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Have you noticed how many right-wingers are decrying the "tyranny" of the Obama administration these days?

But it's becoming common among mainstream right-wingers, particularly after the president dismissed these characterizations during a speech at Ohio State. Sure enough, everyone from Jonah Goldberg to Michelle Malkin piled on with the "yeah, whatever you say, dude" retorts.

But I was reminded the other day, rereading Stephen Budiansky's marvelous book about Reconstruction, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, just where the right-wing fetish about "tyranny" comes from. It's a highly selective fetish, after all; none of these "libertarians" seemed even remotely concerned when George W. Bush launched the whole "enemy combatants" enterprise back in 2001.

According to Budiansky, it -- like the phrase "waving the bloody shirt," as well as the whole conservative adoption of that rhetorical ruse as an aggressive form of defense -- has its origins in the years during and immediately following the Civil War, when it was common for Southerners to sneer at Abraham Lincoln (alive or dead) as a "tyrant":

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”

“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the “domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous. “This is a white man’s government,” was the phrase echoed over and over in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being subjected.

A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point blank.

So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers, happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution, that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.

Indeed, it's common to hear neo-Confederate agitators -- those folks who are still pushing for modern secession by the South -- describe Lincoln to this day as a "tyrant."

The idea of being governed by a black president? To many of these people even today, that is itself the essence of tyranny.

[Cross-posted at Orcinus.]

I am really excited that the long overdue battle over immigration reform and a path to citizenship has finally begun in earnest. While I am heartsick at the reason, it is good news that common sense gun safety laws are once again being discussed in this country almost two decades after we finally passed the Brady Bill. And the on-going, never ending budget fights remain urgently important in terms of stopping more damage to middle class and poor people in America. I know I will be engaging daily in the vitally important battles over all these issues, and I expect my progressive allies all over the country will be as well.

But I remain troubled, profoundly troubled, by the fact that fundamental economic issues seem to be the last thing on anybody’s minds in DC. Our economy may be slowly getting better, but we still have a very serious jobs crisis in this country- nowhere near to full employment and not on a path to get there for many years to come. Our manufacturing sector is still only limping along and our trade deficit remains catastrophically high. Our infrastructure is still badly in need of repair. Wages for most workers are still stuck in neutral or slipping compared to inflation, and a third of those who found new jobs after losing them in the great recession are being paid less than in the old job. Our housing market is getting stronger in some metro areas, but is still very weak overall in terms of prices, homeowners under water, and numbers of foreclosures and empty homes.

And looming over these economic problems is quite literally the elephant in the room: these gargantuan Too Big To Fail, and apparently Too Big To Jail, Wall Street financial conglomerates.

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The recent war over the federal budget and debt ceiling were simply the latest in a long line of skirmishes where Democrats - the self-described practitioners of "good faith" and seekers of compromise - found themselves in a pitched policy battle with recalcitrant Republicans. Right-wingers so high on radical, Randian, tea-party-brewed, Kool Aid, that anything short of dismantling the Federal Government and requiring universal tattooing of Milton Friedman where-the-sun-don't-shine was treason.

After its humble beginnings as an astroturf, Koch-Brothers-funded revival aimed at mobilizing ill-informed, reactionary, mostly older white Americans against health care reform and psychologically-constructed monsters under the bed, the tea party has become an malignant force that now holds the Republican Congressional Caucus - and with it the country - hostage.

While the Stockholm Syndrome may not have quite set in yet among all Republicans, the tri-corner-hat crowd seems to behave much like the giant Brain Bug in the movie Starship Troopers, jamming a claw into the heads of their fellow GOPers and slowly sucking out cerebral tissue until only the brainless body remains.

Most problematic, most of the tea partiers, private citizens and elected officials alike, seem to possess just slightly less understanding of the Federal budget or tax code of than say, Mater from Cars. Yet, these are the people in the driver's seat as the country heads for what might be Act II of the Great Recession, unless progressives, centrists, and others edified with high school civics adopt a new strategy to counter them.

And counter them we must, for they and their ilk are nothing new, but representative of a recurring and quite dangerous political strain that has always been with us. Their undermining of the traditions, culture, and give-and-take necessary for any democracy to function has had destructive results on free societies in the past, and taken down a Republic or three.

This is what President Obama seems constitutionally unable to grasp. That even if they are a sometimes useful foil, and (sadly) sometimes equally useful in getting him the policy results he wishes, by definition the Tea Party brigade sees any compromise as evil, because everyone to the left of Pat Buchanan is viewed as a mortal threat to their imagined perfect society, which looks a lot like Utah.

With fewer minorities. And a lot more Jesus.

None other than former Secretary of State and one-time Republican wunderkind Henry Kissinger understood this to be true. In his first book on the Napoleonic wars, Kissinger offered an almost perfect description - on the international stage - of what can happen when an entity with no interest in compromise and no problem destroying the current order gains control of major political party or country:

"It is a mistake to assume that diplomacy can always settle international disputes if there is 'good faith' and 'willingness to come to an agreement'"; in a revolutionary situation "each power will seem to its opponent to lack precisely these qualities. In such circumstances many will see the early demands of a revolutionary power as 'merely tactical' and will delude themselves that the revolutionary power would actually accept the status quo with a few modifications."

Kissinger concluded that, "Coalitions against revolutions have usually come about only at the end of a long series of betrayals ... for the powers which represent legitimacy ... cannot 'know' that their antagonist is not amenable to 'reason' until he has demonstrated [that he is not]."

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AngryBlackLady has a few things to say, mostly in response to a fairly clueless and tepid defense of dear Ms. Boyle over at Mediaite:

The obvious problem is separating the kids — obvious problem is obvious.

But there’s another problem — the Charleston Problem, and that is, the narrative regarding the reasons this country fought itself in the Civil War have been coopted by idiots who like to put on their fanciest Confederate gear and pretend shoot one another. They see it as a celebration of history. I see it as a yearning for a Simpler Time, when it was all mint juleps, and seersucker, and field negroes. It makes me exceedingly uncomfortable.

I think AngryBlackLady is putting that mildly. In the ABC interview with the kids, you can almost see them defending their teacher, which is somewhat heartbreaking to me -- that they would be in a position first to be humiliated in that fashion, and then feel as though they needed to gentle-down what was done in that school that day.

And more to the point, it's beyond clueless. It indicates an attitude that doesn't think one is the same flesh and blood as "those people." This isn't political correctness. This is taking a painful episode in history and asking children to re-enact it as a 'learning experience', with skin color determining what place in the re-enactment they will assume. Someone who thinks like that is also separating "those children" from the others in her own mind as a matter of course.

It isn't as though elementary schools in Virginia haven't had similar incidents over the years. There is a pattern here that continues to go unaddressed:

Last year, a Jacox Elementary teacher who anointed students with "holy oil" in the classroom resigned after a parent complained about the teacher's religious actions. The division determined the teacher violated the school system's instructional curriculum as well as policies and laws related to the separation of church and state.

Also last year, two teachers at Norcom High School were placed on leave for using materials in the classroom that were endorsed by an anarchist group and an organization that backs legalized marijuana. Both received letters of reprimand for not receiving permission to use the materials in class and returned to their jobs.

An elementary guidance counselor who distributed 80 to 100 human fetus figurines to students last year at Oakwood Elementary resigned after being put on leave. The school's principal was removed from her post and reassigned elsewhere as an assistant principal.

This didn't just happen in Virginia last week, either. In Ohio last month another teacher decided a "re-enactment" was in order:

Nikko Burton, a 10-year-old student at Chapelfield Elementary in Ohio, says he was humiliated by his teacher when she tried to demonstrate what it was like to be a slave on an auction block. Burton, one of two black students in his class, was chosen to be a slave. Students who were the "masters" inspected the "slaves" to see if they would be able workers.

Meanwhile, confederate themes continue to grow and proliferate more than ever. 150 years later, the Civil War rages on, to all of our detriment.

Perhaps it would help these teachers in Virginia and Ohio to remember better if they were forced to wear a big scarlet "B" (for bigot) instead of just apologizing.

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You can always count on Tom Tancredo to say all kinds of insane things, but sometimes it's hard to tell if he just says them to get attention, which he obviously craves, or if he really believes the things he says.

Well, the other day at a campaign event for his pal, Republican Senate candidate and renowned Tea Partier Ken Buck (a favorite of Erick Erickson, too), Tancredo seemed quite aware of this confusion, and did his best to clear it up for us all:

Tancredo: What could be more important for you to do, really, if you think about this? Everything is at stake here. Everything.

I firmly believe with all my heart, you guys, although we have had many threats to our nation -- and we have gone through a whole lot of things, and survived many things. We -- I always say, you know, we survived the Civil War, we survived the Depression, we went through all -- we survived Bill Clinton, for heaven's sake!

But nothing -- I do not believe -- not the Soviet Union, when we were in, you know, that thirty-five year period leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, thanks to Ronald Reagan, God bless him. [Applause]

...

But we had that threat, we survived it. Later, we found out we had another threat to our way of life, and that was Al Qaeda, and we found that out on 9/11.

But I firmly believe this -- it's not just, you know, some dramatic statement a person would make to get press or something or ink. I believe this with all my heart -- that the greatest threat to the United States today, the greatest threat to our liberty, the greatest threat to the Constitution of the United States, the greatest threat to our way of life, everything we believe in, the greatest threat to the country that was put together by the Founding Fathers, is the guy that is in the White House today.

It's actually a bit scarier to realize that people like Tancredo (and Beck, and Limbaugh, and Weiner Savage, and Palin, et al et al) really believe the things that come out of their mouths.

And you'll notice that everyone applauded.

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We've mentioned Glenn Beck's upcoming book The Overton Window a little bit previously. It appears to be a dumbed-down (in an Ayn Randian way) version of The Turner Diaries, as Will Bunch found:

Bunch reported that Beck told the gathering the story depicts the rise of a citizen’s organization called the Founders Keepers, “a group of people that just won’t give up.” What follows, Beck said, is “a battle and a civil war, and life is upside-down planetwide."

Yep. Pretty much the identical plot as the novel that inspired The Order and the Oklahoma City bombing -- as well as a number of other violent far-right extremists.

Why, we can hardly await the results of Beck's novel.

Already, we get to see the trailer his crackhead team over Glenn Beck Inc. came up with.

Try not to break out in guffaws. I dare you.

No, this is not the Stephen Colbert parody. In fact, he doesn't need to make one. This is self-parody.

FWIW, this isn't Beck-written text. These are lines taken from Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings." (It's a favorite of The Derb's, too.)

Today on his radio show, after the folks at HuffPo observed that this was gobbledygook, Beck noted the early reaction to the trailer. He said the book "will drive the left insane". Really? Or will it just establish yours, Glenn?

Beck went on to explain that it's "art," and the ad gives him a chance to teach us Philistines all about artistic endeavor.

Hooookay.

I have a confession to make...

I am insane. I have to be. Yes, I did turn on the live stream of the Texas Board of Education curriculum standards meeting at 9AM Thursday morning and yes, I stayed with it until 6pm, live-tweeting the whole thing until I could stand it no more. Still not content with the assault on my sensibilities, I came back for more at around 8pm, until it finally adjourned at 10pm my time, 1am Texas time.

I did it for you, all for you...

Bless their hearts....

Here's my biggest takeaway, and I mean this with all sincerity and respect: These people should not be doing this. They just shouldn't be. Not because they're evil. They're not. Well, maybe some of them are just a little bit, but more fundamentally they don't have the first clue as to how absolutely screwed up these curriculum standards are getting. Forget the textbooks, no teacher -- not even one with a masters from Harvard or University of Texas or ANYWHERE -- could possibly teach what they've put together.

It's incoherent. It makes no sense. They've created something that I should be able to define without resorting to NSFW terms, especially a compound word that begins with the word "cluster" and ends with an additional four letters, but really, that's what they've made. A colossal one, even.

Some highs (or lows, or you'll wish you were high)

Don't acknowledge truth without a tinge of pettiness

While it was certainly big of them to include a standard acknowledging the 2008 election of the first black President of the United States, it was not without moments. One of the conservative members thought that would be fine as long as he was included as "Barack HUSSEIN Obama". There was a bit of a verbal tussle over this as the more reasonable members suggested that might be just a little bit petty. Ultimately, the Henry Cabot Lodge false equivalency failed, and they agreed to Barack H. Obama. Grudgingly.

What's a little eugenics between friends?

After tonight, there is an extra word nestled in the following standard:

analyze causes and effects of events and social issues such as immigration, Social Darwinism, race relations, nativism, the Red Scare, Prohibition, and the changing role of women; and...

It reads this way now:

analyze causes and effects of events and social issues such as immigration, eugenics, Social Darwinism, race relations, nativism, the Red Scare, Prohibition, and the changing role of women; and

That's right. Our kids in Texas will possibly learn about eugenics. Why do I say possibly? Because there are two ways to word a standard. One is to use the term including, which means everything may be on a standardized test and therefore must be covered. The other is to use the term "such as", which means the teacher must teach the concept but has the option to use some or all of the terms.

It sounds like a benign enough compromise until you begin to consider the insidious ways it was used to denigrate in some cases and slide references into the material in others. Like eugenics, for example. Or to downgrade the elevation of our first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor, to a "such as" when the original list without her was an "include". But, they did manage to remove Phyllis Schlafly from that same list, so there's that, anyway.

Speaking of Phyllis Schlafly...

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Balloon Juice: Principled opposition to big government

Eschaton: Things Chuck Norris actually says

The Democratic Daily: Haley the Barbourian and the Invisible Empire

Liberal Values: This Republican gets her health care ideas from Dilbert

d r i f t g l a s s: Oklahoma? Militia? State Sovereignty? Where have we heard that before?

Seeing the Forest: The Story of Cap & Trade

A modest proposal: no one displaying the Confederate flag gets to lecture any American about patriotism - ever. Ditto for anyone trafficking in Confederate nostalgia as a political strategy. Of course, that new red, white and blue rule would pose a problem for today's Republican Party. After all, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, the same man who delivered the GOP's response to President Obama's 2010 State of the Union, this week resurrected "Confederate History Month" in Richmond. And to be sure, when it comes to flying the Stars and Bars and talking up secession, nullification and "the war of Yankee aggression," McDonnell has plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican Party.

Exhuming a ritual buried by his Democratic predecessors Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, McDonnell called on Virginians to celebrate the South's failure in the conflict bookended by Sumter and Appomattox, one he deemed "a four year war ... for independence." More shocking still, McDonnell's proclamation ignored the issue of slavery altogether because, he claimed, "I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia." Governor Jim Gilmore's 1999 declaration at least recognized slavery as the cause of the war that killed over 600,000 Americans, a point a humbled General Ulysses Grant made for posterity at Appomattox:

"I felt sad and depressed at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though their cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought."

Sadly, Bob McDonnell is far from alone among Republican leaders past and present reminding Americans that the old times there are not forgotten.

As the health care reform debate reached its climax in March, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia was among those longing for the days of the ante bellum South. Missing the irony that health care is worst in those reddest of Southern states where Republicans poll best, Broun took to the House floor to show that he was still fighting the Civil War:

"If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States -- the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

If you thought you had heard that outdated term of Dixie revisionist history recently, you did. In February 2009, Missouri Republican Bryan Stevenson took exception to President Obama's support for the Freedom of Choice Act, legislation which codify the reproductive rights protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide:

"What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression."

That expression was also a favorite of former Senate Majority Leader and later Minority Whip (really, you can't make this up) Trent Lott.

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Image from Driftglass.

If we hadn't already had a full year of their racist, eliminationist mumbo jumbo, this would be hard to believe. Jezebel:

Earlier today, self-described conservative blogger Solomon "Solly" Forell posted a tweet that included a call for assassination, as well as this line: "We'll surely get over a bullet 2 Barack Obama's head!" It gets worse.

There was a lot worse, like starting that tweet with the word "assasination!" in all caps, so that the Secret Service started an investigation and Twitter claimed they would suspend the "blogger's" account. The account was still active as of this writing, and it leaves me wondering if law enforcement might have requested it be left up for the purposes of investigation. The specific assassination tweets have been deleted but for the strong-of-stomach Jezebel has screen shots. And the calls for Obama's assassination exploded exponentially from there.

There has been a rapid backtrack on this violent rhetoric since those instigating it caught wind that it might actually get them investigated by Treasury agents. That said, searching twitter for "1861" is an illuminating exercise. "Texasbeaut" also backtracked and deleted this tweet, but the re-tweet is forever.

One unintended consequence of passing healthcare reform is that it brings to light yet again the vicious racism of at least a segment of its opponents. Race has nothing to do with healthcare reform, and those racists who hate the President will still benefit from the bill's passage. As watered down as this bill is, it is still tragic to realize how close a reactionary minority came, to completely scuttling the reform that will benefit them and their children for generations.

Or as my colleague Jon Perr puts it more succinctly: All the more reason Ulysses Grant needs to stay on the $50 bill.