You must have noticed this before, leftists are bad at history. Even when they are “good” with most historical items, they selectively edit history to line up with their political views. Views with tend to run at odds with reality.
Here is a new example, a very smart fellow, whom I know is a more than mildly serious history buff, rattled off a very clear, concise and accurate, summary of the failure of Solyndra. It was however, missing some key facts that didn’t fit his political world view.
The facts missing completely change the narrative, which is what he objects to.
The facts in question are:
Solyndra applied for federal loans/grants during the G.W. Bush administration, which turned them down. The reason stated was that they did not have a solid business plan that showed a path to profitability, no matter how much money was dumped their way.
After our Dear Leader, Barack Hussein Obama, occupied the White House, Solyndra reapplied, and where quickly approved as part of the Obama regime’s “Green Jobs” program.
The CEO of Solyndra was a major “bundler” to both the DNC and Barack Hussein Obama.
In the world of the left, Solyndra failure was ‘not their fault’ and had nothing to do with Obama paying off his political donors with tax payer money.
If this was the only case of a company, which happens to be run by a big DNC/BHO donor, receiving millions of taxpayer dollars as part of BHO’s “Green Jobs” program, and then “unexpectedly” went bankrupt, I’d be willing to buy into this particular leftist fantasy. It is a leftist fantasy because there have been multiple other companies that fit this same profile.
The filibuster was finally ended when the Senate Minority Leader, Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, a Republican from Illinois, pushed for a closure vote in a speech that called for the democrats to end their filibuster and accept racial equality.
The Civil Rights Act was finally voted on, and passed with a majority of Republicans and minority of democrats voting for it.
“A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States of America
A very interesting book for both the martial artist and the historian. Mr. Clayton has done extensive research into finding the environment that drove the creation of hard style linear Karate. This system of martial arts came about in a specific time and place. A time and place that previously predominately practiced only empty handed systems based on Southern Kung Fu systems. Those systems had to be empty handed systems, because possession of a sword or any other restricted weapon by an Okinawan was punishable by death!
The first half of the book is pure history. The second half breaks apart the Shotokan katas and points out the hidden techniques. Techniques that had to be hidden at time the system was created. Very interesting stuff for the martial arts historian.
Anti-gun activists have much in common with the original Luddites. They blame new technologies and users of those technologies for their own plight, and aren’t above using violence to achieve their goals. Luddites did their own killing, whereas “anti-gunners” — more “anti personal guns for ordinary people” in truth — try to use the ATF and other government agencies as their cat’s paw.
The rallying cry of the anti-gun bigots is usually “for reasonable gun control!” They claim that old, simple guns are just fine, it’s the new and extra deadly weapons and ammunition that are the evil incarnate.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recalled last night for CNN how her father took up arms to defend fellow blacks from racist whites in the segregated South and said the constitutional right to keep and bear arms is as important as free speech and religion.
In an interview on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Miss Rice said that her minister father and his friends armed themselves to defend the black community in Birmingham, Ala., against nightriders in 1962 and 1963.
She said that if local authorities in segregated Birmingham, where Miss Rice was born in 1954, had lists of registered weapons, she did not think her father and other blacks would have been able to defend themselves.
Miss Rice said, “We have to be very careful when we start abridging rights that the Founding Fathers thought very important.”
She said they understood “there might be circumstances that people like my father experienced in Birmingham, Alabama, when, in fact, the police weren’t going to protect you.”
“I also don’t think we get to pick and choose from the Constitution,” she said in the interview, which was taped for airing last night. “The Second Amendment is as important as the First Amendment.”
This is history that most so called “liberals” don’t want taught in government run public schools. It gives the wrong message, i.e. that the government can’t solve every one of your problems and should.
What makes this interesting is that his statement is actually correct, but his attempt at reasoning is completely and utterly wrong base on actual historical facts.
For the whole story, read The Racist Roots of Gun Control, which was originally published in the Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy back in 1995.
Here is the executive summary:
The first so-called “gun control” laws passed in the United States were in Southern states right after the end of the Civil War. They were implemented to protect members of the KKK from being shot by citizens the Klan members still considered uppity property when the Klan showed up in the middle of night to string a few American Citizens up by the neck as a warning to other black Americans to ‘keep their place.”
Even before the Civil War, the Tennessee state constitution had the following line in it: ” “That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defense.” Note that free ‘persons of color’ were denied the basic Human Right of effective self-defense. They were to be at the mercy of ‘their betters.’ Yes, even then, those who today would be self-labeled “progressives” were closet aristocrats.