Gettysburg- A Fourth of July Long Ago

(reposted by request)

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass.Let me work. - Carl Sandburg

One hundred and fifty five years ago today, brave men fought in and around a small town in Pennsylvania to determine whether the Union would endure or whether it would not.

The Battle of Gettysburg broke the tide of the advance of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and while the war itself didn't end for another 22 months, Gettysburg decided the outcome.

Lee's objective was psychological as much as strategic. By 1863 there was substantial sentiment in the North to allow the Confederacy to go its own way and end what had become an increasingly bloody, unpopular and costly war. By subjecting the North to the same sort of invasion the South had been subjected to - in essence, bringing the war home - Lee hoped to increase this sentiment and force the North to negotiate a settlement.

Gettysburg was very much an accidental battle. Neither side was really looking to fight here, but the armies accidentally collided, largely because Lee was deprived of Jeb Stuart's cavalry in the early stages of the battle and thus lacked his usual awareness of where the Union forces were. Once the initial impact was made,on July 1st 1863 in a battle between Brigadier General John Buford's Union cavalry division and two corps of Union infantry and two large Confederate corps that attacked from the north and northwest under General Richard Ewell, the armies came together and the battle was on.

An astounding fact about Gettysburg is that the victorious commander of the Union forces, General George Gordon Meade, had only been in command of the Army of the Potomac for a scant three days, after General Joseph Hooker was relieved of command. Meade was caught by surprise with the sudden collision of the two armies, but he reacted with coolness and unexpected courage at several points when the battle could very well have been lost with a different sort of general in charge.

The missing man at Gettysburg, one who might very well have altered the course of the battle and of history was Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, who was accidentally killed by his own troops after his amazing victory at Chancellorsville.

The key to Gettysburg was the control of the high ground, the hills and ridges outside the town. After Gen. Buford's troops were scattered into the hills that first day of battle, they could easily have been driven out of the high ground with an assault by the victorious Confederates, and had Stonewall been in command there's no doubt he would have driven his troops to do exactly that, digging them in on the high ground and reinforcing them with Longstreet's divisions to wait for General Meade's Union Army to come at them. Gettysburg would then have been a very different battle. But the troops Jackson would normally have commanded were under the command of General Richard Ewell.

General Ewell, even after he was ordered by Lee to take the Union position on Cemetery Hill "if practicable" chose not to make the attack. There's no question that Stonewall Jackson would have ordered his troops to take the high ground and dig in to wait for the main Confederate forces which were coming to the ridges from the  west. In that case, it would have been the Union forces attacking uphill at an entrenched Southern army backed up by dug in  artillery. The battle coud verywell have ended quite differently.

When Ewell finally did attack, on the second and third day of the battle, it was the Union forces who were reinforced and dug in and the Confederates who were forced to assault them. Ewell's hesitancy likely cost the South the battle.

On the second day of the fighting, July 2nd, General Lee sent General Longstreet's divisions against the Union Left flank in an attempt to roll it up and knock the Union forces off of the high ground. Meade sent reinforcements to the Left flank to shore up positions that later became legendary - the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Plum Run Valley and the Devil's Den. The Union forces held on in spite of horrendous casualties. One of the most amazing exploits of that day happened in the defense of Little Round Top, where Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, a former college professor in command of the 20th Maine maintained a precarious hold on the Union's extreme left flank under assault from General John Hood's troops.When the 20th were almost out of ammunition, Colonel Chamberlain led them in a surprise bayonet charge downhill that swept the Confederates off the hill, saved the position and likely the Union, a deed for which he later won the Medal of Honor.

On the third day, July 3rd, Lee decided to risk everything on a frontal assault on the right center on the Union lines, and 12,500 Confederate troops advanced from the ridge line three-quarters of a mile (1,200 meters) towards Cemetery Ridge in that gallant attempt to reverse fortune known to history as Pickett's Charge.

It was a slaughter. The Union artillery had deliberately held its fire during the Confederate bombardment prior to the Charge, but as the Confederate troops approached they were hit with fierce artillery fire from Union positions on Cemetery Hill and north of Little Round Top, and from the Union center. Nearly one half of the Confederate troops who participated in the Charge failed to return from the attack. Somehow, some way, Confederate General Lewis Armistad's brigade managed to make it through the withering fire and briefly breach the Union lines at a place called the "Angle", a place with a low stone fence near a small wooded area. But they were quickly hurled back, and with that, the battle was essentially over.

After the battle it rained, something that occurred frequently enough to give rise to a belief among soldiers on both sides that the smoke and gunpowder somehow brought on the weather.

The two armies, both licking their wounds and having been through almost more than men should be able to bear gazed at each other across the field of battle on that long ago July Fourth. On both sides combined, there were over 50,000 casualties from three days of battle.

Late in the evening, Lee began the torturous retreat southwards. Did he understand at that point that the war was lost? Perhaps, since he was recorded as telling his troops "This is all my fault." We have no way of knowing. But on that July Fourth, one nation's hopes for independence were doomed and another nation's hopes reaffirmed.

After the battle, there were huge amounts or corpses that needed to be disposed of, and the Union decided to make the site a national cemetery, for convenience as much as anything else. Four months after the battle, on November 19, the cemetery was dedicated, and a ceremony was held.

The main speaker was a nationally known orator, Edward Everett. In those days of oratory as a national sport, he was expected to deliver a real rip snorter of a speech, and he reportedly did just that.

Oddly enough, Everett's isn't the speech that's remembered.Almost as an afterthought, the organizing committee invited President Abraham Lincoln to participate a scant two weeks before the ceremony, where they requested that he appear and "make a few brief remarks to honor the occasion".

So after Edward Everett finished his speech, which clocked in at close to an hour, the President rose and delivered those few brief remarks, ones that started with "Four score and seven years ago" and have come down to us through the mists of history.

Gettysburg today is a living version of Sandburg's poem, in a way. The grass has done its work,but much of the original landscape has been altered and it takes some effort to visualize what happened there. To do that, you have to go there when its quiet and listen to the ghosts. Trust me, they're there in abundance and they'll tell you the whole story if you feel like listening.

Best wishes for a wonderful July Fourth...and take a moment to remember and honor the ghosts of July Fourths past. They deserve that much, at least.

Rob Miller writes for Joshuapundit. His articles have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Washington Examiner, American Thinker, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The San Francisco Chronicle, Real Clear Politics, The Times Of Israel, Breitbart.Com, Yediot and other publications.

Gettysburg - A Fourth Of July Long Ago

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass.Let me work. - Carl Sandburg

One hundred and fifty four years ago today, brave men fought in and around a small town in Pennsylvania to determine whether the Union would endure or whether it would not.

The Battle of Gettysburg broke the tide of the advance of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and while the war itself didn't end for another 22 months, Gettysburg decided the outcome.

Lee's objective was psychological as much as strategic. By 1863 there was substantial sentiment in the North to allow the Confederacy to go its own way and end what had become an increasingly bloody, unpopular and costly war. By subjecting the North to the same sort of invasion the South had been subjected to - in essence, bringing the war home - Lee hoped to increase this sentiment and force the North to negotiate a settlement.

Gettysburg was very much an accidental battle. Neither side was really looking to fight here, but the armies accidentally collided, largely because Lee was deprived of Jeb Stuart's cavalry in the early stages of the battle and thus lacked his usual awareness of where the Union forces were. Once the initial impact was made,on July 1st 1863 in a battle between Brigadier General John Buford's Union cavalry division and two corps of Union infantry and two large Confederate corps that attacked from the north and northwest under General Richard Ewell, the armies came together and the battle was on.

An astounding fact about Gettysburg is that the victorious commander of the Union forces, General George Gordon Meade, had only been in command of the Army of the Potomac for a scant three days, after General Joseph Hooker was relieved of command. Meade was caught by surprise with the sudden collision of the two armies, but he reacted with coolness and unexpected courage at several points when the battle could very well have been lost with a different sort of general in charge.

The missing man at Gettysburg, one who might very well have altered the course of the battle and of history was Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, who was accidentally killed by his own troops after his amazing victory at Chancellorsville.

The key to Gettysburg was the control of the high ground, the hills and ridges outside the town. After Gen. Buford's troops were scattered into the hills that first day of battle, they could easily have been driven out of the high ground with an assault by the victorious Confederates, and had Stonewall been in command there's no doubt he would have driven his troops to do exactly that, digging them in on the high ground and reinforcing them with Longstreet's divisions to wait for General Meade's Union Army to come at them. Gettysburg would then have been a very different battle. But the troops Jackson would normally have commanded were under the command of General Richard Ewell.

General Ewell, even after he was ordered by Lee to take the Union position on Cemetery Hill "if practicable" chose not to make the attack. When he finally did, on the second and third day of the battle, it was the Union forces who were reinforced and dug in and the Confederates who were forced to assault them. Ewell's hesitancy likely cost the South the battle.

On the second day of the fighting, July 2nd, General Lee sent General Longstreet's divisions against the Union Left flank in an attempt to roll it up and knock the Union forces off of the high ground. Meade sent reinforcements to the Left flank to shore up positions that later became legendary - the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Plum Run Valley and the Devil's Den. The Union forces held on in spite of horrendous casualties. One of the most amazing exploits of that day happened in the defense of Little Round Top, where Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, a former college professor in command of the 20th Maine maintained a precarious hold on the Union's extreme left flank under assault from General John Hood's troops.When the 20th were almost out of ammunition, Colonel Chamberlain led them in a surprise bayonet charge downhill that swept the Confederates off the hill, saved the position and likely the Union, a deed for which he later won the Medal of Honor.



On the third day, July 3rd, Lee decided to risk everything on a frontal assault on the right center on the Union lines, and 12,500 Confederate troops advanced from the ridge line three-quarters of a mile (1,200 meters) towards Cemetery Ridge in that gallant attempt to reverse fortune known to history as Pickett's Charge.

It was a slaughter. The Union artillery had deliberately held its fire during the Confederate bombardment prior to the Charge, but as the Confederate troops approached they were hit with fierce artillery fire from Union positions on Cemetery Hill and north of Little Round Top, and from the Union center. Nearly one half of the Confederate troops who participated in the Charge failed to return from the attack.

Somehow, some way, Confederate General Lewis Armistad's brigade managed to make it through the withering fire and briefly breach the Union lines at a place called the "Angle", a place with a low stone fence near a small wooded area. But they were quickly hurled back, and with that, the battle was essentially over.



After the battle it rained, something that occurred frequently enough to give rise to a belief among soldiers on both sides that the smoke and gunpowder somehow brought on the weather.

The two armies, both licking their wounds and having been through almost more than men should be able to bear gazed at each other across the field of battle on that long ago July Fourth. On both sides combined, there were over 50,000 casualties from three days of battle.

Late in the evening, Lee began the torturous retreat southwards. Did he understand at that point that the war was lost? We have no way of knowing. But on that July Fourth, one nation's hopes for independence were doomed and another nation's hopes reaffirmed.

After the battle, there were huge amounts or corpses that needed to be disposed of, and the Union decided to make the site a national cemetery, for convenience as much as anything else. Four months after the battle, on November 19, the cemetery was dedicated, and a ceremony was held.

The main speaker was a nationally known orator, Edward Everett. In those days of oratory as a national sport, he was expected to deliver a real rip snorter of a speech, and he reportedly did just that.

Oddly enough, Everett's isn't the speech that's remembered.Almost as an afterthought, the organizing committee invited President Abraham Lincoln to participate a scant two weeks before the ceremony, where they requested that he appear and "make a few brief remarks to honor the occasion".

So after Edward Everett finished his speech, which clocked in at close to an hour, the President rose and delivered those few brief remarks, ones that started with "Four score and seven years ago" and have come down to us through the mists of history.

Gettysburg today is a living version of Sandburg's poem. The grass has done its work, much of the original landscape has been altered and it takes some effort to visualize what happened there.

To do that, you have to go there when its quiet and listen to the ghosts. Trust me, they're there in abundance and they'll tell you the whole story if you feel like listening.

Have a wonderful July Fourth...and take a moment to remember and honor the ghosts of July Fourths past. They deserve that much, at least.

(reposted by request)

Addendum: This year, the Antifa movement threatened that they were going to invade the Gettysburg site and desecrate the graves and the monuments. This is an excellent indication of what bullies and sniveling cowards they really are. They would never dare to attack these brave men if they were alive...although I must admit, watching these Antifa dregs mixing it up with some of Pickett's Division or the men of the 2nd Vermont would have been amusing.

Fortunately, a number of men from the local militias, Sons of Confederate Veterans, a number of the locals and similar concerned parties went to the park armed and ready to protect it from these scum. And the Antifa clowns made the wise decision not to show up.

NYT: 'Texas, CA Belong to Mexico. US Must Give Migrants Amnesty To Keep Them

Pravda-on-the-Hudson has been caught dissembling quite a few times. But this op-ed they chose to publish asserting that Mexico has a claim to all the territory ceded to the U.S. at the end of the Mexican War in 1848 has a special place in their disgraceful history. And I'm actually glad they did run this,because it unintentionally reveals the true core of the argument that illegal migrants are 'immigrants' and thus entitled to what are referred to as 'immigrant rights.'


 


The piece, written by one Señor Enrique Krauze who is described as 'a historian, the editor of the literary magazine Letras Libres and the author of “Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America.”' His premise is this...and note certain key words I've emphasized:

The United States invasion of Mexico in 1846 inflicted a painful wound that, in the 170 years that followed, turned into a scar. Donald Trump has torn it open again.

Among the many lies that he has constructed, none is more ridiculous than his attempt to contradict history by presenting the United States as a victim of Mexico, a country that supposedly steals jobs, imposes onerous treaties and sends its “bad hombres” across the border.

To confront this fake history, some Mexicans are proposing to remind Mr. Trump exactly what country was the first victim of American imperialism. They are calling for a lawsuit that would aim to nullify the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (signed on Feb. 2, 1848), in which Mexico — invaded by American soldiers, its capital occupied, its ports and customs stations seized — was forced to accept the American annexation of Texas and concede more than half the rest of Mexican territory, now including most of the states of Arizona, New Mexico and California.

He continues by naming some radical Left 'statesmen' (his term) behind the idea of an (International Criminal Court (ICC) lawsuit and says, "If the present Peña Nieto government does not adopt Mr. Cárdenas’s project, an opposition candidate (of either the populist left or the nationalist right) could legitimately assume it as a banner for the presidential elections of July 2018. Such a new president could make that lawsuit a reality."

He goes on to cherry pick a few quotes from Americans who disagreed with the war, including misrepresenting soldiers like Robert E. Lee who merely expressed human sympathy for the loss of life that occurred during the war. And finishes thus:

For us Mexicans, this is the chance for a kind of reconquest. Surely not the physical reconquest of the territories that once were ours. Nor an indemnification that should have been much greater than the feeble amount of $15 million that the American government paid, in installments, for the stolen land. We need a reconquest of the memory of that war so prodigal in atrocities inspired by racial prejudices and greed for territorial gain.

But the best and most just reparation would be American immigration reform that could open the road to citizenship for the descendants of those Mexicans who suffered the unjust loss of half their territory.

Let's look at what Señor Krause is actually saying. The United States viciously invaded Mexico for no reason whatsoever and committed war crimes inspired by racial prejudices and greed. So Mexico should annul the treaty that ended the war and sue for 'reparations' at the ICC. But because such a suit might not succeed, the U.S. needs to recognize its guilt, flagellate itself and provide amnesty for 11-20 million 'immigrants' no matter what, simply because they're Mexican. Because you see, they have rights other immigrants don't have, because America stole territory that rightly belongs to Mexico.

That is exactly what La Raza, MeCha and other 'immigrant rights' groups have been really saying for some time. That illegal migrants,or as they like to call them immigrants from Mexico have the right to come here and settle en masse because of this history.

Let's examine this, shall we?

In the first part of his screed, Señor Krause makes much of the violent, unprovoked war of greed and conquest America waged against Mexico. Then, towards the end this 'historian' mentions in passing 'the feeble amount of $15 million that the American government paid, in installments, for the stolen land.'

When was the last time you heard of the victor in a war of greed and territorial conquest giving any money to the losing side in a peace treaty? N-E-V-E-R.

And that 'feeble amount?' In today's money, that translates into over $460 billion dollars for land that was mostly unsettled and undeveloped. Not exactly the kind of money 'conquerors' dole out to the vanquished, is it? For that kind of cash, we should have gotten the Mexicans to throw in Baja and a nice piece of Sonora as well, ¿No es así??

Mexico was desperately in need of that money, after years of dysfunctional, corrupt government from various dictators like Presidente General Santa Anna. They happily agreed to what was a seller's price they had no reason to expect after starting a war.

Texas, by the way had already broken free from the Mexican yoke. One of the chief causes of the war was the U.S. accepting the Lone Star Republic as the the 28th state of the Union. Mexico had never gotten over getting their behinds handed to them by the Texans a few years back in spite of the Treaties of Velasco they made with the Texans. They still regarded Texas as theirs, even though they no longer controlled it. They were enraged when it became part of the U.S. and publicly called it a causus belli, a cause for war.

California was also on the verge of revolt, because neither most of the Califonios (Mexican living in California) or the American settlers liked Mexico's tyrannical government or its high taxation and corruption. California's Bear Flag Republic broke free from Mexico during the war, in 1846.

What 'historians' like Señor Krause conveniently forget if that prior to the war, President Polk tried to stave off hostilities by having U.S. diplomat John Slidell travel to Mexico offering a sum of 30 million dollars (nearly a trillion dollars!) for New Mexico and California and a border at the Rio Grande. (Mexico claimed the border started at the Nuences River, which the U.S. and Texas disputed). The Mexican government refused to receive him or negotiate anything.Ayi, those greedy Yanquis! And when General Zachary Taylor and his troops were ordered to travel down to the Rio Grande to maintain the disputed border of Texas they were fired on by the Mexican army.

Hmm, so much for an unprovoked war, Señor   Krause. Who's dealing in fake history now?

 And Mexico got even more money a few years after the war via the Gadsden Purchase, $10 million 1853 dollars (about $240 billion today) for what was simply desert wasteland and served to give Mexico a contiguous border. So much for the greedy Yanquis, si?

So now that we've established that the U.S engaging in the Mexican War was not unprovoked, that Mexico could have prevented it, that Mexico was the aggressor, that the land was bought and paid for at a more than fair price, and that the  United States was surprisingly generous in victory to a country that had attacked them, let's briefly examine the argument this horse manure is based on.

 

Mexico today still has a corrupt, dysfunctional government. Part of the reason that kind of government survives is because illegal migration from Mexico aids and abets it. They do it by sending billions of dollars back to Mexico to prop up the status quo, and by importing billions in social welfare cost to America because Mexico prefers to aid and abet illegal migration rather than take care of its own people. Illegal migration is Mexico's safety valve that helps keep the status quo in power.

There are a lot of governments like Mexico, and a lot of people who want to come here for various reasons. Over 3 million people are currently stuck in bureaucratic limbo with ICE as I write this. If you doubt this, talk to any American who married a spouse from a foreign country and went through the red tape and expense to bring them here legally. To say that Mexican illegal migrants  have special rights over people who are actually obeying our immigration  laws to come here legally and get to jump the line simply because of their proximity to our border,  some complicit American politicians and peddlers of fake history like Senor Krause is racism. Plain and simple.

An obvious ideologue like 'historian' Señor Krause is one thing. But For Pravda-on-the-Hudson to run this sort of propaganda and take it seriously(they even translated this bilge) gives a new meaning to complicity. It's embarrassing that they're not embarrassed.

Gettysburg - A Fourth Of July Long Ago

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass.Let me work. - Carl Sandburg

One hundred and fifty three years ago today, brave men fought in and around a small town in Pennsylvania to determine whether the Union would endure or whether it would not.

The Battle of Gettysburg broke the tide of the advance of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and while the war itself didn't end for another 22 months, Gettysburg decided the outcome.

Lee's objective was psychological as much as strategic. By 1863 there was substantial sentiment in the North to allow the Confederacy to go its own way and end what had become an increasingly bloody, unpopular and costly war. By subjecting the North to the same sort of invasion the South had been subjected to - in essence, bringing the war home - Lee hoped to increase this sentiment and force the North to negotiate a settlement.

Gettysburg was very much an accidental battle. Neither side was really looking to fight here, but the armies accidentally collided, largely because Lee was deprived of Jeb Stuart's cavalry in the early stages of the battle and thus lacked his usual awareness of where the Union forces were. Once the initial impact was made,on July 1st 1863 in a battle between Brigadier General John Buford's Union cavalry division and two corps of Union infantry and two large Confederate corps that attacked from the north and northwest under General Richard Ewell, the armies came together and the battle was on.

An astounding fact about Gettysburg is that the victorious commander of the Union forces, General George Gordon Meade, had only been in command of the Army of the Potomac for a scant three days, after General Joseph Hooker was relieved of command. Meade was caught by surprise with the sudden collision of the two armies, but he reacted with coolness and unexpected courage at several points when the battle could very well have been lost with a different sort of general in charge.

The missing man at Gettysburg, one who might very well have altered the course of the battle and of history was Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, who was accidentally killed by his own troops after his amazing victory at Chancellorsville.

The key to Gettysburg was the control of the high ground, the hills and ridges outside the town. After Gen. Buford's troops were scattered into the hills that first day of battle, they could easily have been driven out of the high ground with an assault by the victorious Confederates, and had Stonewall been in command there's no doubt he would have driven his troops to do exactly that, digging them in on the high ground and reinforcing them with Longstreet's divisions to wait for General Meade's Union Army to come at them. Gettysburg would then have been a very different battle. But the troops Jackson would normally have commanded were under the command of General Richard Ewell.

General Ewell, even after he was ordered by Lee to take the Union position on Cemetery Hill "if practicable" chose not to make the attack. When he finally did, on the second and third day of the battle, it was the Union forces who were reinforced and dug in and the Confederates who were forced to assault them. Ewell's hesitancy likely cost the South the battle.

On the second day of the fighting, July 2nd, General Lee sent General Longstreet's divisions against the Union Left flank in an attempt to roll it up and knock the Union forces off of the high ground. Meade sent reinforcements to the Left flank to shore up positions that later became legendary - the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Plum Run Valley and the Devil's Den. The Union forces held on in spite of horrendous casualties. One of the most amazing exploits of that day happened in the defense of Little Round Top, where Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, a former college professor in command of the 20th Maine maintained a precarious hold on the Union's extreme left flank under assault from General John Hood's troops.When the 20th were almost out of ammunition, Colonel Chamberlain led them in a surprise bayonet charge downhill that swept the Confederates off the hill, saved the position and likely the Union, a deed for which he later won the Medal of Honor.



On the third day, July 3rd, Lee decided to risk everything on a frontal assault on the right center on the Union lines, and 12,500 Confederate troops advanced from the ridge line three-quarters of a mile (1,200 meters) towards Cemetery Ridge in that gallant attempt to reverse fortune known to history as Pickett's Charge.

It was a slaughter. The Union artillery had deliberately held its fire during the Confederate bombardment prior to the Charge, but as the Confederate troops approached they were hit with fierce artillery fire from Union positions on Cemetery Hill and north of Little Round Top, and from the Union center. Nearly one half of the Confederate troops who participated in the Charge failed to return from the attack.

Somehow, some way, Confederate General Lewis Armistad's brigade managed to make it through the withering fire and briefly breach the Union lines at a place called the "Angle", a place with a low stone fence near a small wooded area. But they were quickly hurled back, and with that, the battle was essentially over.



After the battle it rained, something that occurred frequently enough to give rise to a belief among soldiers on both sides that the smoke and gunpowder somehow brought on the weather.

The two armies, both licking their wounds and having been through almost more than men should be able to bear gazed at each other across the field of battle on that long ago July Fourth. On both sides combined, there were over 50,000 casualties from three days of battle.

Late in the evening, Lee began the torturous retreat southwards. Did he understand at that point that the war was lost? We have no way of knowing. But on that July Fourth, one nation's hopes for independence were doomed and another nation's hopes reaffirmed.

After the battle, there were huge amounts or corpses that needed to be disposed of, and the Union decided to make the site a national cemetery, for convenience as much as anything else. Four months after the battle, on November 19, the cemetery was dedicated, and a ceremony was held.

The main speaker was a nationally known orator, Edward Everett. In those days of oratory as a national sport, he was expected to deliver a real rip snorter of a speech, and he reportedly did just that.

Oddly enough, Everett's isn't the speech that's remembered.Almost as an afterthought, the organizing committee invited President Abraham Lincoln to participate a scant two weeks before the ceremony, where they requested that he appear and "make a few brief remarks to honor the occasion".

So after Edward Everett finished his speech, which clocked in at close to an hour, the President rose and delivered those few brief remarks, ones that started with "Four score and seven years ago" and have come down to us through the mists of history.

Gettysburg today is a living version of Sandburg's poem. The grass has done its work, much of the original landscape has been altered and it takes some effort to visualize what happened there.

To do that, you have to go there when its quiet and listen to the ghosts. Trust me, they're there in abundance and they'll tell you the whole story if you feel like listening.

Have a wonderful July Fourth...and take a moment to remember and honor the ghosts of July Fourths past. They deserve that much, at least.

(reposted by request)

The Border? The Mideast? Scandals? For The Obamas It's Luxury Vacay Time Again!!

 

Now isn't this precious! The Obamas and a crew of their very special invited guests are planning a 16 day luxury vacation at Martha's Vineyard on a $12 million, 10-acre forested estate with expansive water views of Vineyard Sound on the southwestern corner of the island. The house will have to be altered for security and communications facilities, and then returned to its former condition. That could cost $150,000 and up alone, based on similar jobs like this done for other trips.

From August 9 to August 24 they'll be camped out at the 8,100-square foot beachfront home of a heavy Democrat donor that includes an infinity pool and hot tub, plus a basketball and tennis court.Valerie Jarret, of course will be among the ones in attendance.

A total of 12 smaller houses have been rented for the not quite so favored and the help on the tony island resort during high season..not cheap, although the White House isn't revealing the cost. The average on the island in August is a mere $400-$500 per day. For a dozen houses,lets split the difference and say $8,000 per day, or a total of around $150,000 since the staffers normally get there a few days before the president.

And then, there's security. We can't have gawkers or the non-connected interfering with the Obamas' fun, now can we?

Figure at least 50 Secret Service agents, plus a number of Navy and Coast Guard ships that will be on hand as well.The Secret Service all have vehicles ( normally at least 20 based on the usual size of the presidential entourage, so that means Air Force One plus military transport aircraft which usually includes two VC-25As and a C-130. There is usually also a chartered press plane to bring along additional journalists. Air Force One alone costs $68,000 an hour to run, so figure over $400,000 round trip just for Air Force One, plus the same for the identical backup Air Force One 747 (that's right, there are TWO of them). Figure at least another $75,000 per plane for maintenance, so close to just over a million for the two Air Force Ones alone. The other planes add up to at least slightly more than that...let's call it two million five in all. That doesn't include food and beverages, something the Obamas and their guests are normally pretty free with according to documents obtained on other trips by Judicial Watch's FOIA suits.

Obviously the number and type of ships guarding the president is highly classified. I think assuming something like 15-20 ships including submarine and Coast Guard launches is probably pretty close to correct.Operation costs for military vessels vary according to size and type. A modern sub, for instance, costs about $55,000 per day to operate. If there are two of them, one for each side of the island, we're talking almost $2 million for eighteen days, just for the subs.Smaller destroyers cost about $150,000 per day, so a pair of those might run between $2 to $2.5 million. For the entire vacay, I would not be surprised if the naval ships cost between $5 million and $10 million for the 18 days they'll be on duty.Let's say $6 million, which is probably on the low side.

We're up to $8.8 million. And we haven't figured in food, gas, entertainment, greens fees, communications charges or a myriad of other miscellaneous expenses. I figure the entire romp will cost the taxpayers at least $10 million, probably more.

Just for comparison purposes, Mrs. Obama's previous luxury romp in Spain cost close to half a million of your tax dollars, and according to the UK Daily Mail, Judicial Watch reports that it cost more than $11 million for President and Mrs. Obama to travel to South Africa for Nelson Mandela's memorial service in December, where the president and his wife and their entourage were in Africa for less than 13 hours.

No one has even begun to calculate the cost  of the luxurious China  vacation Michelle Obama took  with her mother and assorted hangers on that was actually billed as an official trip  believe it or not, even though no official business was conducted.

And the most fun part of all? Guess who's paying for it? We are! Now there's something to think about as you're trying to figure out whether you can swing the price of gas, meals at McDonalds or Carrows and a couple of nights in a Motel Six to take your own family out for a long weekend this summer or whether its going to be another staycation at home.

But for the Obamas, its Bluto Blutarsky's motto all the way: "Take it. Don't cost nuthin'. "

 

At least, it don't cost nuthin' for the Obamas!


But let's not be too critical. The president needs to rest up from his fundraising and campaigning for his fellow Democrats. That speech he always gives, the class warfare one at each stop ranting about the awful “1 percent,” the greedy “rich” (you know, anyone making $200,000 who's not working in government) and those do-nothing Republicans in congress must take a lot out of him.

(***BIG FAT NOTE*** Yours truly edited the above part of this piece after being notified by some of the usual trolls in the comments section that I had been punked by a SATIRE SITE. Yes, even the trolls serve a purpose sometimes. The part about the vacay is true, but the former numbers were so ludicrously off I should have known. Doesn't happen often, but I had a pretty big laugh at myself at how I fell into this one! Mea culpa.

So I researched what the likely costs would be for a presidential vacay in  a place like Martha's Vineyard, the  actual cost of operating the aircraft, renting auxiliary properties and the cost of operating the naval vessels.Of course, the trolls missed the forest for the trees, like always  -  that at a time when our economy is actually shrinking, so many are in want  and there are so many major problems to deal with, it's a selfish, indecent  and  classless move to go on a luxury vacay of this sort. That part was right on the money, and they of course ignored it. We now return to our regularly scheduled program )

Ah, but what about BUSH! Didn't HE go to that satanic ranch of his in Crawford all the time. HUH!?!



I hate it when the insane Left makes me defend a mediocre president like George W. Bush. Although of course he looks good, you know, in retrospect to some people.

The Bushes spent a mere fraction of what the Obamas have spent on vacation, and there's a simple reason why. Rather than renting a different house each time in a high cost resort, almost of of their vacations were spent in one of three places - at the family home in Crawford, at Camp David or at a family compound in Maine.

When a president goes on vacation, the biggest costs involve Air Force One, the subsidiary aircraft for staff and the Secret Service and accommodations for them.And the extensive changes to any property so the computer and communications networks are encrypted and secure and can be used successfully by the president in case something comes up, or simply if a decision needs to be made while he's on vacation.

In the case of the Bushes, two out of three of these location already had the communications networks and accommodations for the Secret Service and staff already in place on the premises, Camp David ( which doesn't even need to be flown to, so no Air Force one expenditures) and the Bush Compound in Maine, because of George HW Bush's presidency. The Bush family home in Crawford had to have these facilities prepared precisely ONCE, after George W. Bush became president. The only further expenditure for Crawford in 8 years was the flight time and the phone bill.

Now, in the case of the Obamas, they stay in different high priced digs each time where similarly high priced accommodations have to be found for the Secret Service, staff and help each and every time. And each and every time whatever mansion they're staying in has to be refurbished for security access and to accommodate the computer systems, surveillance cameras and communications networks needed...and then repaired and returned to their original condition when the Obamas leave...at literally millions in government expense, of course.

The Bushes weren't exactly high livers compared to the Obamas either. There was nothing like some of the gaudy spectacles we've seen since the Obamas came to town. And no one ever saw Mrs. Laura Bush sporting high fashion designer gowns at gala White House events.

There's no way of working it out besides hearsay from people who have served both presidents, but the overall impression we get is that President Bush spent a great deal more work time on his vacations than Barack Obama ever has. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was true.

Oh, and one more thing. President Bush was an enthusiastic golfer, just like our current president. But he gave it up entirely once we went to war after the invasion of Afghanistan. To paraphrase the president's own words, he didn't want some mother or wife of an American soldier in harm's way to see her president playing golf when their loved ones were in danger.

That showed a certain amount of empathy and class. We have a very different kind of man in the White House now.

And speaking of empathy and class, I also seem to remember that during the Depression, FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt weren't ones for ritzy parties, high fashion and expensive vacations either...and they could have afforded to pay for such things themselves, let alone getting them on the government dime. Whatever one thinks of their politics they were, essentially, decent human beings who had a sense of what living it up during war and depression would look and feel like to their fellow Americans.

 

As much as I might disagree with some of her views, Mrs. Roosevelt was an amazing human being and exactly the First Lady the country needed during depression, hardship and war. She flew all over the country at a time when flying wasn't anywhere near comfortable as it is now, and she went to the slums, the mines and the small towns left without hope to let the American people know that someone in Washington knew what they were going through and actually gave a damn. Franklin couldn't walk, so she became his legs.

And when war came, she ran herself ragged visiting the troops, selling bonds and comforting Gold Star mothers who had lost loved ones. She would have been outraged at the idea of spending millions on vacations or prancing around in designer clothes.



And FDR? His vacations consisted of therapy and playing pater familias at Warm Springs, going to Camp David and the odd yacht cruise for a day, a special relaxation for an old sailor.



 

Again, they were very different people than the current inhabitants of the White House. They were by no means perfect, but they came to give, not to take.

Gettysburg - A Fourth Of July Long Ago

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass.Let me work. - Carl Sandburg

One hundred and fifty years ago today, brave men fought in and around a small town in Pennsylvania to determine whether the Union would endure or whether it would not.

The Battle of Gettysburg broke the tide of the advance of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and while the war itself didn't end for another 22 months, Gettysburg decided the outcome.

Lee's objective was psychological as much as strategic. By 1863 there was substantial sentiment in the North to allow the Confederacy to go its own way and end what had become an increasingly bloody, unpopular and costly war. By subjecting the North to the same sort of invasion the South had been subjected to - in essence, bringing the war home - Lee hoped to increase this sentiment and force the North to negotiate a settlement.

Gettysburg was very much an accidental battle. Neither side was really looking to fight here, but the armies accidentally collided, largely because Lee was deprived of Jeb Stuart's cavalry in the early stages of the battle and thus lacked his usual awareness of where the Union forces were. Once the initial impact was made,on July 1st 1863 in a battle between Brigadier General John Buford's Union cavalry division and two corps of Union infantry and two large Confederate corps that attacked from the north and northwest under General Richard Ewell, the armies came together and the battle was on.

An astounding fact about Gettysburg is that the victorious commander of the Union forces, General George Gordon Meade, had only been in command of the Army of the Potomac for a scant three days, after General Joseph Hooker was relieved of command. Meade was caught by surprise with the sudden collision of the two armies, but he reacted with coolness and unexpected courage at several points when the battle could very well have been lost with a different sort of general in charge.

The missing man at Gettysburg, one who might very well have altered the course of the battle and of history was Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, who was accidentally killed by his own troops after his amazing victory at Chancellorsville.

The key to Gettysburg was the control of the high ground, the hills and ridges outside the town. After Gen. Buford's troops were scattered into the hills that first day of battle, they could easily have been driven out of the high ground with an assault by the victorious Confederates, and had Stonewall been in command there's no doubt he would have driven his troops to do exactly that, digging them in on the high ground and reinforcing them with Longstreet's divisions to wait for General Meade's Union Army to come at them. Gettysburg would then have been a very different battle. But the troops Jackson would normally have commanded were under the command of General Richard Ewell.

General Ewell, even after he was ordered by Lee to take the Union position on Cemetery Hill "if practicable" chose not to make the attack. When he finally did, on the second and third day of the battle, it was the Union forces who were reinforced and dug in and the Confederates who were forced to assault them. Ewell's hesitancy likely cost the South the battle.

On the second day of the fighting, July 2nd, General Lee sent General Longstreet's divisions against the Union Left flank in an attempt to roll it up and knock the Union forces off of the high ground. Meade sent reinforcements to the Left flank to shore up positions that later became legendary - the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Plum Run Valley and the Devil's Den. The Union forces held on in spite of horrendous casualties. One of the most amazing exploits of that day happened in the defense of Little Round Top, where Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, a former college professor in command of the 20th Maine maintained a precarious hold on the Union's extreme left flank under assault from General John Hood's troops.When the 20th were almost out of ammunition, Colonel Chamberlain led them in a surprise bayonet charge downhill that swept the Confederates off the hill, saved the position and likely the Union, a deed for which he later won the Medal of Honor.



On the third day, July 3rd, Lee decided to risk everything on a frontal assault on the right center on the Union lines, and 12,500 Confederate troops advanced from the ridge line three-quarters of a mile (1,200 meters) towards Cemetery Ridge in that gallant attempt to reverse fortune known to history as Pickett's Charge.

It was a slaughter. The Union artillery had deliberately held its fire during the Confederate bombardment prior to the Charge, but as the Confederate troops approached they were hit with fierce artillery fire from Union positions on Cemetery Hill and north of Little Round Top, and from the Union center. Nearly one half of the Confederate troops who participated in the Charge failed to return from the attack.

Somehow, some way, Confederate General Lewis Armistad's brigade managed to make it through the withering fire and briefly breach the Union lines at a place called the "Angle", a place with a low stone fence near a small wooded area. But they were quickly hurled back, and with that, the battle was essentially over.



After the battle it rained, something that occurred frequently enough to give rise to a belief among soldiers on both sides that the smoke and gunpowder somehow brought on the weather.

The two armies, both licking their wounds and having been through almost more than men should be able to bear gazed at each other across the field of battle on that long ago July Fourth. On both sides combined, there were over 50,000 casualties from three days of battle.

Late in the evening, Lee began the torturous retreat southwards. Did he understand at that point that the war was lost? We have no way of knowing. But on that July Fourth, one nation's hopes for independence were doomed and another nation's hopes reaffirmed.

After the battle, there were huge amounts or corpses that needed to be disposed of, and the Union decided to make the site a national cemetery, for convenience as much as anything else. Four months after the battle, on November 19, the cemetery was dedicated, and a ceremony was held.

The main speaker was a nationally known orator, Edward Everett. In those days of oratory as a national sport, he was expected to deliver a real rip snorter of a speech, and he reportedly did just that.

Oddly enough, Everett's isn't the speech that's remembered.Almost as an afterthought, the organizing committee invited President Abraham Lincoln to participate a scant two weeks before the ceremony, where they requested that he appear and "make a few brief remarks to honor the occasion".

So after Edward Everett finished his speech, which clocked in at close to an hour, the President rose and delivered those few brief remarks, ones that started with "Four score and seven years ago" and have come down to us through the mists of history.

Gettysburg today is a living version of Sandburg's poem. The grass has done its work, much of the original landscape has been altered and it takes some effort to visualize what happened there.

To do that, you have to go there when its quiet and listen to the ghosts. Trust me, they're there in abundance and they'll tell you the whole story if you feel like listening.

Have a wonderful July Fourth...and take a moment to remember and honor the ghosts of July Fourths past. They deserve that much, at least.

(reposted by request)

What 's Really Going On In The Ukraine

 

The Ukraine is in the news as violent protests shake the country.What's going on, and why is it important? Here's what you really need to know, as opposed to a lot of what you may be hearing.

Russia and the Ukraine have a history that goes back centuries, and it's pretty much all bad. Like Poland and the Baltic countries, the Ukraine marks the borderline between the Russian culture and western European culture, and to an extent the borderline between Catholicism and Othrodox Christianity, although the Ukraine is mixed in this regard.



Poland, the Ukraine and Lithuania in the Baltic Sea area were all once world powers, and a Polish/Lithuanian alliance actually invaded and took over Russia in the early 17th century. The Russians never forgot it.

The three countries made several attempts over the years to unite as one kingdom, which would have substantially changed the history of Europe and guaranteed their independence, but the underlying suspicions between the three, language and cultural differences and the inherent difficulties in how Poland's Sejm (a gathering of powerful nobles that was one of the first parliaments in Europe) was set up to make real consensus difficult all contributed to the failure of those attempts, and gradually all of these countries wound up under Russia's thumb.

After a brief period of independence after the Russian Revolution, the Ukraine again became part of the Russian Empire in 1919, this time a Soviet one.

The Soviets treated the Ukraine as a colony and essentially plundered it. They severely repressed the Ukraine's language, religion and culture and instituted forced collective farming, and when the Ukrainians were rebellious and continued to resist, Stalin literally seized every bit of food inside the Ukraine including the livestock and seed grain, removed it, sealed the borders and left the population to starve. Anywhere from three to seven million people were starved to death in an atrocity known as the Holodomor.

When the Nazis invaded, for the most part the Ukrainians were avid collaborators, partly because they understandably hated the Russians and saw Hitler's troops as liberators and partly because many Ukrainians shared their ideas about Jews. For all the Ukrainian rhetoric through the years about freedom and human dignity, historically some of the worst and most brutal pogroms against Jews were in the Ukraine. Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who is still a national hero in the Ukraine destroyed over 300 Jewish communities in the country. And in the early 20th century, vicious pogroms in the Ukraine and elsewhere in Russia were an impetus both for Jewish emigration to America and to Palestine.There are indications even today that not much has changed when it comes to Jews for a number of Ukrainians.

Many Ukrainians fought for Hitler in his SS against the Russians, and they were among the perpetrators of something that occurred at a place in the Ukraine called Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev where literally thousands of Jewish men, women and children were machine gunned to death, with the assistance and cooperation of the Ukrainians who participated in the carnage while people from the surrounding area watched, brought picnic lunches and applauded.

Needless to say, when the Red Army retook the area, the Ukrainians were not exactly very high in their esteem, and Soviet policy towards the Ukraine again returned to treating it as a colony and as a vital border area that needed to be held to prevent Russia from being invaded by outside forces again.The Ukrainian SSR was also turned into a major Soviet military outpost and arms manufacturing center in the cold war, and was home to a number of important and strategic military bases. packed with the best weapons systems the Soviets could make.

When the Soviet Empire crashed and burned, the Ukraine went their own way and declared their independence in 1991,but the country still maintained close ties to Russia and remained under Russian influence out of economic necessity.

The first real move towards independence from Russia occurred in 1994, when a rigged election and the subsequent outrage and unrest led to Victor Yushchenko becoming president,who favored closer ties to Europe and EU membership. This strained relations with the Russians (who actually tried to poison Yushchenko to stop him), and led to Russia attempting to blackmail the Ukraine by shutting off natural gas supplies to both the Ukraine and the EU, a must for heating due to the climate.

That ended up finally being settled more or less amicably, but due to political infighting a pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was elected in 2010, allegedly with covert Russian assistance. Yanukovych turned the Ukraine's focus back towards Russia, arresting politicians who favored closer alliance with the west and in November of 2013, refusing to sign the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement.

I recount this brief history in order to give you a bit of necessary background so that you understand the dynamics of what's happening now.

Yanukovych's failure to bring the Ukraine into the EU sparked massive protests, which have come to a head now. The majority of the Ukrainian people do not want to be a client state of Russia, and want EU membership.

The Russians, on the other hand, see a Europeanized Ukraine as a threat to their security, which is why Russian leader Vladimir Putin is so exercised about it. His carrot-and-stick performance includes the offer of a badly needed $15 billion aid package if the Ukraine stays out of the EU, and the threat of once again shutting off the gas in the middle of the European winter if the Ukrainians toss out Yanukovych and join the EU.

Yanukovych made a major error with a particularly brutal response to the protests, which involved a number of deaths and included snipers picking off people in the crowds. Many of Yanukovych's police refused to be a part of this and actually joined the protesters, or at least turned over their arms and equipment.

Yanukovych was forced to make a deal with the leaders of the opposition today, which commits him to early elections and reduces his presidential authority, along with granting amnesty to all protesters and firing the minister of the interior, who ordered the brutal response to the protesters and was a major security tool of Yanukovych.

Significantly, it also mandated the release of opposition politician and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who has been imprisoned for more than two years, and could very well be the next Ukrainian leader.



Simply put, those are the issues.

The Russians understandably want the Ukraine as a secure border area and checkpoint. While the Russians participated in today's negotiations along with EU diplomats that were designed to calm things down and forestall more bloodshed, the Russians are not endorsing the deal and Putin is almost certainly willing to go to some lengths to retain the Ukraine in Russia's sphere of influence. That might include 'influencing' the next elections,or literally just about anything.

The Ukrainian opposition understandably want to join the EU and obtain a divorce from Russia, and while they were apparently willing to fight for the privilege, it remains an open question of how far the EU is willing to go to support them.

President Obama has essentially been AWOL on the issue.

And that's where things stand. While I agree with erring on the side of freedom, it's vitally important not to get taken in by rhetoric and look at the whole picture when figuring out how to proceed, where our best interests lie and what to do about it.

This, after all, is essentially an ethnic conflict that has been going on for centuries.

U.S. Army Seeks To Purge Lee, Jackson And Other Confederate Generals From Facilities

 

Various U.S. Army facilities are discussing whether to purge all mentions, statues, portraits and other memorials that mention former Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee, Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson, James Longstreet, Jeb Stuart or other American military figures who fought on the Southern side of the War Between the States.

I would bet my dollar to your dime that this came as a diktat from the White House:

The U.S. Army War College, which molds future field generals, has begun discussing whether it should remove its portraits of Confederate generals — including those of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.

Nestled in rural Pennsylvania on the 500-acre Carlisle Barracks, the war college is conducting an inventory of all its paintings and photographs with an eye for rehanging them in historical themes to tell a particular Army story.

During the inventory, an unidentified official (emphasis mine) — not the commandant, Maj. Gen. Anthony A. Cucolo III — asked the administration why the college honors two generals who fought against the United States, college spokeswoman Carol Kerr said.

“I do know at least one person has questioned why we would honor individuals who were enemies of the United States Army,” Ms. Kerr said.

“This person was struck by the fact we have quite a few Confederate images,” she said, adding that the portraits were rehung on a third-floor hallway. “[Lee] was certainly not good for the nation. This is the guy we faced on the battlefield whose entire purpose in life was to destroy the nation as it was then conceived. … This is all part of an informed discussion.”

It is the kind of historical cleansing that could spark an Army-wide debate: Lee’s portrait adorns the walls of other military installations and government buildings.

It seems fairly obvious that some apparatchnik from the Obama Administration raised a fuss, so the College simply moved the portraits out of the line of fire, so to speak.

Well, let's have that 'informed discussion', shall we?

There are quite a few military facilities,statues and portraits honoring military figures who fought for the South, including at West Point.

In the first place, most of them had seen honorable service under the stars and stripes, and most had been decorated for conspicuous gallantry in conflicts like the Mexican War. And however you want to manipulate the history, the facts are that most of these men made an anguished decision to resign their U.S. Army commissions and fight to defend their homes only after the Lincoln administration had called for volunteers to invade the southern states. In fact, most of the southern states including Lee's home state of Virginia held out against secession until that decision was made.

And that decision was solely the choice of the Radical Republicans, who were Lincoln's sole political base as a newly elected minority president. While there were also a number of hard liners south of the Mason-Dixon line, there was little attempt by Lincoln's government to attempt to allow cooler heads to prevail and to seek a political settlement that would have avoided the war and preserved the Union while dealing intelligently with the slavery question.

Lee, in fact, was offered command of the Union forces in 1861 at the outbreak of war and declined it for that very reason. He knew what leading a Union army into the South was going to lead to, and so did many others in his position.

Secondly, this politically correct 'purging' destroys and dishonors the spirit of reconciliation that Lee, General Sherman, General Grant and President Lincoln himself championed at the end of a brutal, bloody war, the most costly in our history. It opens wounds long healed to no purpose.

And finally, it deliberately demeans some of the most gifted and accomplished soldiers in American history. They fought with bravery and distinction against huge odds and students of military history still study their battles and campaigns as brilliant examples of tactics. However one feels about their cause, their accomplishments on the battlefield cannot be denied without indulging in an Orwellian makeover of history.

In an army that has banished any mention or study of jihad and radicalized Islam from its training manuals, purging the historical examples of what men like Stonewall Jackson achieved is not a 'reasonable accommodation' to political correctness but a massive error and a disgrace.

If nothing else, our warriors may very well need Jackson and Lee's example in the future.Mark my woirds on that.

December 16, 1773 - The Boston Tea Party

240 years ago, a group of brave patriots decided they simply weren't going to take it anymore.

Today is the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

What happened then has considerable resonance in our own times.

The colonies were under the thumb of a detached Ruling Class who decided that they could plunder their subjects at will. As part of that governance, the British parliament decided to forbid the colonists to but tea from anyone else but Britain in the 1773 Tea Act, and to pay a tax on it...without the American people having the slightest say in it.

The Tea Act and the tax were extremely unpopular, and protests had prevented the unloading of the taxed tea in three other colonies,New York, Charleston and Philadelphia. But the Massachusetts Bay Colony (as it was known then) was different.

There, the British appointed Royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, whose sons were tea merchants with a royal monopoly to sell it insisted that the tea be unloaded and distributed.

On the night of December 16th 1773, a gang of Bostonian patriots around 100 strong disguised as Indians boarded the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver and dumped 90,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor.Th efact that they chose to disguise themselves as Indians meant something besides merely concealing their identities. It meant that they were identifying themselves as Americans, a separate people.

It is worth noting something else here...this was an act of principle, not economics. Because the Tea Act eliminated various middle men and allowed the British East India company to sell directly to the crown appointed tea agents, the price actually lowered. What the colonists objected to was the right of the Crown to tax them at its whim without any representation in parliament. And when the governor refused to bow to the will of the people, they acted.

Parliament's response also showed that this was not about economics.No less than our own Benjamin Franklin declared that the destroyed tea should be paid for. Robert Murray, a New York merchant, went to then British Prime Minister Lord North with three other merchants and offered to pay for the tea, but the British government refused to accept payment.

Instead, the British responded in 1774 with the Coercive Acts, which ended and degree of local self-government in Massachusetts and closed off Boston's harbor. That led to further protests throughout the colonies and had the effect of unifying them, ultimately leading to the First Continental Congress which petitioned King George III for redress, and further united those colonists opposed to Britain's tyranny. Lexington and Concord followed and the American Revolutionary War began in 1775.

Today, our own Ruling Class sees the Tea Party as their 'subjects' in flyover country, a bunch of ignorant. knuckle dragging rubes who need to be ruled by their elite betters. That's pretty much how the British Crown saw those early Americans.

Both the men and women whom supported the original Tea Party of 1773 and its modern equivalent share frustration with elites who simply could care less about their concerns and attack our freedom with taxation and regulation the American people mostly have little or no say over. The very term 'Tea Partier' or in its nastier form 'teabagger' has become code within the media and the elites for racists, reactionary, gun toting Jesus lovin' morons.

It is high time that Americans who still care about freedom and see America as a bastion of freedom and human dignity took a good long look at how that freedom and dignity is being eroded every day by those whom have set themselves up as our Ruling Class. And became worthy of our ancestors by doing something about it.

Who Really Killed JFK?

 

Today being the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, there's the usual florid prose out there (and of course, the usual Leftist conspiracy theorie about how Kennedy was murdered by 'Right wingers') .

While most of the conspiracy theories are pretty easily dismissed, one thing that isn't is the apparent whitewashing of the facts by the Warren Commission.

Yet that itself is pretty easily explainable.

As I explained to one of my correspondents earlier, the first thing in solving any murder is to look at motive.

There were two groups who had motive to kill off JFK, who by the way was dying of Addison's disease and might not even have finished his term out anyway.

One was the Mob. Because of the help given JFK by Frank Sinatra and others whom were 'connected' during the 1960 campaign,the Mob expected a quid pro quo in certain areas. Instead, Sinatra ended up having zero influence (when Kennedy went to Palm Springs, he stayed at Republican Bing Crosby's house), Attorney General Bobby Kennedy bore down heavily on the Mob and JFK did nothing to get back the Mob's purloined properties in Havana.

In edition, Kennedy was sleeping with Mob boss Sam Giacana's girlfriend, Judith Exner, which made Giacana look foolish when he found out about it.

The second group was the Castro brothers and the Cubans themselves.Kennedy had made a number of amateurish efforts to bump off Castro, even trying to get him to smoke poisoned cigars...not to mention the aborted attempt to overthrow him in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

I would think the Cubans are more likely to have done it. (A) Because Lee Harvey Oswald was heavily involved in pro-Castro groups like the Fair Play For Cuba committee and may even have been a Soviet agent (B) because when he was captured, Oswald repeatedly asked to talk to Hoover and the FBI before he was murdered and (C) This would explain the continued U.S. blockade and isolation of Castro's Cuba, which I believe will end once Fidel is dead. It also explains the Warren Commission whitewash..because to retaliate against Castro might have meant nuclear war with the Soviets.

There may or may not have been a second shooter. Oswald was a trained Marine marksman. It really doesn't matter in the long term.

A third possibility - a long shot,but not out of the question - would have been a joint effort by the Mob and Castro. I say this mainly because of mobbed up nightclub owner Jack Ruby's involvement.

Ruby had terminal cancer, and there's certainly a possibility he might have been leaned on to do the job, and perhaps even promised a lil' somethin' somethin' for his family if he successfully did the deed.

Oswald's death certainly tied up a lot of loose ends, didn't it?

At any rate, that's what I think happened.

The Battle Of Crécy, 1346 - The Age Of Knighthood Ends

The Battle of Crécy, fought this day 667 years ago in Normandy was one of the most decisive battles in history. It marked the beginning of the end of knighthood as a military force, the beginning of the age of infantry and the start of England's rise as a world power.

The series of off again, on again conflicts known as the Hundred Year's War began in 1337, 9 years before Crécy over a dispute between Edward III, King of England and Phillip VI of France over the French throne. William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy and a French noble was the last man in history to successfully invade the Island of Britain in 1066. He also retained lands in France as a vassal of France's king. Over the next two and a half centuries or so, Williams' descendents retained their official status as French vassals and paid tribute to France, but the two kingdoms had become different peoples.

When Edward III stopped paying tribute to Phillip VI of France, Phillip confiscated Edward's land in Aquitaine, in Western France. Edward, in turn claimed that Phillip was not the rightful King of France anyway, because Edward's uncle, Charles IV of France, died without a direct male heir. Phillip VI was the dead king's cousin.

That was politics in the 14th century, and the war was on.

The first few years were mainly occupied with political maneuvers, as each side sought allies to counterbalance the other. In those days, warfare was largely a matter of corralling support from vassals rather than raising large national armies, something the Hundred Year's War was to change. Both kings also allied with kingdoms on each others' borders. The French allied with Scotland, while England allied with Flanders, a key partner in the wool trade.

In 1340 Edward III sailed across the Channel to the Zwyn Estuary, where a French/Scottish fleet had assembled outside the port of Sluys.The French originally thought they had frightened the English fleet into withdrawing, but when the wind changed in the late afternoon, the English attacked with the wind and sun behind them and decimated the French fleet in what became known as the Battle of Sluys. French losses were so heavy that chroniclers of the time said the Channel ran red with blood and that the fishes had learned to speak French. More importantly, French naval power was effectively ended for the duration of the war, so the Channel route was free and clear.

Edward lacked the funds and the men to follow up at that time, and the next few years were taken up by proxy wars in the French provinces of Brittany and Gascony.

But in 1346, Edward III assembled an invasion force and landed in France at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue on July 12, 1346. Resistance was light because crucial elements of the French forces were not French, but mercenaries and they hadn't been paid on time. One of them was a contingent of 500 Genoese crossbowmen, who figured prominently in the battle to come.

The English army continued to advance along the Cherbourg Peninsula, pillaging as they went - another feature of war at that time. Finding out that he had been separated from his Flemish allies because the French had destroyed key bridges along the Seine River, Edward, who had intelligence of a huge French Army King Phillip had gathered to attack the invaders had his troops retreat until his forces could be consolidated, taking a defensive position on a small hill in the forest of Crécy, just outside Calais,where he dug in and rested his forces.

 

The French, seeing an opportunity to destroy Edwards forces pursued him without resting their troops. Edward's army was outnumbered with nowhere to go except the English Channel.

Before the battle, King Edward addressed his troops,reminding them of the victories they had won together and urging them to follow the orders of their commanders, to stand together and not falter. He then divided his troops into three divisions, one commanded by his 16-year-old son Edward, the Prince of Wales, known better to history as the Black Prince because of the armor he wore, a central force under the King's command but led by Sir John Chandos, and a third reserve group under the Earl of Northampton.

What was most interesting was the differing make up of the armies. The English had five early cannons, around 8,000 archers, most of them sporting the English longbows 2,700–2,800 men-at-arms, heavily armed and armored men that included the English King and various nobles with their retinues as well as lower-ranking knights and other contingents, and around 4000-5000 Welsh and English spearmen, billmen and other troops. Per Edward's orders the English knights and men at arms fought dismounted in the battle, as heavy infantry.

The French forces consisted of between 8000-10,000 mounted knights and men at arms, a force of 4,000 Genoese crossbowmen and an unknown amount of light infantry. They were commanded by King Phillip, his ally the blind King John of Bohemia (who went into battle with his horse tied to two of his knights so he could be led into battle) Philip's brother, Charles II of Alencon and King Louis of Nevers.

The English used tactics they had learned to their cost fighting the Scots at battles like Bannockburn. They positioned themselves on high ground with natural barriers on both flanks and had the time to build a system of ditches and pits and obstacles to slow up and impede the enemy cavalry. The archers were put in prominent positions to rain arrows on the enemy forces, while the heavy infantry of the dismounted knights and men-at-arms was positioned in the center.King Edward, no fool, retired to a nearby windmill where he could observe the battle, give any orders he needed to and escape if necessary.

The French opened the assault at around 4 PM with the Genoese crossbowmen, mercenaries commanded by Antonio Doria and Carlo Grimaldi.The normal way these troops were used was a throwback to the old Roman legions. They would come in range, protected by large shields known as pavises, launch their missiles and then reload or operate as light infantry while the mounted knights charged in as heavy cavalry to break the battle line.

Unfortunately for the French, a sudden rain squall hit the two armies. The English were able to remove their bowstrings from the longbows and keep them dry, but the Genoese had no way of protecting their crossbows...especially since, in order to mount a quick attack, they had been ordered to leave their pavises behind.

As the rain stopped, the Genoese came within range and released their bolts, with reduced effectiveness because the crossbows were still damp.

The crossbowmen's attack proved almost useless. The best they could manage was a shooting rate of around 1–2 shots per minute. The highly trained longbowmen could shoot five or six arrows in the same amount of time, and also had superior range and power due to their bows, their dry bowstrings and the elevation.

According to Froisart, a contemporary chronicler, the English did not respond to the Genoese attack until after the crossbowmen had fired their first round of bolts.Then they responded with mass arrows "with a sound like snow".

The Genoese had no protection without their shields and were slaughtered. Both their commanders, Doria and Grimaldo were killed trying to rally their men. As the surviving Genoese retreated towards the French lines, most of them they were cut down by the French knights and men at arms for their 'cowardice'. French chronicler Jean de Venette wrote that this was done on the direct orders of King Phillip VI. The cynic in me thinks this just might have been King Phillip's method of solving a budget problem to avoid paying the mercenaries. Small wonder the survivors cut the strings of their crossbows and refused to fight any further.

In true chivalric form, the French launched their heavy cavalry at the English lines, figuring that they could simply smash through the battle line. That turned out to be a simply horrible idea.

The English and Welsh longbow was a weapon designed for exactly this kind of situation. Roughly the height of a man and without much in the way of re-curvature, it allowed an extremely long draw and thus a very powerful thrust and penetration. With the bodkin and broadhead arrowheads, they could easily penetrate most of the armor of the time, and the highly trained and disciplined archers were deadly accurate and could keep up a steady rain of fire.

The French charge was broken up not just by the carnage the longbows inflicted but by the ditches and pits the English had dug for exactly that purpose..and by the corpses of the French knights and horses littering the battle field. The few that managed to reach the battle line were dealt with by the heavy infantry and the yeoman billmen, who wielded a billhook, a particularly deadly early form of halberd, essentially a razor sharp scythe on a pole designed for military use. A trained billman was fully capable of pulling a knight from his horse and killing him before the heavily armored knight was able to rise to fight back.

At one point, King Edward watching the battle from the windmill received a messenger telling him that his son, the Black Prince’s division might need reinforcements. King Edward saw that the French were making little headway up the hill in spite of their outnumbering the English, and asked the messenger if his son was dead or wounded. When he heard that his son was alive and whole, the King responded, “I am confident he will repel the enemy without my help.” Turning to one of his courtiers the King said, “Let the boy win his spurs."

We still use that expression today, over six centuries later.

And the teenaged Black Price did indeed win his spurs that day, going on to become a murderously effective general and to kill many a Frenchman.

Finally, at around midnight, King Philip, himself wounded abandoned the carnage, riding away from the battlefield to the castle of La Boyes as the rest of the French forces fled in a disorganized retreat back towards Paris. Challenged as to his identity by the sentry on the wall above the closed gate the King called, bitterly, “Voici la fortune de la France” and was admitted.

Crécy was a slaughter, the triumph of infantry and ranged weapons, of foot soldiers and yeoman infantry over mounted knights and chivalry. Reliable estimates of English casualties rang from a high of 300 to a low of around 100. The French losses are estimated at between a high of 4,000 and a low of 1,500, and were probably much higher because only knights and men at arms were counted, not the unfortunate Genoese crossbowmen or common soldiers. Any of the French who fell wounded on the field and were judged not able to come up with a ransom were killed forthwith, a common practice in the days before refinements like Club Gitmo and POW status.

Among the fallen were the King John of Bohemia (who was found surrounded by his knights, who died trying to protect him) King Louis of Nevers, Philip's brother, Charles II of Alencon, the Duke of Lorraine, the Count of Flanders, the Count of Blois, eight other counts and three archbishops.

Interestingly enough, after the battle, the Black Prince adopted the emblem of the King of Bohemia, the three white feathers, and his motto “Ich Dien” (I serve); it is still the emblem of the Prince of Wales.



After the debacle of Crécy, the French lost huge swaths of territory to England that took years to recover under the leadership of Joan of Arc.

The French made the classic mistakes of underestimating their enemy and using yesterday's tactics to fight today's war, mistakes that have continued to be repeated in our own times.

Crécy changed the entire way battles and war were fought, and signaled the change from feudal kingdoms to nations, from wars being fought by the king's vassals and men at arms levied from feudal dukedoms to national armies of yeoman soldiers.

It was a battle that changed the history of Europe.

Obama Administration To Return Stolen Jewish Artifacts To The Iraqis Who Stole Them

This is truly despicable.

Harold Rhode over at Pajamas Media has a piece ( h/t, Liberty's Spirit)  that outlines how Jewish historical artifacts, Torah scrolls and holy books stolen from the Iraqi Jewish community before they were forcibly expelled from Iraq were recovered and preserved...and are scheduled to be returned not to the Jews that they belong to but to the anti-semitic country of Iraq that stole them:

The National Archives is readying an exhibit of Iraqi Jewish artifacts due to open on October 11. Appallingly, the U.S. government has agreed to then return the Iraqi Jewish archives — including holy books — to Iraq, which systematically expelled its Jewish community, by June of 2014.

How did the Jewish Iraqi community — which dates to 721 B.C.E. when the Assyrians conquered Samaria and eventually deported the population to central Mesopotamia, and which was one of the two main sources of Mishnaic and Talmudic learning — lose, find, and lose again its patrimony?

The incredible story of how this unlikely turn of events came to pass has never been told in its entirety until now; I am one of the few who can tell it.

After American forces entered Baghdad in May 2003, the head of the Jewish and Israel section of Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat (intelligence agency) came to the Iraqi National Congress (INC), offering information about Saddam’s intelligence operations against Israel and Jews. He did this in order to curry favor. Former Iraqi officials frequently came to opposition groups to tell their stories, in return for which they would get “safe passage” documents stating that since they were cooperating with post-Saddam authorities, they should not be harmed.

The tipster visited the INC to talk about the rumored Jewish archives hidden in the basement of the Mukhabarat headquarters. After his visit, INC chairman Ahmed Chalabi called Judy Miller, the former New York Times reporter then embedded with a mobile unit looking for WMD, and me. I was an Arabic/Hebrew speaking policy analyst with the Office of Net Assessments in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, then assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority, at the time.

We rushed over to talk with Chalabi, who told us that a former Mukhabarat employee reported that a huge treasure trove of Iraqi Jewish and Israeli material was amassed in the Mukhabarat building, and that he was prepared to show us where it was located. He also said there was an ancient copy of the Talmud written on leather or parchment.

Miller and I then went off to the Mukhabarat building with the former Saddam officer and an INC contingent.

The tipster indicated from outside the building where in the basement the Jewish and Israel sections were located. Then — he promptly disappeared. Despite the bombed-out structure’s instability, looters were overrunning the building. Danger was everywhere.

We were, in fact, standing beside a large metal device which had lodged itself halfway into the ground. We later learned that this live, undetonated bomb had penetrated through three or four stories of the building and destroyed the building’s water system. It had pierced the wall almost at ground level. We saw, through the hole it made, that the Jewish and Israel sections were flooded.

Rhode goes on to relate the amazing story of how the artifacts were rescued, restored and shipped to America, with the aid of Ricard Perle and Dick Cheney, among others. And then
tells how they were stolen in the first place:

After Israel became a state in 1948, martial law was declared in Iraq and many Jews left in the mass exodus in 1950-51. Almost all of those who remained behind left by the 1970s. They were not allowed to take much with them.

In 1950-51, they were allowed one suitcase with clothing — sometimes not even their personal documents — and nothing more. They were forced to leave everything else behind, including their communal property. For many years, Jews were not permitted to leave Iraq at all and were persecuted. With time, the few Jews who remained in Baghdad transferred what communal holy books and religious articles they had to the one remaining synagogue which functioned. This was in Batawin, a section of Baghdad which in the late 1940s was the neighborhood to which upwardly mobile Jews moved. The remaining Jews stored this property in the synagogue’s balcony, where the women sat during prayer.

The Jews did not freely relinquish this material. They did it under duress, having no other option.

In 1984, Saddam sent henchmen with trucks to that synagogue. Those scrolls, records, and books were carted off to a place unknown. Local Jews who were at the synagogue at that time witnessed this thievery, and described to me personally how the material was carted off against their will.

The post-Saddam Iraqi authorities agreed to the Jewish artifacts being taken to America to be restored, but guess what? These thieves now want 'their' stolen property returned. This is the equivalent of heirs of Nazis demanding that artwork stolen by Hitler's henchmen from all over Europe be returned to them as rightful owners.

Moreover, considering how Iraq feels about Jews, there's no guarantee the artifacts will be given the care and reverence they deserve.

They belong to the Iraqi Jewish community, almost all of whom now live in Israel. And their proper home is the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center outside of Tel Aviv, the only museum in the world dedicated to the history of Iraqi Jewry.

There's a petition you can sign here to stop the transfer and return these historic and holy artifacts to their rightful owners.

These holy artifacts must not go back to the people that stole them.