One Hundred Fifty Years Ago, Today

Robert E. Lee decisively wins the Battle of Fredericksburg, but you wouldn't know from the This Day in the Civil War site.

[The] Army of the Potomac under Gen. Burnside suffers a costly defeat at Fredericksburg in Virginia with a loss of 12,653 men after 14 frontal assaults on well entrenched Rebels on Marye's Heights. "We might as well have tried to take hell," a Union soldier remarks. Confederate losses are 5,309. "It is well that war is so terrible - we should grow too fond of it," states Lee during the fighting.

- from The History Place

Of course, slave owners and other southern whites should already be used to carnage, what with all the times they beat up the people they "owned". Then again, the "gentile" people farmed that work out to the sociopaths, so they never had to see it.

It All Makes Sense Now

Early in Obama's first administration, I was continually frustrated by his bending over backwards to appease people who obviously hated him. I wrote him several emails that told him to stop working with them, and get something done. It is only now that I understand what he was doing, and a little more about why the minimum age to be President is 35.

At this point, no one who knows about race relations in America should be under the impression that Obama could have been anything less than completely accommodating and hope to win a second term. He was smarter than all of us - or at least smarter than me, and a lot of white people like me. He appeased the idiotic beltway conventional wisdom, and made sure that even if the narrative painted him as uncompromising, the facts couldn't back it up.

The long view is a hard one to accept, especially when you watch the collateral damage around you, on your own streets, and from the words of people around you. But the long view is the most important one to have. Obama could have muscled more legislation through, taken a harder negotiation stance in 2009, but he would have lost the Senate in 2010 too. We would have President Elect Romney right now, who would undo anything and everything Obama touched, started a new war, and just shifted everything off of the books.

Don't kid yourself, if he hadn't been so accommodating, so compromising for the last four years, Obama would have been a one-term president.

Incentive to Attend Party

I have a CD with 16 different versions of Cher's "Believe" on it.