A Gentleman’s view.

Many say that birtherism is just racism, but there’s more than simple racial animus behind it.
April 28, 2011 |

The following article first appeared on TheNation.com. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for their email newsletters here.

Remember when the media regularly asked if Barack Obama was “black enough” to get the support of African-Americans? In 2007 pundits wondered if a black-identified but technically biracial candidate who came of age in the post–civil rights era, was raised far from traditional African-American communities, was educated in the Ivy League and boasted a foreign name might be more palatable to white voters than black ones. Today this query seems hopelessly naïve and endearingly optimistic about the fluidity of American racial identities. After the secret-Muslim accusations, the witch doctor posters, the “You lie!” shout-down and the chimpanzee e-mails—it is clear that President Obama is certainly “black enough” to experience both racially motivated public attacks and exceptional support among racial minorities.

But the tenacity of the birther movement has revived the issue of Obama’s blackness for me. Nearly a quarter of Americans, most of them white, believe President Obama was not born in the United States. The resilience of the birther myth—lately given air by Donald Trump—has even forced the White House to post a copy of Obama’s birth certificate online in hopes of settling the matter once and for all. Good luck—this controversy isn’t about documentation; it’s about deeply held beliefs, even faith claims, about who is and is not a legitimate citizen.

Many on the left say that birtherism is just racism, but there’s more than simple racial animus behind it. I suspect that part of the problem is that Obama is indeed not black enough; specifically, the president is not sufficiently Negro—the historical variation of blackness that is uniquely and indisputably American.

The American slave system disrupted the ability of enslaved Africans to retain or pass along their ethnic identities. Igbo, Ashanti, Akan, Yoruba and Hausa became interchangeable units for sale. While slaves nurtured fragments of cultural, religious and familial traditions, much of the specificity of their African experience was surrendered to an imagined and indistinct notion of “Africa.” Moreover, the law did not initially recognize slaves or their US-born children as American. So enslaved Africans were women and men literally without a country, defined solely in terms of their labor value. Their descendants eventually achieved citizenship, but to be an American black, a Negro, is to be a rejected child who nonetheless clings to her abusive father because she knows no other parent. To be a black American descended from slaves is to lack, if not a birth certificate, then at least a known genealogy—to have only a vague sense of where one comes from, of who one’s ancestors were and of where one belongs.

In this sense, Obama is not very black. He is not a Negro. As a black man, President Obama’s confident and clear knowledge of his lineage is precisely the thing that makes his American identity dubious. Unlike most black people, he has easy access to both his American and his African selves.

In 1897 W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “One feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Although Obama is the child of a black African and a white American, one does not sense this unreconciled two-ness in him. He confidently embraces a triumphant American narrative that echoes the tone of voluntary immigrants more than the pathos of the dominated.

Compare Obama’s Dreams From My Father with Michelle Robinson’s senior thesis. The First Lady reflected a Du Bois–like struggle with being the outsider within. She wrote, “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘Blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton…I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.” Whatever racial invectives have been hurled at Michelle, they have never included a claim against her American identity. Her familial lineage in slavery, the Great Migration and Chicago’s South Side are far too emblematic of American blackness to raise suspicions about her country of birth.

But in another sense, birtherism is the dual-edged blade of African identity for black Americans. In the eighteenth century, choosing the designation “African” was a symbol of self-determination. For example, the Free African Society, founded in Philadelphia in 1787, and its religious offspring, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, were founded in the spirit of defiance of slavery and racial inequality. Later, emigrationist movements led by Paul Cuffee and Marcus Garvey offered physical and psychic return to Africa as an alternative to the horrors of American racism. These efforts reflected black people’s rejection of the idea that they are a people without a place. No one can find the country of “Negro” on a map, but the continent of Africa, no matter how remote after centuries of disconnect, is a real place. To claim it was to recognize one’s humanity.

But black people have also found it troubling to call Africa home. Emphasizing African identity can mean relinquishing hard-earned affirmations of Americanness. The Negro was made an American through the sin of slavery but kept this identity through the sacrifices of citizenship: taxes, military duty, labor, effort, patriotism and struggle. Few acts of racism elicit more disgust among black folks descended from eighteenth-century slaves than being told to “go back to Africa” by a white person whose American heritage goes back only to the twentieth century.

When birthers accuse President Obama of not having a “real” birth certificate, they’re telling him to “go back to Africa.” It’s a taunt he’s able to dismiss because he knows exactly where and when he’s from. But for black Americans descended from slaves, to question one’s birth raises perhaps a more troublesome enigma: to be born in servitude to someone, but from nowhere.

Donald Trump: I’m proud of myself!

By MAGGIE HABERMAN | 4/27/11 9:39 AM EDT Updated: 4/27/11 9:45 AM EDT

Donald Trump began his trip to New Hampshire with a victory lap for President Obama’s release of his birth certificate.

“I’ve accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish,” he said. “I want to look at it but I hope it’s true so we can get onto much more important matters so the press can stop asking me questions.”

He added, “I am really honored frankly to have played such a big role in hopefully, hopefully, getting rid of this issue.”

“We have to look at it we have to see is it real? Is it proper? What’s on it? But I hope it chekcs out beautifully. I am really proud. I am really honored.”

“I’m taking great credit,” Trump crowed, calling it “rather amazing” that the original birth certificate “suddenly materializes.”.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53801.html#ixzz1KjQVqlxV

By MAGGIE HABERMAN | 4/25/11 10:55 PM EDT Updated: 4/26/11 6:21 AM EDT

Donald Trump is upping the ante against President Barack Obama’s legitimacy, raising questions on Monday night about how the president was admitted to two Ivy League schools.

Trump openly questioned how Obama, who he said had been a “terrible student,” got accepted into Columbia University for undergraduate studies and then Harvard Law School.

“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible,” Trump told the Associated Press in an interview, a claim he’s made in the past but one he doubled down on by suggesting he’s probing that area of the president’s life.

“How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records,” he said, without providing backup for his claim.

Trump added, “I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can’t get into Harvard.”

“We don’t know a thing about this guy,” Trump said. “There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”

Obama transferred to Columbia University in 1981 from Occidental College, and graduated two years later. He graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude in 1991, after serving as editor of the prestigious Law Review.

Trump has already said he has investigators on the ground in Hawaii looking into proof of Obama’s birth in the state, which the real estate magnate has questioned repeatedly.

He’s suggested Obama ought to show his birth certificate and has rejected pushback that the certification of live birth that Team Obama made available in 2008, and which is what Hawaiian officials issue in response to requests for birth documents, serves as proof.

In a sometimes-testy exchange with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday night, Trump insisted he had heard the birth certificate is “missing” from official Hawaiian state records, and again called on Obama to produce it. He also accused reporters of giving Obama a pass on the issue.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53694.html#ixzz1Kdh37Fqq

So, What do you think about these?

CNN takes a look at 11 political conspiracies, myths and urban legends and helps you tell fact from fiction.

1) The myth: George Washington wasn’t the first U.S. president.

The facts: Theorists say it was actually John Hanson, the president of the Continental Congress, who served as the nation’s first president, not George Washington.
That claim is simply false.
The office of “President of the United States” was created under the Constitution in 1787, long after Hanson died.
2) The rumor: George W. Bush has the lowest IQ of all the presidents.

The facts: A report by the Lovenstein Institute in 2001 found that George W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any president in the past 50 years. The report was discovered on the website lovenstein.org.
The problem? There is no Lovenstein Institute and no report.
Case solved.

3) The myth: Washington Redskins always predict the presidential winner.

The facts: The claim is that, since 1936, the outcome of the Washington Redskins’ last home game before the presidential election has predicted the outcome of who wins the White House.
The way it works: If the Redskins lose, the incumbent party loses; if they win, the incumbent wins.
Although the circumstances have worked out for 17 elections in modern history, it is just another political superstition that pundits love to use — or maybe to fill time.
In 2004, the Redskins lost to the Green Bay Packers 28-14 on October 31. Under the myth, incumbent President George W. Bush should have lost to Democratic Sen. John Kerry.
That was not the case. Kerry lost, too.

4) The myth: Sarah Palin didn’t give birth to baby Trig.

The facts: Soon after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was announced as Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential running mate, rumors abounded that her newborn son, Trig, who was born with Down syndrome, was not hers.
The McCain campaign, along with Palin herself, shot down the rumor.
Conspiracy theorists, now called “Trig Truthers,” point to photos taken in late March of that year in which Palin’s stomach appears, they say, to be flat — not the image of an expectant mother. But other photos show her with a round stomach.
Then there’s the question of why Palin waited so long to seek medical attention after her water broke during a trip to Texas. Reports indicate that it took more than 15 hours for her to get to a hospital after flying back to Alaska.
Some claimed that the baby, born in April, might have been that of teenage daughter Bristol. But Bristol gave birth to her own child, Tripp, in December. Myth busted.

5) The theory: The government was behind the September 11 attacks.

The facts: The September 11 terrorist attacks have become a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists who have offered alternative explanations to the horror of that day.
Some of the theories include that the U.S. government was behind the entire terror plot, including taking down the World Trade Center, in order to take the country to war in the Middle East; the Pentagon was not hit by a commercial plane but rather by a missile; and United Flight 93 did not crash after passengers stormed the cockpit, but an Air Force jet took it out.
Popular Mechanics magazine looked into the claims and was able to “debunk each of these assertions with hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense.”

6) The myth: Sen. John McCain had an illegitimate black child.

The facts: There was an effort during the 2000 GOP presidential primaries to start a smear campaign against John McCain, who was running a tight race against George W. Bush in South Carolina, saying the Arizona senator had an illegitimate black child.
In an interview with NBC’s “Today Show” last year, political operative Karl Rove, who was said to have been behind the story, shot down the claim. He said he had “nothing to do” with the rumor, adding that it came from “a professor at Bob Jones University” and not the Bush campaign.
McCain and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter from Bangladesh.
Bush ended up winning South Carolina 53% to 42%.

7) The charge: The Clintons were responsible for the death of Vince Foster.

The facts: In summer 1993, Vince Foster, deputy White House counsel in the Clinton administration and close friend to the first couple, was found dead in a federal park in northern Virginia. Investigators ruled it a suicide.
In 1994, the Arkansas Project — an effort to discredit the Clintons — raised the idea that the couple was responsible for the murder of Foster and others who may have had incriminating evidence against the former Arkansas governor.
Three investigations into the death turned up no evidence of a link. The Clintons have emphatically denied any involvement. The rumor, however, found its way into the media and GOP circles.

The charge: Rep. Gary Condit was involved in Chandra Levy’s disappearance.

The facts: The 2001 disappearance of Chandra Levy, an intern for the federal Bureau of Prisons, drew national attention after her parents discovered a connection with then-Rep. Gary Condit, D-California.
He was never a suspect in the case but was questioned intensively for details as to Levy’s whereabouts. Condit was also rumored to have had a sexual relationship with Levy an allegation he repeatedly refused to answer.
But Condit’s semen was found on her underwear, according to an FBI biologist who testified at a trial in 2010.
Levy’s body was found in a Washington park more than a year after her disappearance. Salvadoran immigrant Ingmar Guandique — who was in prison for another crime — was convicted in her killing and sentenced in 2011 to 60 years in prison.

9) The theory: Someone besides Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK.

The facts: Decades after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, the shooting and the events that followed continue to fascinate many Americans.
Much of that interest rests on the theory that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy — not the act of a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Theories include that Kennedy “was killed by CIA agents acting either out of anger over the Bay of Pigs or at the behest of Vice President Lyndon Johnson,” by the KGB or by “mobsters mad at Kennedy’s brother for initiating the prosecution of organized crime rings,” according to Time magazine.
But the Warren Commission, established to investigate the assassination, found that Oswald was the lone gunman — and that there was not a second shooter.

10) The myth: President Zachary Taylor was poisoned to death.

The facts: Taylor, the nation’s 12th president, was rumored to have died after being poisoned with arsenic, possibly by his wife.
But the claim was debunked by DNA scientists in 1991.
Medical officials in Kentucky ruled that he was not poisoned but rather died because of natural causes, such as gastroenteritis. The results were obtained after testing Taylor’s tissue samples.
“The question of whether he was poisoned or not will no longer hang over us,” Coroner Richard F. Greathouse of Jefferson County told the New York Times. “We’ve put that to rest once and for all.”
Arsenic was found, but state officials said it was in levels too low to be considered deadly.

11) The myth: Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.

The facts: CNN has investigated these claims by “birthers” who say the nation’s 44th president was not born in America and thus is not eligible to be president.
The Obama team and the state of Hawaii released a certification of live birth that documents the president’s birth on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu. This is not the original birth certificate but is a valid legal document. In Hawaii and other states, original birth certificates are not released when requested later.
Explain it to me: ‘Birthers’
The certificate, officials say, allows a person born in Hawaii to get a driver’s license, purchase land and obtain a U.S. passport.
The “birthers” claim that Obama doesn’t want to show the birth certificate because it may claim that he wasn’t born in America.

But state officials — including Gov. Neil Abercrombie and Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the former director of Hawaii’s Department of Health — said they saw the document, and Obama was born in the U.S.
In addition, his birth announcement appeared in two Honolulu papers. The announcements are provided to the newspapers by the Department of Health and not members of the public, according to officials.

Fareed Zakaria has an opinion on Donald Trump’s Presidential Fantasy

1. Donald Trump’s appeal is based on a fantasy

Americans have always had an appetite for a populist, non-politician who promises to cut through the mess in Washington and provide simple, commonsense solutions to the problems ailing the United States.
The peculiar American twist is that the populists tend to be billionaires. People think the very rich are immune to the usual pressures in government. In some cases this turns out to be true (Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a good example).
But, fundamentally, this is wishful thinking bordering on fantasy. The mess we’re in is not a product of a handful of idiotic politicians engaged in venal behavior. The problem is that Americans want low-taxes and lots of government services.
If you look at the recent polls, most Americans think there should be no changes to Medicare and no broad increases in taxation. This is magical mathematics. There is no way to make the budget work without doing both of these things – or at least one of them.
The reason people like Donald Trump have appeal is they seem to promise that through their superior business talent they will magically solve problems and save Americans from having to make hard choices. That’s a fantasy. It’s never going to happen.

2. The ‘birther’ issue is coded racism

Then there is the ‘birther’ issue. I regard this as coded racism, frankly. I don’t think there’s any other word for it.
For goodness’ sake, George Stephanopoulos displayed Obama’s Certificate of Live Birth on network TV and this rumor still doesn’t die. Put it this way: If the President was a white man named John Smith with the other background issues being the same – foreign student father, mother in Hawaii, etc. – would there be any of these dark insinuations? Trump should be ashamed of himself. But then, I suppose, he wouldn’t be Donald Trump.
I don’t think that the ‘birther’ issue the real appeal of Trump, anyway. It has just helped Trump get free media and rise up in the polls. His real appeal is the fantasy that he can somehow get us out of the mess we’re in.
The reality, however, is that only we can get us out of the mess we’re in.

3. The Republican presidential field is weak

I think the most serious Republican candidate is Mitt Romney. He has run a big business. He was the governor of a big state. But he’s probably disqualified from the Republican nomination because his healthcare plan is too close to Obama’s.
I think this is unfortunate because he would spur a serious debate if he were the nominee. I don’t agree with everything he says. (He’s said some pretty nutty stuff about Islamic extremism and terrorism). But I do think he’s a credible guy who could plausibly be a good President.
Tim Pawlenty and Mitch Daniels strike me as minor figures who are unlikely to have the kind of firepower that you would need to take on a sitting President.
And Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are ideological statements that fire up the base but would be overwhelmingly rejected by the American people. If either of these two were nominated, it would say that the Republican Party was more interested in being true to its perceived causes than in actually winning elections. This has not historically been true of the Republican Party, which has tended to be a more practical party.

4. President Obama is in good shape

The single most important factor determining a president’s reelection is the economy. And through a combination of good crisis management and luck, I think Obama will end up entering the 2012 campaign stretch with an American economy that’s improving, which is probably more important than everything else.

This whole “Teach Obama a Lesson” thing is working so perfectly, isn’t it? byEclectablog

Epic rant to follow. This might leave a mark.

In Wisconsin. In Ohio. In Michigan. In Florida.

All across the country, the True Liberals’ efforts to teach Barack Obama a lesson are paying off in spades. Their plan could not have worked out more perfectly. After a year of shouting to the highest heavens about how much they were disappointed in President Obama and the Democrats, after a year promising to withhold their support during the 2010 Midterm campaign and, more importantly, at the ballot box, they got their wish: Democrats stayed home in droves. Huge numbers of Democrats across the country, many of whom had voted for the very first time in 2008, got up and went to the fridge instead of the polls that late Fall Tuesday.

Yesterday, in Wisconsin, the tea party Governor and his cadre of Republican Senators figured out a way to bypass Senate Democrats’ exploitation of a loophole that allowed them to put the brakes on a GOP effort to drive a stake into the heart of unions in their state. Most collective bargaining rights for teachers and public employees are now gone as if they were trash taken to the curb. Sure, Scott Walker’s favorables took a beating there for awhile. If it weren’t for that pesky quorum loophole, this would have all been taken care of weeks ago and his numbers wouldn’t have tanked so far. But that’s water under the bridge and now they are back on track. The unions have been squashed like bugs and they can go back to laughing at the protesters as they are frisked and searched and scanned just to enter a public building.

Barack Obama has really got to be smarting over that, eh? He’s really paid the price now, by golly.

In Michigan yesterday, the GOP-controlled Senate passed a bill that enhances the Republican Governor’s ability to declare financial emergencies in municipalities and appoint an Emergency Financial Manager (EFM). This EFM will have authority to do pretty much whatever they wish including suspending contracts with unions and other groups and even firing the existing elected officials. Rachel Maddow explained it very well the other night. There was a protest at the Capitol before the vote, of course. Over 700 people showed up, mostly union employees. Know what the Republican who introduced the bill said about the protest? “I don’t think it had an effect outside of the fact we had to talk a little bit louder today.” Ouch. They had to talk a little louder.

But that’s not all that is coming down the pipeline in Michigan. The Republican Governor’s budget taxes public and private pensions that helps the elderly. It eliminates the Earned Income Tax Credit that helps the poor. It eliminates a huge tax credit for filmmakers in Michigan, killing that job-creating baby in its crib. It eliminates tax credits for vehicle battery manufacturers, strangling a nascent industry before it even gets off the ground. It eliminates tax credits for redeveloping brownfield sites, ensuring that new industrial development will take place on undeveloped, pristine lands rather than on already-despoiled soil. Here’s one: there’s a union-busting bill in Congress to make Michigan a “Right to Work” state or, as the unions call it, a “Right to Work for LESS” state. All of this and businesses are getting billions of dollars in tax breaks, paid for by the elderly, the poor and whichever other down-trodden groups you can name.

“Eclectablog, what shall we do???!” I’m asked. “We can’t let this stand. We must protest. Where is OFA???”

What can we do? We can’t do ANYTHING! In Michigan, the Republicans control the House. The Republicans control the Senate. The Republicans control the Supreme Court. The Governor is a Republican. When we protest, they just talk a little louder. And after they get done redistricting our formerly solid-Democratic state this year, we’ll be lucky if our dog catchers are Democrats.

Protest at the Capitol? Sorry, I won’t waste my time.

But, I’ll tell you this: President Obama has surely learned his lesson. These union-busting, pro-business moves by the Michigan GOP have got to be chapping his britches something fierce.

It’s happening in Florida, too. Tea Party Governor Rick Scott is unstoppable. He’s solving his state’s multi-billion dollar deficit by cutting taxes on businesses by several billion dollars and he’s cutting teachers’ pay to do it. He’s rejecting federal funds to develop high-speed rail.

Take that, Obama!

How about Ohio? The Republican Governor there is assaulting the unions, too. And the only difference between Wisconsin and these other three states is that Wisconsin Democratic Senators had a quorum loophole they could use to stop a vote. Well, they could stop it for three weeks. Then the unions got their asses handed to them anyway.

Last night Rachel Maddow said her staff’s analysis shows there are Republican-sponsored union-busting bills in the Congresses if no less than SEVENTEEN states.

Ed Schultz has been on fire on MSNBC these past three weeks, hasn’t he? Nothing like pure, unadulterated union-busting by Republicans to get old Ed fired up and ready to go. A let’s not pretend Ed didn’t have a plan for this all along, right? Remember this from him last fall?

And I’m announcing today, I’m not going to vote in the midterms. I’m not going to do it. You can say it’s un-American. No, it’s rather revolutionary is what it is. I’m at that point. I’m checking out. I’m checking out of the Democrats because they are proving to me that they don’t know how to handle these big babies over on the right that say no. You know what you do? You get in the driver’s seat, you hit the throttle, and you run over them.
Un-American? Hell no, Ed! That’s as American as it gets. Hell, it’s practically Republican, it’s so American! Create a problem that you yourself can benefit from. Help make sure the GOP takes control by helping suppress the Democratic vote then watch your rating positively SOAR when you get to be on television almost non-stop when they start crushing unions like cockroaches.

Man, you sure showed them, Ed. Obama has really got to be feeling this now, what with all those union people getting crushed and taxes being cut on the backs of the poor and the elderly.

And, let’s make no mistake, it’s not just Ed who is teaching a lesson to Obama. Here’s part of an email I got recently from a friend, a liberal who is disappointed in the President. I had reached out to him to help us start organizing in our area so that we’re ready to really hit the ground hard for the 2012 elections. He was very active in 2008 so I had hoped that he and others in our area would be eager to help get Dems elected again in 2012 considering that they control everything in our state right now. Hah. Boy was I ever wrong:

Thank you and everyone for all the hard work you guys do and will be doing. I really enjoyed working with all of you a couple of years ago.
Unless there are some drastic changes in his policies over the next few months which I doubt I simply cannot bring myself to put forth my time and money to help this President. I thought we were electing someone who would fight for our ideals and yet he has managed to compromise on just about every campaign issue he was for. From health care which no public option was even fought for, to tax cuts for the top 2% that he instantly gave, Gitmo, etc. And the major issue is the fact we are bombing even more than the Bush administration in Pakistan killing innocent people. The economic and other issue I may be able to get past but this I can’t. Along with Rendition still going on.

President Obama will probably still get my vote as from what I see the other side will probably have someone even worse but that will be to the extent of my support for him.

It’s not just him. I’m hearing this from lots of Democrats. Hell, I see it on the progressive blogs like Daily Kos on a daily, even hourly, basis. They are going to teach Obama a lesson for not delivering everything they want by handing the keys to the kingdom back to the people who are most likely to screw them over.

So, I hope you like watching the unions getting squashed. I hope you enjoy watching business taxes being cut while taxes are raised on the poor and the elderly. I hope you enjoy watching environmental regulations done away with and health insurance reform rolled back. I hope you will enjoy it when even the modest regulatory reforms on Wall Street are sent to the dustbin of history and the improvements in our food regulatory system are done away with. I hope you will enjoy it when the reproductive rights of women are taken away and the rights of minorities are degraded; when same sex couples see their dream marriage sent down the garbage disposal and members of the LGBT community are put back in the military closet. We all need to start getting used to these things.

Why? Because all that stands between us and all of these things and more happening is four Senators and one President.

We have a choice to make and we better start getting on that because the first debates of the 2012 election are next month.

If Democrats stay home in droves next year, we’ll lose the Senate and the Oval Office, too, and what you’re seeing in Michigan will just be a microcosm of what will happen nationally.

But, hey, at least Obama will have learned a le

The First Guess: Lying About The Civil War
Posted on April 14, 2011

Of course the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. It was a fight over which color was better: Blue or Gray.

The new polling this week tells a terrible story of historical revisionism, rationalization, and lousy education. 42 percent of this country says that slavery was not the main cause of secession nor of the Civil War.

150 years later and we’re collectively less honest with ourselves about our greatest American tragedy than we were as it happened. The greatest attack on this nation, on its freedoms, on its independence – the greatest act of terrorism against the United States of America, the greatest act of treason, our nation at its worst — and four out of ten Americans are willing to lie about its cause.

That’s right: Lie. Because if you believe slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War, you are either lying, or mentally impaired, or a grammar school dropout. There are no other choices.

You have doubts about that? Do not bring them to me. Bring them to William Henry Gist.

Mr. Gist was the Governor of South Carolina in 1860, one of the Southern leaders who proposed secession, who – in advance of Abraham Lincoln’s election – met with other governors to plot their treason, who got Florida and Mississippi to follow South Carolina out of the union, and whose actions led — as much as any man’s did — to the Civil War.

FOK: What did Governor Gist say about it?

Let me quote from Adam Goodheart in the New York Times from December 3rd of last year, about Governor Gist:

In one address to the legislature at the end of November, he whipped up his listeners with talk of laws that would reopen the African slave trade, officially declare white men the ruling race, and punish “summarily and severely, if not with death” any person caught espousing abolitionist views.

So obviously secession had nothing to do with slavery. Nothing. Laws passing summary judgment on anyone merely advocating an end to slavery in South Carolina – a death penalty for proposing the abolition of slavery – obviously those would have had nothing to do with slavery.

The Governor of one of the United States of America promising legislation that would formally pronounce whites “the ruling race” – why to think that had anything to do with slavery is the height of absurdity!

And reopening the slave trade? Why, how could reopening the slave trade have anything to do with slavery? It’s preposterous!

One more thing from Mr. Goodheart’s piece from last December needs to be emphasized. It was about what happened in Charleston, just before Governor Gist made his promises to the South Carolina legislature:

…local militia had placed the American military arsenal in town under guard, ostensibly to defend it in case of a slave revolt.

Well, that settles it! What would fear of a slave revolt have to do with slavery?

In fact, what does slavery have to do with slavery? You make it sound like the words “slavery” and “slavery” mean the same thing!

There is no gray area about why the Civil War started. None. The south seceded to protect and maintain slavery – period. They would not have seceded over a federal tax on Sorghum.

This is not a debate, this is not a nuance, this is not an interpretation. To maintain otherwise is, in fact, to strip whatever dignity remains for traitors like Governor William Henry Gist and President Jefferson Davis and the others.

At least when they spat on this nation, when they took up arms against their own country and spilled the blood of those carrying our flag, they told the truth about why they were doing so.

Their descendants are without facts, without dignity, and most importantly – without honor.

I believe it is time for America to get serious about the Bud!

“When I was a kid I inhaled frequently. That was the point.” – Barack Obama

‎”I think people need to be educated to the fact that marijuana is not a drug. Marijuana is an herb and a flower. God put it here. If He put it here and He wants it to grow, what gives the government the right to say that God is wrong?” – Willie Nelson

“When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.” -Bob Marley

“That is not a drug. It’s a leaf,” – Arnold Schwarzenegger

“I used to smoke marijuana. But I’ll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening or the mid evening. Just the early evening, mid evening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early mid afternoon, or perhaps the late mid afternoon. Oh, sometimes the early mid late early morning. . . . But never at dusk.” Steve Martin

1. Marijuana does not kill brains cells.

2. Marijuana has over 200 known medical uses.

3. Marijuana is not addictive as it contains no pharmacological ingredient to cause an physical dependence.

4. Marijuana has been used for over 10,000 years.

5. It is impossible to overdose on Marijuana as it would take 15,000 joints being smoked in 20 seconds by one person to reach a level of toxicity.

6. Zero, I repeat Zero deaths attributed to Marijuana… Ever!

7. There are over 30,000 products that can be made from the male plant, Hemp alone.

8. Marijuana was legal in the entire United States in 1937.

9. Queen Victoria used resin extracts from cannabis to relieve menstrual cramps.

10. Evidence exists that Marijuana may actually stimulate regrowth of brain cells.