Replies to post #130655 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[harrypothead]

Why do the neocons hate Dixie so?

Posted: November 26, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.


"Howard Dean wants the white trash vote," wrote Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer in recent mockery of the Vermonter. "That's clearly what [Dean] meant when he said he wanted the votes of 'guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.'"

After Dean was savaged by Al Sharpton, who called the Confederate flag an "American swastika," Krauthammer was rhapsodic. His humiliation serves Dean right, Krauthammer chortled. He should never have pandered to Southern "yahoos" and "rebel-yelling racist redneck(s)."

What is it in the wiring of these neocons that they so loathe white Southerners who cherish the monuments, men and memories of the Lost Cause?

Last December, Krauthammer, David Frum and Jonah Goldberg all squabbled noisily over who was first to join the media mob that lynched Trent Lott for his tribute to Sen. Thurmond on Strom's 100th birthday. When Lott lost his leadership post, these neocons rejoiced at his resignation.

In the latest National Review – not your father's NR – an editorial calls the cause of Southern independence, for which Gen. Robert E. Lee fought and "Stonewall" Jackson died, the cause of "slavery and treason."

Why the Hollywood Left hates Dixie is easy to understand. It is conservative, Christian, traditionalist, hostile to the cultural revolution. But why do the neocons? After all, the folks Krauthammer calls "white trash" are the most reliable conservative voters in America, God-and-country people. They enlist in disproportionate numbers in the military, and die in disproportionate numbers in America's wars.

The neocons are pro-Israel. So, too, are these folks who believe in standing by Israel because the Bible tells them so. Yet, when it comes to Southerners who revere the Confederate flag, neocons like Krauthammer echo the Washington Post writer who dismissed Southern white Christians as "poor, uneducated and easy to command."

But even the Post does not use the venom of Krauthammer. Indeed, I never heard George Wallace or Lester Maddox, both of whom I came to know and like late in their lives, use the kind of language on political foes that Krauthammer uses on a whole class of people he doesn't even know.

A point of personal privilege. I have family roots in the South, in Mississippi. When the Civil War came, Cyrus Baldwin enlisted and did not survive Vicksburg. William Buchanan of Okolona, who would marry Baldwin's daughter, fought at Atlanta and was captured by Gen. Sherman's army. William Baldwin Buchanan was the name given to my father and by him to my late brother.

As a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, I have been to their gatherings. I spoke at the 2001 SCV convention in Lafayette, La. The Military Order of the Stars and Bars presented me with a battle flag and a wooden canteen like the ones my ancestors carried.

Has Krauthammer ever been to one of these meetings? Has he any knowledge at all of these people he dismisses as "white trash"?

Discussing the Dean-flag issue, one New York Times columnist wrote of the campaign "to remove the Stars and Bars from the top of the South Carolina Statehouse." But it was not the Stars and Bars, first flag of the Confederate States of America, that flew over that statehouse. It was the battle flag of the Confederate army, with the St. Andrew's Cross, on which, tradition holds, the apostle Andrew was crucified.

And that flag atop the statehouse flew beneath Old Glory. What were South Carolinians saying by putting it there? Only this: "We are proud of the bravery of our grandfathers who fought under this blood-stained banner, but we are Americans, and the Stars and Stripes represents our country now and forever." What is wrong with that?

To Krauthammer, the battle flag is a racist symbol. And, yes, it has been used by racists to insult and intimidate. But so, too, has the Christian cross when burned on hillsides. And so, too, has the American flag.

These symbols are abused because they have power. But to Southern kids who put battle flag decals on book bags, their fathers who put replicas on cars and trucks, rural folks who fly the flag in their yards, it does not mean they hate anyone. Rather, it says: "We love our Southern heritage and shall never forget our ancestors who fought and died under this flag."

Late in life, Joshua Chamberlain, the Union hero who won the Medal of Honor for holding Little Round Top when Lee sent the Texans to turn Meade's flank on the second day at Gettysburg, said that whenever he saw that flag, it recalled to him the indomitable courage of the men who had fought under it. At re-enactments of Civil War battles, high-school football games and NASCAR races, the battle flag is ubiquitous across the South.

If Krauthammer and the neocons really believe the only folks who cherish this symbol are "white trash" and "yahoos," that tells us more about them than it does about the South, of which they know nothing.





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Next...

Will be a plane with D Youngs face pictured on the side...


He is one arrogant POS...

Don Young's World

by Stephen Slivinski

Stephen Slivinski is director of budget studies at the Cato Institute.

When pondering the monstrosity that is the recently enacted federal highway bill, most observers will note how expensive it is but never really discern why it's an indicator of a larger problem. Yes, on paper it will cost $286.4 billion. That's 31 percent larger than the last highway bill in 1998, $30 billion more than the maximum amount the president threatened would trigger a veto last year, and $2 billion more than the White House was willing to accept earlier this year.

Unfortunately, the bill will really cost $295 billion, but it was made to look smaller by way of an accounting gimmick. The bill assumes that Congress will simply vote not to spend $8.5 billion on September 30, 2009, one day before the bill expires. It's very unlikely that will ever happen. As a result, the bill will be $11 billion more expensive than President Bush said he would accept seven months ago. None of this, of course, stopped the president from signing the bill and thereby demolishing any credibility he might have to threaten vetoes of future spending bills -- assuming he'd even want to.

The bill is filled to the brim with pork projects -- it's stuffed "like a turkey," bragged Rep. Don Young of Alaska, House transportation committee chairman and the main beneficiary of some of the most expensive projects within, including a $231 million bridge in Anchorage to be named "Don Young's Way." Indeed, while projects earmarked for specific congressional districts are nothing new, the amounts in this bill are staggering. There are over 6,000 specific earmarks at a total cost of $24 billion. Contrast that with the 1,850 projects in the last highway bill. Or the 152 projects in the 1987 bill. President Ronald Reagan vetoed that bill. Those were the good old days.

All of this, however, is merely a symptom of two much larger problems. The first is structural. The Interstate Highway System has been complete since 1986. The federal fuel tax was supposed to sunset upon completion. Yet it's still around and so is Congress's power to dole out the cash it collects with it. Today the so-called highway trust fund looks more like a politician's slush fund.

Most of the money is sent back to states through a formula that guarantees that at least 90.5 percent of the revenue from each state returns to that state. The current bill raises that level to 92 percent by 2009. What happens to the rest? At the expense of all other states, a very few politically powerful congressmen get to divvy it up. This benefits powerful incumbent politicians like Democratic senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, whose state receives close to $2 for each $1 his state contributes. Or Democratic senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, or Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska (member of the Senate Appropriations Committee), or GOP congressman Don Young of Alaska, just to name a few. Each state represented by them receives more than $2 for every $1 contributed. In the case of Alaska, the ratio is an astounding 5 to 1.

But how about letting each state keep all of the fuel tax money it collects? Supporters of limited government in the House, like Jeff Flake of Arizona and Scott Garrett of New Jersey, have promoted plans to get the federal government out of the highway business altogether by giving complete responsibility over road construction and maintenance to the states. This would allow states to keep all the money they collect in fuel taxes and decide how best to use that money.

Which leads us to the second real reason why the highway bill is such a disaster: the complete abandon of fiscal discipline by the Republican majority in Congress. The reform plans to devolve this power back to the states was an idea promoted originally by Reagan, and discussed during the early days of the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s. Yet this month it was the senior GOP members and the leadership who were fighting changes to the political patronage system fueled by the highway slush fund. Just as it has been senior Republicans during the past five years fighting all other attempts to cut spending or put a cap on the federal budget.

The Republicans are no longer the party of Reagan when it comes to the fight for limited government. It's Don Young's world, now. We're just living in it.

This article originally appeared on Spectator.org on August 16, 2005.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4227



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