Shuffle and Shake.
The Trump administration is now pushing a story that his comments about “fine people” in Charlottesville were about those protesting the removal of a stature of R.E. Lee. Let’s look at this a little deeper:
Point 1. The comments that were made at the time were equivocal at best. Certainly the white supremacists, Nazi sympathizers and white nationalists took the comment to be an endorsement. Whatever the meaning intended, the affect was to energize the haters.
Point 2. There were two groups on opposite sides of the street. One group was composed of tiki torch marchers chanting, “Jews will not replace us”. The other group was protesting the march and the marchers.
If there were, in fact people who were there to protest the removal of the stature of General Lee, they had the choice of which side of the street to stand. They could have stood on the side protesting the hate groups and still wanting to make their position known.
If they instead chose to march with the hate groups, then, at least in my mind, they can of no right be called “fine people”.
With regards to General R.E. Lee.
Pros:
- He was a distinguished graduate of West Point and served in the US Army for 32 years
- He was apparently well liked by those who served under him
- He opposed the construction of public memorials to the Confederate rebellion on the grounds that they would prevent the healing of wounds inflicted during the war.
Cons:
- He performed the basest of all treasonous acts – taking up arms against his own country.
- He was responsible for the deaths of over 240,000 Americans.
- That represented almost 1% of the total US population in 1862.
- Compare that to the totals in other wars and you can see that as a function of the percentage of the population killed, General Lee was in battles that killed almost 1.7 times as many Americans as WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan combined.
I have been thinking about the issue of deportation. It seems to me that the headline is superficial and fails to look at the logistics of the issue. I hope to layout those matters in more detail here.
First, some facts about the Illegal Immigrant community in this country.
How many illegal immigrants are there currently in this country?
