Fun with Santos

 

Much about politics and politicians is ridiculous. Sometimes the ridiculousness has to be dealt with seriously because of the harm it can do, but sometimes it is just plain fun. That is the situation with the business over George Santos. Democrats are professing shock and outrage over the fact that, of all things, a person seeking public office would lie about his qualifications and background in his campaign and demanding that he resign to preserve the purity and essence of our electoral process. Republicans are responding that Santos should resign only after Elizabeth Warren, Richard “Rambo” Blumenthal, and Joe Biden set the example and resign first.

The Republicans have the best of it on this one. One may argue that Warren and Blumenthal have not been caught in as many lies as Santos, but two of the ones they were caught on are especially bad. Grabbing an affirmative action job by lying about being be a member of an ethnic minority and insulting actual combat veterans by lying about being one are both egregious. Apologists for Biden do not even have that argument. He has gone well past Santos in the number of whoppers about his background and history and done so over a much longer time.

I think people should leave Santos alone and let him serve his term. The little scoundrel is in a place where he belongs among a bipartisan group of people with whom he fits in. After all if every habitual liar in the congress resigned, how would there ever be a quorum to do the people’s business?

A Frederick Douglass Collection

 

One of my Christmas presents this year was the Library of America’s collection of Frederick Douglass’s speeches and writings. I have enjoyed reading in it the last few days. I had admired his work before but had not read that much of it. (One really interesting piece I remember, not in this volume, was an introduction he gave of Robert Ingersoll at a political meeting where he quoted Robert Browning in his appreciation of Ingersoll. A person wouldn’t be seeing much of that sort of thing at meetings of Republicans or Democrats these days.) In a career of over fifty years from the 1840s to the 1890s, he gave a lot of speeches and wrote a lot of articles. The book contains dozens of them. I recommend it to people interested in the struggle to end slavery, the Civil War, and the success and later failures of reconstruction and also to anyone interesting in reading strong, well written, radical, uncompromising defenses of the liberal values of liberty and individual rights by an excellent author who also must have been a splendid orator.

There is one group of people I particularly wish would get it and read it. Many conservatives and even a few libertarians have an unfortunate tendency to romanticize the Confederacy and ignore or gloss over the facts and history of slavery, the Civil War, and reconstruction. Slavery was not just some regrettable unwise policy. It was a savage abomination that had to be abolished and a direct contradiction of the principles of liberty and the Declaration of Independence. The secessionists left the Union to preserve slavery - believing that Lincoln and his Republicans would create conditions for eventually abolishing it. They made that plain at the time. Claims about other motivations besides preserving slavery were later inventions by apologists for the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. The American army officers who joined the rebellion committed treason by doing so and were fortunate to have been dealt with so leniently after they lost. The slaveholders deserved what they got from the Union army during the war and reconstruction. The main thing wrong with reconstruction was that it ended too soon and left the ex-rebels in position to gain control of the governments of southern states and deny black citizens their rights for decades to come. Another few years of occupation by the Union army might have made a difference.

Those today who are soft on the Confederacy should know better, but since they don’t, reading this book might help them to learn. Something needs to.

Not a War on Christmas, But

 

Many conservatives claim that American leftists are waging a war on Christmas. That is an exaggeration, but it is true that many on the left have some discomfort with the holiday. They have added “merry Christmas” to their long list of forbidden phrases and generally successfully pressured corporations into not mentioning Christmas in their ads urging people to buy their products as Christmas presents. Most replace it with “the holidays”, but some go farther. General Motors is running an ad telling people to buy a truck for the holiday, singular - a holiday which, one presumes, dares not speak its name.

The usual explanation from leftists that this is done out of some sort of sensitivity or concern for inclusion since there are other holidays people celebrate at about the same time of the year is nonsense. (To see how nonsensical, one can note that to be consistent leftists would have to stop mentioning Martin Luther King Day and speak only of the January holidays out of sensitivity toward and inclusion of the people who celebrate Elvis’s birthday or Confederate Heroes Day at the same time of the year.) Mentioning one holiday neither disparages any other left unmentioned nor implies that everyone does or should celebrate it.

Conservatives blame leftists’ hostility to Christianity, and while it surely is true that many leftists are not fond of Christianity, I think the conservatives mainly are wrong. Christmas is at least as much a secular as a religious holiday. Millions of non-Christians around the world celebrate it. Santa, Frosty, Rudolph, presents, decorated trees, open houses, office parties, and proclaiming a season to be jolly have little or nothing to do with Christianity. Easter, which is a far more nearly entirely religious holiday than Christmas, does not seem to bother the leftists much at all. My conjecture is that the leftists’ discomfort is more emotional than theological and has mainly to do with the merry part. The notion of unsupervised Americans feeling happy with life and themselves, jollily benevolent toward the people around them, and generally full of good cheer, generosity, and warmheartedness goes enough against their world view to feel wrong and even threatening to them irrespective of any opinions about Christianity.

Regardless of why the leftists do it, the phoniness of the corporate weasels who go along with it is laughable and contemptible. They count on Christmas. They want to make their numbers from people buying Christmas presents and know Christmas is what matters for them. They probably know that just about everyone else who thinks about it also knows it. Yet they cave in and pretend otherwise. It’s a minor thing compared to some of the other phoniness and hypocrisy around us, but it is bad enough to be annoying and indicative.