvious untruths.

1. No invasion was ever threatened. All Lincoln did was to protect federal property at Fort Sumter and elsewhere.

2. You weren't independent in 1860-61.

3. You were, overall, more racist than the North. (Not that there wasn't plenty to go around.)

Givens isn't alone:

“Many people in the South still believe that is a just and honorable cause. Do I believe they were right in what they did? Absolutely,” said Jeff Antley, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, noting that he spoke for himself and not any organization. “There’s no shame or regret over the action those men took.”

Mr. Antley said he was not defending slavery, which he called an abomination. “But defending the South’s right to secede, the soldiers’ right to defend their homes and the right to self-government doesn’t mean your arguments are without weight because of slavery.”

Well, they are without weight if you're dishonest.

The truth? From historian James W. Loewen.

“The North did not go to war to end slavery, it went to war to hold the country together and only gradually did it become anti-slavery — but slavery is why the South seceded.”

And, that's not all.

Here's a rejoinder to the SCV:

“I can only imagine what kind of celebration they would have if they had won,” said Lonnie Randolph, president of the South Carolina N.A.A.C.P.
He said he was dumbfounded by “all of this glamorization and sanitization of what really happened.” When Southerners refer to states’ rights, he said, “they are really talking about their idea of one right — to buy and sell human beings.”

Well, they act like they DID win.

Is this still important? Hell, yes:

“These battles of memory are not only academic,” said Mark Potok, the director of intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Cente r. “They are really about present-day attitudes. I don’t think the neo-Confederate movement is growing, but it’s gotten a new shot of life because of the sesquicentennial.”

Need I say Tea Party, Preznit Kumbaya?

Josh Marshall, neolib dupe and doofus on Wikileaks

Josh Marshall, publisher of the blog and sometimes news site Talking Points Memo, has in the past, shown himself to be almost as much a mainstream media mogul as the proprietors of the New York Times, etc. Posting White House slide shows, using multiple anonymous sources in stories are just two manifestations of that.

Now, we get his his right hand man David Kurtz's take, in one post, on the Wikileaks cable leaks. (Yes, I didn't check the post's byline originally; but, I figured that, with its breathlessness, it was Josh's. Instead, it's Kurtz's breathlessness busted by my the second time. That said, Josh is still the publisher. He could be talking more to Kurtz.) That's followed by Josh sticking his Napoleonic hand inside his publisher's military vest.

The most naive post? Kurtz's "five biggest surprises" one.

The idea that Sunni Arab states fear Iran's nuke program so much they want us to take Iran out? Hinted at in news stories years ago.

That the State Department ordered spying on foreign diplomats? In the wake of the UN discussion on Iraq in late 2002-early 2003, facts to this end were uncovered and reported five years ago. It's just continued since then, obviously.

That Iran supplied North Korea with missiles? News, sure. Surprise? Not really. And, also, per FAIR, not necessarily true, either! And thus, per the FAIR story, I've also busted Kurtz for blindly trusting the New York Times as a secondary source.

Ditto on Iran using the cover of the Red Crescent to smuggle material into battle sites.

That the U.S. diplomatic corps relies on blog-ready gossip items? It has for decades. We probably could learn boatloads from a country like Great Britain.

Next, Marshall notes that WikiLeaks may have intended the cables dump as an attack on U.S. diplomacy.

NOoooooo! Next up, TPM gets an IgNoble Prize.

Of course, the now commenter-unfriendly TPM allows no comments on either story.

What's even worse in a way is how Marshall comes off as a pedantic small-college professor, or cyber-small town newspaper editor:

We've given explicit marching orders to our editors and reporters not to get distracted by the 'meta' part of the wikileaks story and just focus on the details unearthed.

First, we're covering all the details we can find. So that puts some real limits on how much we can credibly criticize the way these cables came to light. I'm also not sure we would have made different decisions than, say, The New York Times, if we'd been given the opportunity to report out the cables in advance of their release. And of course we here at TPM like every other news organization routinely file FOIA requests on the reasoning that it's in the public interest to get as much as possible of the inner workings of government exposed to the public.

What he's saying is, "Folks, look at me give you a peek under the hood about how to run an online news site!"

Oy.

An actual surprise? Per McClatchy, the total clusterfuck of the 2009 coup in Honduras?

An even bigger actual surprise? At least some Chinese officials are OK with a Seoul-led reunified Korea.

Updated Dec. 1.

Feingold for President?

Should Russ Feingold run a third-party campaign for President in 2012? I'd be down with that.

And, among more professional opiners, Alec Cockburn says yes. And says it's possible.

That said, the meat of his article has to be the speculation over whether or not George Soros would finance an independnet progressive challenge to Obama. Here's some recent Soros verbiage:

"We have just lost this election, we need to draw a line," he said. "And if this president can't do what we need, it is time to start looking somewhere else."

The description of Soros’s sensational remarks appeared in the Huffington Post, citing unnamed sources, presumably at the private meeting. The story cited Michael Vachon, an adviser to Soros, as not disputing the story, though “Vachon also clarified that the longtime progressive giver was not referring to a primary challenge to the president. Mr. Soros fully supports the president as the leader of the Democratic Party. He was not suggesting that we seek another candidate for 2012.”

Beyond being the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act, and one of a minority within his own party to oppose the 2002 Iraq war vote, Feingold also voted against the bailout in 2008. Sure, he's got a spot or two on his record, but, it would be hard to do better with a name candidate.

That said, we actually have two questions.

The first is not about Soros' money, but about Feingold's willingness to run outside the Democratic Party, whether as an independent, a Green candidate, the Reform Party candidate or whatever.

Then comes the question of Soros' money.

Hitchens gets a hypocrisy beatdown

Acerbic political analyst Christopher Hitchens and former British prime minister Tony Blair debated in Canada last week whether or not religion was a general force for moral good. By voting of students at the debate, among other things, Hitch won a smackdown victory.

But, Josh Rosenau decided to engage in a little monkey-wrenching, asking how Hitch could talk about religion killing so many people when the Iraq war he still supports has done the same!

Touche!

My own take on whether this was a blow below the belt or not?

First, the more snarky take.

Ohhh, what a smackdown! But, surely, Hitch has sent millions of $$$ to his drunkenness-beloved Kurds, has he not?

As for Iraq and Hitch's knowledge, the man had been a correspondent/reporter in the Middle East for more than a decade, if not more than two, before the invasion. It was his ego that led him to portray himself as a special defender of the Kurds; it was his willful ignorance, or overlooking, of the existence of large Kurd populations in Iran and Turkey that blinded him to problems of writing Iraqi Kurds a blank check for independence; and it was his self-righteousness, IMO, that blinded him to the idea that the US government under George W. Bush was the entity to successfully pull this off.

Shorter anti-Hitchens rant? He made his bed, he now gets to sleep in it.

Shorter anti-Hitchens rant 2? If you sleep with dogs, you may catch fleas.

Now, the more serious take.

Can moral stances, or actions with moral consequences, be judged rationally?

Well, basically nothing of importance in terms of human actions is 100 percent rational, but many actions appear to be largely rational. Or, at least, could have been largely rational, given that the actors had a certain degree of consciousness and a certain amount of empirical and/or analytical knowledge.

Both Hitchens' support for the Iraq war and, say, the papacy's opposition to condoms in all cases (before Benedict XVI re-read Moroni's golden plates and decided that penile gloves could be worn in cases of prostitution) are instances of actions that fall under this sphere of judgment.

While deaths due to the Iraq war may not be as high as condom-preventable AIDS deaths in Africa (to use an example Hitch cited from his debate with Blair), the order of magnitude is similar enough for a charge of moral equivalence to be raised rationally against Hitch.

GOP nutbars out over WikiLeaks ... and Dems?

The GOP nuts are already going nuts over WikiLeaks.

Peter King wants Wikileaks declared a terrorist organization.

All that's needed to be a terrorist, according to Rep. Peter King, is a website and some inconvenient information. That's why King sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder on Sunday, demanding that whistleblower website WikiLeaks be deemed a "foreign terrorist organization" and it's founder declared a terror ringleader.

Substitute "Facebook page" for "website" and "stupidity" for "inconvenient information," and we can declare Sarah Palin a terrorist.

Of course, cowardly, balls-less Democrats are already jumping on the "me too" bandwagon. Unsurprisingly, John Kerry is leading off the First Amendment-hating warmongers:

Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described the release as "a reckless action which jeopardizes lives by exposing raw, contemporaneous intelligence."

The only life I see in imminent danger is Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the country's former president, will probably have Berlusconi whacked in an omerta-style hit now that it's been revealed we see Silvio as Vlad the Impaler's sock puppet.

I can't wait for the full 250,000 pages to be sorted through and commented on; I "can't wait" with baited scare quote breath for GOP wingnuts and ball-less Democrats to try to outdo each other in either real or fake hysteria.

And, given its recent missive, I can't wait, and "can't wait," for The Nation to bury its head further up Obama's ass by saying the Koch brothers are funding Julian Assange.

Hindus want to reclaim yoga

A group of ardent Hindus, some called "Hindu nationalists," want to reclaim yoga to what they claim are its Hindu roots. An eclectic group of opponents, ranging from Deepak Chopra to religious scholars, says it's not Hindu but pre-Hindu.

Is yoga from before Hinduism? Well, I think that it depends on part what you call Hinduism.

Western critical religious scholars, for example, call everything in the Bible before the Babylonian exile "Israelite religion," reserving "Judaism" only for post-Exilic religion.

If that standard is followed, AND if roots of yogic practice can be traced back that far, then, no, it's not Hindu.

That said, conservative Christians and Jews alike, today, reject the scholarly distinction mentioned above. I'm sure the "nationalist Hindus" do the same. (That said, I think it's fair to say Hinduism is not "just" a religion, but, more than any other world religious tradition, a sociology as well.)

That said No. 2, folks like Chopra have good financial reasons for denying the Hindu roots of many religious practices from India that have become relabeled as "spiritual." Per the story, even if you're not a conservative Baptist minister who believes yoga is of the devil, telling many practitioners that they're engaged in a Hindu religious exercise will surely drive them off.

But, package it in smiley New Age wrapping and ...