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“A House Divided Against Itself” The Coming Republican Divide

democratic convnetion

Friends of Padre Steve’s World

Over the past few years, and especially after former President Trump and his Cult seized control of it, I have alluded to events in the Republican Party that make it appear that it is about to experience an identity crisis and split. That moment is rapidly approaching.

I am a historian, and there is precedent in American history for the collapse of a national political party. This happened before in the 1854 collapse of the Whig Party, the 1912 division in the republican Party, but more importantly during the 1858 through 1860 collapse of the Democratic Party. Now I am not a person to say that history repeats itself. However, there are similarities and trends, but nothing is ever exactly the same as to why different parties collapse.  

While the issues of each day may be different there are common threads of humanity, hubris and hatred that unite to destroy political parties. I think that this is happening now in the Republican Party, following Trump’s attempted Coup against the Congress, spearheaded by his true believers. These include the huge number of QAnon antisemitic conspiracy theorists who now hold office in the House of Representatives including the most notorious Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and the moves of Trump Cultists in a number of states to expel solid conservatives from the Party, or to punish as is the case of Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the number three Republican in the House because she voted to impeach Donald Trump.

So it is important to look at history whenever possible to see how different political leaders responded in times of intense ideological, economic, social, national, and sectional division. The modern GOP has become the Democrats of 1860, and are probably on the way to becoming a completely Fascist and Authoritarian Party, and there is no going back. Members and former leaders are beginning to depart the party in the tens of thousands, and soon what is off the rails, like Casey Jones will crash down the forty foot ditch taking all it can with it. 

This is part of a series on the disaster that the Democratic Party made for itself and the country between 1858 and 1860 that became a chapter in my to be published book. This deals with the after effects of the Lecompton Constitution crisis and fiasco during the 1860 Democratic Party Conventions in Charleston and Baltimore.

I hope that you will find it interesting and thought provoking.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

The fight over Lecompton was a watershed in American politics that those who wrote the Constitution of the United States could not have imagined. The deeply partisan fight served to illuminate how easily “minuscule minorities’ initial concerns ballooned into unmanageable majoritarian crises. The tiny fraction of Missouri slaveholders who lived near the Kansas border, comprising a tinier fraction of the South and a still tinier fraction of the Union, had demanded their chance to protect the southern hinterlands.” [1] The crisis that Kansas Democrats provoked drew in the majority of Southern Democrats who came to their aid in Congress and President Buchanan. This provoked Northerner, including Democrats to condemn the Southern minority, which they believed was disenfranchising the majority of people in the territory in order to expand slavery there and to other territories in the west.

The issue of Lecompton crisis galvanized the political parties of the North and demolished any sense of national unity among the Democrats. The split in the Democratic Party mirrored the national divide and the party split into hostile Northern and Southern factions, which doomed it as a national party for the foreseeable future.

Following Lecompton the intra-party Democrat divide widened as “Pro-Douglas and pro-Buchanan Democrats openly warred on one another for the next two years; an unacknowledged but real split had taken place.” [2]

The battle over the Lecompton Constitution also marked the first time that a coalition Northern Democrats sided with anti-slavery forces to defeat pro-slavery legislation in congress. Though the measure to admit Kansas as a slave state was defeated it was a narrow victory; the “Republicans and anti-Lecompton Douglas Democrats, Congress had barely turned back a gigantic Slave Power Conspiracy to bend white men’s majoritarianism to slavemaster’s dictatorial needs, first in Kansas, then in Congress.” [3]

The political impact of the Lecompton crisis on the Democratic Party was an unmitigated disaster. The party suffered a major election defeat in the 1858 mid-term elections and lost its majority in the House of Representatives even though it barely maintained a slim majority in the Senate. While the victorious Republicans had won the election, they made little legislative headway since the Democrats still controlled the Senate and James Buchanan remained President. In a sense“there were two Democratic parties: one northern, on southern (but with patronage allies in the north); one having its center of power in the northern electorate and in the quadrennial party convention… the other with its center of power in Congress; one intent on broadening the basis of support to attract moderate Republicans, the other more concerned to preserve a doctrinal defense of slavery even if it meant driving heretics out of the party.” [4] Democratic Party divide fulfilled what Lincoln had said about the country, as the Democratic Party had “became increasingly a house divided against itself.” [5]

democrat condenders

Douglas’s courageous opposition to the fraud of Lecompton would be the chief reason for the 1860 split in the Democratic Party as Southern Democrats turned with a vengeance on the man who had been their standard bearer during the 1856 Democratic primary. “Most southern Democrats went to Charleston with one overriding goal: to destroy Douglas.” [6] The party decided to meet in the Charleston to decide on their platform and the man who would be their standard bearer in the election of 1860. When the convention met in April 1860 it rapidly descended into a nightmare for the Democrats as “Southern delegates were much more intent on making a point than on nominating a presidential candidate.” [7]The “Southern delegates demanded a promise of federal protection of slavery in all the territories and a de facto veto in the selection of the party’s presidential candidate” [8] in order to block the nomination of Douglas. Southern radicals “led by William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama stood for seven days agitating for a pro-slavery platform.” [9]

Ohio Democrat George A. Pugh responded to the Southern fire-eaters and said that “Northern Democrats had worn themselves out defending Southern interests – and he declared that the Northern Democrats like himself were now being ordered to hide their faces and eat dirt.” [10] Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens who had moderated his position and was supporting Douglas wrote that the radicals “strategy was to “rule or ruin.” [11] When their attempts to place the pro-slavery measures into the party platform were defeated by Northern delegates, it prompted “a walkout by delegates from Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.” [12] This deprived Douglass of the necessary two thirds majority needed for the nomination and “the shattered convention adjourned, to reconvene in Baltimore on June 18,” [13] the “incendiary rhetoric left the Democratic Party in ashes.” [14] A friend of Alexander Stephens suggested that the party might patch things up in Baltimore, but Stephens dismissed the suggestion and told his friend, “The party is split forever. The only hope was in Charleston.” [15]

Old line former Whigs who feared the disintegration of the country led by Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden formed their own convention, the Constitutional Union Party and declared a pox on both the Buchanan and Douglas factions of the Democratic Party. They nominated a rather cold and uninspiring moderate slave owner, the sixty-four year old John Bell of Tennessee as their candidate for President and “then chose a man who overshadowed him, Edward Everett of Massachusetts, aged sixty-seven, as the vice-presidential nominee.” [16]But this ticket had no chance of success, as Bell “stood for moderation and the middle road in a country that just now was not listening to moderates, and the professional operators were not with him.” [17]

When the Democratic Party convention reconvened the results were as Stephens predicted. Another walk out by Southern delegates resulted in another and this time a final split. “Rival delegations from the Lower South States arrived in Baltimore, one side pledged to Douglas and the other to obstruction. When the convention voted for the Douglas delegations, the spurned delegates walked out, this time joined by colleagues from the Upper South.” [18] Though Douglas did not have the two-thirds majority, the convention “adopted a resolution declaring Douglas unanimously nominated.” [19] A day later the radicalized Southern delegates nominated their own candidate, the current Vice President, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as their candidate “for president on a slave-code platform.” [20]

There were now four presidential tickets, three composed of Democrats and former Whigs, “each supported by men who felt that they were following the only possible path to salvation. A Republican victory was almost certain, and the Democrats, who had the most to lose from such a victory, were blindly and with a fated stubbornness doing everything they could to bring that victory to pass.” [21]

The Democratic Party had imploded and doomed the candidacies of Douglas and Breckinridge. The Augusta Daily Chronic and Sentinel editorialized, “It is an utterly futile and hopeless task to re-organize, re-unite and harmonize the disintegrated Democratic party unless this is to be done by a total abandonment of principle… No, sensible people might as well make up their minds to the fact that the Democratic party is dissolved forever, that new organizations must take its place.” [22]    

Notes

[1] Ibid. Freehling, The Road to Disunion Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861p.140

[2] Ibid. Levine Half Slave and Half Free p.213

[3] Ibid. Freehling, The Road to Disunion Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861p.142

[4] Ibid. Potter The Impending Crisis p.394

[5] Fehrenbacher, Don E. Kansas, Republicanism, and the Crisis of the Union in The Civil War and Reconstruction Documents and Essays Third Edition edited by Michael Perman and Amy Murrell Taylor Wadsworth Cengage Learning Boston MA 2011 p.94

[6] Ibid. McPherson The Battle Cry of Freedom p.213

[7] Ibid. Goldfield America Aflame p.167

[8] Ibid. Levine Half Slave and Half Free p.216

[9] Ibid. Guelzo Fateful Lightening p.121

[10] Catton, Bruce The Coming Fury Phoenix Press, London 1961 p.32

[11] Ibid. McPherson The Battle Cry of Freedom p.215

[12] Ibid. Goldfield America Aflame p.167

[13] Ibid. Guelzo Fateful Lightening p.121

[14] Ibid. Goldfield America Aflame p.167

[15] Ibid. Catton The Coming Fury p.46

[16] Ibid. Potter The Impending Crisis p.417

[17] Ibid. Catton The Coming Fury p.46

[18] Ibid. Goldfield America Aflame p.168

[19] Ibid. Potter The Impending Crisis p.413

[20] Ibid. McPherson The Battle Cry of Freedom p.216

[21] Ibid. Catton The Coming Fury p.69

[22] Ibid. Guelzo Fateful Lightening p.121

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“Whom the gods intend to destroy, they first make mad” The Post Trump World Collides with Secession

disunion_carolina-blog427

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I am posting a section of my book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory! Racism, Religion, Ideology and Politics in the Civil War Era and their Continuing Importance regarding the actions of Southern Democrat Secessionists who had already split their party during the 1860 election because I think it is very relevant today.

Former and twice impeached President Donald Trump and his supporters attempted a coup by attacking Congress as it undertook its Constitutional duty to officially count the votes of the Electoral College. 

The assault made under the direct order of the former President was brutal and led by White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, armed self-proclaimed militias, and a host of Theocratic Christians whose Crosses and Flags were prominent in the attack. The Terrorists who attacked the Capitol almost captured former Vice President Mike Pence who they threatened to hang, even bringing a gallows to the Capitol lawn, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and many others. During the attack they killed one Capitol Police Officer, wounded over 140 more, some of whom are still in the hospital with serious injuries including one officer who might lose an eye, as well as two officers on duty that day who subsequently committed suicide.

Despite the fact that many of those leading the attack said they believed that they were following the orders of Donald Trump and therefore believe in their innocence, the “I was just following orders defense,” there is no defense to be found in their actions. Driven by over 30 years of propaganda and over 50 years of measures that gave persecuted minorities such as African Americans, Hispanics, Women, and Gays the same basic rights as the white majority, the anger has reached a fever pitch and much of the Republican Party and what is so wrongly called the Conservative movement has gone mad. When members of Congress still despite all evidence claim the election was stolen, who believe conspiracy theories that the mass murders and massacres of school children at the Newtown and Parkland schools were government false flag operations to enact anti-gun laws, who stalk the survivors of those  massacres, and the belief that a Rothschild family (typical antisemitic accusation) funded space laser was the cause of the 2018 California wild fires.

Likewise many members of the Trump Republican base make frequent physical threats of violence against their political opponents as well as Jews, Blacks, other racial, ethnic or religious minorities. Before the coup attempt of 6 January they have either invaded and taken over or besieged State capitols. They led by the President have committed physical violence against peaceful protestors of  the Black Lives Matter campaign protesting the murders of Black men and women by police and vigilantes. Individuals connected with them have attacked and committed mass murder at Synagogues and Jewish community centers and Black Churches.

The list could go on and there is no condemnation from the former President or his acolytes who are still threatening violence, even in the halls of Congress.

The title of this article includes the comment of William Lloyd Garrison in describing the mood of the South as Southern States began to secede. I no longer believe that there will be a Republican version of Senator Stephen A. Douglas who will attempt to pull the party out of the abyss that it is throwing itself headlong into. In fact they are in the process of a witch hunt in the party, kicking out elected state officials in Arizona and working against others to remove them from Congressional leadership positions and committee assignments and are launching campaigns against their re-election for their attempt to hold former President Trump accountable for his actions.

The irony is, that it is now the Republican Party that is doing what the Democrats did in 1860, but then the Republicans beginning in the 1960s and have become the old Souther Secessionist Democratic Party when they brought in the Dixiecrats and adopted the cynical and racist Southern Strategy.

This article deals with the actions of Southern Democrats upon learning that Abraham Lincoln had been elected leading up to their attack on Fort Sumter. The attitudes, words and actions of the current Republicans are frighteningly similar to the Secessionist Southern Democrats who first destroyed their party before their secession from the Union that led to the bloodiest war in American history.

Peace

Padre Steve+

secession-movement

After the election of 1860 President-Elect Abraham Lincoln tried to reassure the South that he would remain true to his campaign promise not to interfere with slavery where it already existed, but he also refused to give in to threats of secession. Despite his belief that anything that he said would be twisted into the exact opposite by Southerners, Lincoln released a statement through Senator Lyman Trumbull in Springfield saying:

“The states will be left in complete control of their affairs and property within their respective limits as they have under any administration. I regard it as extremely fortunate for the peace of the whole country, that this point, upon which the Republicans have been for so long, as so presently misrepresented, is now brought to a practical test, and placed beyond the possibility of doubt. Disunionists per se, are now in hot haste to get out of the Union, precisely because they perceive they cannot, much longer, maintain apprehension among the southern people that in their homes, and firesides, and lives, are to be endangered by the action of the Federal Government.” [1]

On his way to Washington D.C. the President Elect stopped in New York and gave a speech  “promising that he would “never of his own volition “consent to the destruction of this Union,” he qualified this promise with “unless it were that to be that thing for which the Union itself was made.” [2]  Two days later Lincoln speaking Independence Hall in Philadelphia Lincoln further detailed what he meant in New York, going back to the premise of the Declaration of Independence in which “he asserted that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration…. I was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the mother land; but rather something in that Declaration” that provided “hope for the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” [3] It was a thought that he would continue to refine in the Emancipation Proclamation Gettysburg Address, the Thirteenth Amendment and in his Second Inaugural Address.

Senator Stephen A. Douglas tried to reassure the Southern leaders as well even as argued against secession. He reminded Southerners how he had fought against Lincoln and the platform of the Republican Party and stated “that the mere election of any man to the Presidency does not furnish just cause for dissolving the Union.” [4]Addressing Southern concerns in a pragmatic way, the Little Giant tried to diffuse Southern fears by reminding them that the answer to their fears lay in the checks and balances laid out in the Constitution and in the ballot box. Douglas’s next words redound to the present day:

“It is apprehended that the policy of Mr. Lincoln and the principles of his party endanger the peace of the slaveholding states. Is that apprehension founded? No, it is not. Mr. Lincoln and his party lack the power, even if they had the disposition, to disturb or impair the rights and institutions of the South. They certainly cannot harm the South under existing laws. Will they have the power to repeal or change these laws, or to enact others? It is well known that they will be a minority in both houses of Congress, with the Supreme Court against them. Hence no bill can pass either house of Congress impairing or disturbing these rights or institutions of the southern people in any manner whatever, unless a portion of southern senators and representatives absent themselves so as to give an abolition majority in consequence of their actions.

In short, the President will be utterly powerless to do evil…. Four years shall soon pass, when the ballot box will furnish a peaceful, legal, and constitutional remedy for the evils and grievances with which the country might be afflicted.” [5]

An attempt in Congress led by President James Buchanan and Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky to bring about a constitutional compromise to mollify both sides was considered. A committee of thirteen senators was convened to entertain various compromise propositions, however, most of the suggested compromises were heavily weighted toward Southern interests, though it promised to restore the prohibition of slavery north of the line drawn in the Missouri Compromise.

A frustrated Lincoln wrote, “I’ll tell you now what bothered me: the compromises measures introduced in Congress required the Republicans to make all the concessions.” [6] Lincoln warned Crittenden that such proposals would not be acceptable: “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery…. The instant you do they have us under again…. The tug has to come & better now than later.” [7]

Lincoln had seen how for four decades Southerners had pushed for compromises that only benefited them and the extension of slavery, even at the expense of Northern states rights and he was not about to let it happen again. The President Elect wrote:

“The Crittenden plan, I feared, would put the country back on the high road to a slave empire. Whether it was the revival of the Missouri Compromise line or a popular sovereignty, it was all the same. “Let neither be done,” I warned Republicans in Washington, “and immediately filibustering and extending slavery recommences. Within a year, we shall have to take Cuba as a condition on which the South will stay in the Union. Next it will be Mexico, then Central American. On the territorial question, I am inflexible. On that point hold firm as a chain of steel…” [8]

In the South the efforts of staunch Southern Unionists like Alexander Stephens to discourage secession were dismissed as the movement toward secession became a passion filled revolutionary movement, which acted as a cathartic movement for many Southerners. Like Douglas, Stephens had the greatest faith in the checks and balances provided in the Constitution and he pleaded with his fellow Georgians at the state capital of Milledgeville noting that the checks and balances “would render Lincoln “powerless to do any great mischief,” and he warned that “the dissolution of the Union would endanger this “Eden of the world,” that “instead of becoming gods, we shall become demons, and no distant day commence cutting one another’s throats…” [9] While his speech received favorable coverage in the North and even in London, it was met with little enthusiasm at home.

Influential Southern preachers joined in the push for secession and warned of what they saw as the dire consequences of Lincoln’s election. The Baptist clergyman James Furman expressed the outrage and paranoia of many in the South by warning after Lincoln’s election “If you are tame enough to submit, Abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” [10] Likewise entire southern denominations began to endorse secession, southern Methodists raised “alarms about a Union dominated by abolitionists as they called on the Lord for deliverance from the northern “Egypt.” The division of Israel and Judah (not to mention the nation’s already fractured churches became typologies for the American crisis. Just as southern Methodists had once “seceded from a corrupt church,” a Mississippi politician declared, “We must secede from a corrupt nation.” To drive the point home, Georgia Methodists ministers endorsed disunion by an overwhelming 87-9 vote.” [11]

Despite Lincoln and Douglas’s efforts during and after the election to strike a conciliatory tone, it did not take long before Southern states began to secede from the Union. In light of the profoundly sectional nature of Lincoln’s victory “emboldened many Southern politicians and journalists to insist that they would not be bound by the result.” [12] In his final speech before the Senate, Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia lambasted the “black Republicans” and abolitionists,“We want no negro equality, no negro citizenship, we want no negro race to degrade our own; and as one man [we] would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other.” [13]

Other Senators, many who became prominent leaders of the Confederacy made their speeches, some, like that of Jefferson Davis tinged with regret while others like Senator Stephen Mallory, and the future Secretary of the Navy for the Confederacy delivered a fiery broadside against his Northern colleagues, “You cannot conquer us. Imbue your hands in our blood and the rains of a century will not wipe away from them stain, while the coming generation will weep for your wickedness and folly.” [14] As these men finished the left the chambers of Congress where many had served for years many left with tears, while some marked their exit with angry words.

Alexander Stephens

Stephens, still a Unionist at heart lamented the election even as he prepared to leave the Senate before becoming the vice president of the Confederacy, warned that “revolutions are much easier started than controlled, and the men who begin them [often] …themselves become the victims.” [15] Even so the senator noted “If the policy of Mr. Lincoln and his Republican associates be carried out…no man in Georgia will be more willing or ready than myself to defend our rights, interest, and honor at every hazard and to the last extremity.” [16] But as he resigned his office Stephens replied to a friend’s question, “why must we have civil war?”

“Because there are not virtue and patriotism and sense enough left in the country to avoid it. Mark me, when I repeat that in less than twelve months we shall be in the midst of a bloody war. What will become of us then God only knows.” [17]

But Stephens’ warning fell on deaf ears as passionate secessionist commissioners went throughout the South spreading their message of fear. “Thus fanned, mob spirit ran close enough to the surface to intimidate many moderates – the very temperament that inclines men toward moderation is apt to respond timidly when threatened or abused – and to push others closer to the extremist position.” [18]Such was the case with Southern moderates and Unionists as men like Stephens were swept up in the tumult as their states seceded from the Union. Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana wrote, “The prudent and conservative men South… were not able to stem the wild torrent of passion which is carrying everything before it…. It is a revolution…of the most intense character…and it can no more be checked by human effort, for the time, than a prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot.” [19]

The Palmetto State of South Carolina was the first state to secede. Its senior senator, James Chesnut launched a fusillade against the North in a speech before the state legislature in which he argued that the South could not wait for another election: He thundered:

“Because of the Yankee puritans’ invasive mentality, incendiary documents would flood our region, Southern Republicans would fill our offices. Enemies would control our mails. The resulting upheaval would make “Lincoln’s election…a decree for emancipation. Slavery cannot survive the four years of an administration whose overwhelming influences” will be “brought to bear against it.” To submit now is to guarantee that before 1865, we must “slay the Negro, or ourselves be slain.”  [20]

Future Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, the man whose armies would cut a swath of destruction across Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864 and 1865 was serving as the President the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, what is now Louisiana State University. Like many men in the ante-bellum era, Sherman had thought little about the slavery issue, though he was very concerned with the preservation of the Union. He thought secession made no sense, especially for the people of the South. When Sherman read the news of South Carolina’s secession it “cut to the depths of his nationalistic soul.” The future general wept, and told his friend David Boyd “Boyd, you people of the South don’t know what you are doing! You think you can tear to pieces this great union without war…. “The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth…. You are bound to fail. Only in spirit and determination are you prepared for war.” [21] Sherman, the man who later proclaimed that “War is Hell” proved to be a remarkably accurate seer regarding the fate of the Confederacy.

South Carolina was followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. “A belt of seven states from South Carolina to Texas, embracing nearly one-sixth of the country’s population and nearly one-fifth of the national domain, had proclaimed independence and severed its ties with the Union.” [22] All of the declarations of causes for secession made it quite clear and explicit that slavery, and fear that the institution was threatened by Northern abolitionists was the primary reason . The declaration of South Carolina is typical of these and is instructive of the basic root cause of the war:

“all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.” [23]

Throughout the war slavery loomed large, even though in the beginning of the abolition controversies of the 1830s many northerners “were content to tolerate slavery’s indefinite survival in the South so long as it did not impinge on their own rights and aspirations at home.” [24] Such attitudes were still common in the North during the late 1850s, especially among Democrats.

But it was the continued actions and multiple transgressions of slavery supporters that energized northerners as never before. Their use of the courts to advance their rights and the cause of slavery, by the compromises that had extended slavery to the territories; their use of the courts especially the Dred Scott to allow slaveholders to recover their human property, even in Free States provoked no end of indignation throughout the North, even for those sympathetic to Southern concerns. Those actions demonstrated to Northerners:

“just how fundamental and intractable the differences with Southern political leaders were. Thus educated, most northern voters had decided by 1860 that only an explicitly anti-slavery party could protect their interests.” [25]

The fiery abolitionist and profoundly religious editor of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, used biblical imagery in a rather astute analysis of the behavior of Southern leaders after the election of 1860. He wrote of the Southern response to Lincoln’s election:

“Never had the truth of the ancient proverb “Whom the gods intend to destroy, they first make mad” been more signally illustrated than in the condition of southern slaveholders following Lincoln’s election. They were insane from their fears, their guilty forebodings, their lust for power and rule, hatred of free institutions, their merited consciousness of merited judgments; so that they may be properly classed as the inmates of a lunatic asylum. Their dread of Mr. Lincoln, of his Administration, of the Republican Party, demonstrated their insanity. In vain did Mr. Lincoln tell them, “I do not stand pledged to the abolition of slavery where it already exists.” They raved just as fiercely as though he were another John Brown, armed for southern invasion and universal emancipation! In vain did the Republican party present one point of antagonism to slavery – to wit, no more territorial expansion. In vain did that party exhibit the utmost caution not to give offense to any other direction – and make itself hoarse in uttering professions of loyalty to the Constitution and the Union. The South protested that its designs were infernal, and for them was “sleep no more!” Were these not the signs of a demented people?” [26]

But both sides were blind to their actions and with few exceptions, most leaders, especially in the South badly miscalculated the effects of the election of 1860. Many leaders in the North did not realize that the election of Lincoln would mean the secession of one or more Southern states, and Southerners “were not able to see that secession would finally mean war” [27] despite the warnings of Alexander Stephens to the contrary. In fact throughout the South it was believed that there would be no war because “they believed that the Yankees were cowards and would not fight”… “Senator James Chesnut of South Carolina offered to drink all the blood shed as a consequence of secession. It became a common saying in the South during the secession winter that “a lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed.” [28]

Following their secession the five slave states of the lower South: “appointed commissioners to the other slave states, and instructed them to spread the secessionist message across the entire region. These commissioners often explained in detail why their states were exiting the Union, and they did everything in their power to persuade laggard slave states to join the secessionist cause. From December 1860 to April 1861 they carried the gospel of disunion to the far corners of the South.” [29]

The editors of the Philadelphia Press accused the Southern secessionists of being enemies of democracy and wrote:

“should the Cotton States go out in a body, we shall witness the beginning of an experiment to establish, on this continent, a great slaveholding monarchy. With few exceptions, the leaders of the Disunion cabal are men of the most aristocratic pretensions – men who…easily adopt the habits and titles of the European nobility. South Carolina, which is the head of Secession, is almost a monarchy herself. Her representatives in both branches of Congress, for years past, have acted upon the idea that the people of the free states are servile, and Mr. Hammond, the most candid and straightforward of the set, denounced the laboring white masses of the free States as the mudsills of society …” [30]

The mood of the South in the fall of 1860 was “fearful, uncertain, impatient and volatile, eager to adopt the course that best offered hope of deliverance – which was ideally suited for the immediacy and urgency of the radical secessionists.” [31]Using the political machinery of the Democratic Party in the South which they now possessed, the proponents of secession were far better organized than Southern Unionists who had a difficult time putting up a united front in the face of the radicals.

Slavery and the superiority of the white race over blacks were at the heart of the message brought by these commissioners to the legislatures of the yet undecided states. Former Congressman John McQueen of South Carolina wrote to secessionists in Virginia “We, of South Carolina, hope to greet you in a Southern Confederacy, where white men shall rule our destinies, and from which we may transmit our posterity the rights, privileges and honor left us by our ancestors.”[32] In Texas McQueen told the Texas Convention: “Lincoln was elected by a sectional vote, whose platform was that of the Black Republican part and whose policy was to be the abolition of slavery upon this continent and the elevation of our own slaves to an equality with ourselves and our children.” [33] These Southern secessionists were realists, they knew that the election of 1860 was a watershed in terms of the history of slavery in the United States, emancipation was coming, it might take a decade, it might take twenty-five or even fifty years, but they knew that it was coming, and for them secession was the only logical action left that was “consistent with their ideology.” [34] Many of these men now viewed it as an issue of now or never.

In his First Inaugural Address Lincoln cut to the heart of the division in the country: “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.” [35] Of course he was right, and his Southern opponents agreed. Jefferson Davis wrote: “The great northern party, thus organized, succeeded in electing to the office of the Presidency a man who openly proclaimed his hatred of slavery, who declared that the government could not endure “half slave and half free.” [36]

As the war began, white Southerners of all types and classes rallied to the call of war against the hated Yankee. The common people, the poor yeomen farmers were often the most stalwart defenders of the South. With the Orwellian slogan “Freedom is not possible without slavery” ringing in their ears, they went to war against the Yankees alongside their slave-owning neighbors to “perpetuate and diffuse the very liberty for which Washington bled, and which the heroes of the Revolution achieved.” [37]

Alexander Stephens, the longtime friend of Lincoln who had been a devout Unionist, who had supported Stephen Douglas until the bitter end, and who had strenuously opposed secession in the months leading to the election of 1860 was now the Vice President of the Confederacy. He had been elected Vice President the same day as Jefferson Davis was elected President by the new Confederate Congress and now went through the South speaking about the nature of the new government.  Stephens explained the foundations of the Southern state in his Cornerstone Speech of March 21st 1861, the speech echoed what many Southerners had believed for years regarding slavery and the status of Blacks, namely that Blacks were a lesser order of humanity. He proclaimed in words that could never be taken back:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” [38]

Jefferson Davis had issued instructions to cabinet members to downplay slavery as an issue and was infuriated. The new President of the Confederacy wrote: “That speech infuriated me, Oh, what Stephens had said was true, perfectly true, but could anything hurt us more abroad than such impolitic remarks? It was the beginning of a fatal falling out between me and that rebellious and vindictive dwarf, who was hell-bent on forming his own policies and disputing mine with niggardly deviousness.”[39]

The Orwellian definition of slavery as being necessary to liberty and the Confederate leader’s proclamations that they were comparable to the founding fathers was condemned throughout the North. The editors of the New York Evening Post wrote:

“The founders fought to “establish the rights of man… an principles of universal liberty.” The South was rebelling “not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism…. Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.” Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence spoke for “Natural Rights against Established Institutions,” added the New York Tribune, while “Mr. Jeff. Davis’s caricature thereof is made in the interest of an unjust, outgrown, decaying institution against the apprehended encroachments of human rights.” It was, in short, not a revolution for liberty but a counterrevolution “reversing the wheels of progress…. to hurl everything backward into deepest darkness… despotism and oppression.”[40]

Secession commissioners from the first seven Confederate States fanned out to the undecided Slave states to spread the message of secession. One of these men was Henry Benning of Georgia. Benning spoke to the secession convention of Virginia, a state that the new Confederacy deemed all-important to its cause and which it had to have on its side in the coming confrontation with the Union. There the Georgia Supreme Court Justice used the time-honored method of racial fear mongering to sway the men of the Virginia House of Delegates, he thundered:

“If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is be abolished except in Georgia and the other cotton States, and…ultimately in these States also,” Benning insisted. “By the time the North shall have attained the power, the black race will be a large majority, and we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything.” [41] 

Not letting up the fiery Georgian told the Virginians that the North would invade the South to end slavery and of the outcome of such an invasion:

“We will be overpowered and our men compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth,” he told his audience, “and for our women, the horrors of their state cannot contemplate in imagination.” This then, was “the fate that Abolition will bring upon the white race….We will be exterminated.” [42]

Virginia’s Governor, John Letcher was “a longtime foe of secession and had wanted to bring slavery to an end in Virginia, but once elected to the governorship he adroitly put all that behind him, and rather like [Robert E.] Lee, he went to work with considerable efficiency for two causes in which he did not believe.” [43] One Unionist delegate to the convention wrote of the proceedings, “The scenes witnessed within the wall of that room…have no parallel in the annals of ancient or modern times. On the morning of the 17th, Mr. Wise rose from his seat and drawing a large Virginia horse-pistol from his bosom laid it before him and proceeded to harangue the body in the most violent and denunciatory manner. He concluded by taking his watch from his pocket and, with glaring eyes and bated breath, declared that events were now transpiring which caused a hush to come over his soul.” [44] Those events were a planned seizure of Federal facilities including the arsenal at Harpers Ferry and the Naval Yard at Norfolk. But not all in Virginia were convinced. The strongly Unionist western counties of the state, where few people owned slaves and those who did held very few, voted heavily against secession. The counties withstood the initial shock of secession and would “in a wholly extra-legal way, abetted by Washington – perform its own act of secession, breaking away from Virginia and clinging to the Union as a bob-tailed but finally acceptable new state.” [45]

Former President John Tyler added his voice to the secession cause in Virginia and “personally drafted a document placing the state’s military force under Jefferson Davis’s direct command.” Shortly thereafter he was “elected to the Confederate Congress – becoming the only former President to win office in a foreign country.”[46] However, before he could take office, the former President, now an intractable enemy of the country that he once led, died in Richmond. Shortly thereafter his portrait was removed from its place of honor in the capital.

Tennessee was another state where secession was problematic. Eastern Tennessee was strongly Unionist and the counties “held a convention, denounced the governor and legislature for making the alliance with the Confederacy, and sent a memorial asking that the eastern counties be allowed to form a new state.” [47]The legislature and governor refused this but the area would prove a problem for Jefferson Davis as well as Lincoln who would have liked to help the Tennessee Unionists, but had no military way to do so.

The highly divided border states of Kentucky and Missouri remained in the Union, but became highly partisan battlegrounds between secessionists and Unionists in which insurgents used terrorist methods against their fellow citizens throughout the war. Kentucky’s pro-secession Governor, Beriah Magoffin called the legislature into convention to decide secession “but the legislature, by a vote of 54 to 36 in the lower house, refused to call one and adjourned on February 11 without taking any decisive action.” [48] Losing that vote, he issued a declaration of neutrality which caused both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis to move with caution in the state. Lincoln understood the strategic importance of Kentucky and said “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game….Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We may as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capital.” [49] Lincoln’s use of caution, diplomacy, and when needed the force of the law, courts, and the military paid strategic military and economic dividends for the North as the Ohio River remained under Union control.

Maryland too remained in the Union as Governor Thomas H. Hicks, with the help of federal troops resisted a call in the legislature for a secession vote, even so as Union volunteers marched to Washington in response to Lincoln’s calls for troops some regiments were attacked in Baltimore. The 6th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was set upon as a “crowd of southern sympathizers threw bricks and stones and fired into their ranks as they changed trains. They returned the fire, killing twelve citizens and wounding many more, then packed their four dead on ice for shipment north, and came on to Washington, bearing their seventeen wounded on stretchers.” [50]

To Lincoln, the issue of secession as well as territory was “never just about politics. To him it spoke about the nation, even if primarily as a symbol. In his mind the nation must be about freedom, never slavery.” [51] For him the Union was sacred and could not be dissolved for any reason, especially the cause of slavery. In contrast to the secessionists who proclaimed that the states had formed the Federal Government and had the right to dissolve the Union, Lincoln, using the reasoning and arguments of Daniel Webster asserted in his inaugural address that the Union actually predated the Constitution:

“Descending from these general principles, we find the propositions that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And final, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution, was “to form a more perfect Union.”[52]

In early April 1861, a few days before the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter, a New York Times editorial made a proposition that unveiled the reality of the situation now confronting the divided nation, and which so many had for so long refused to face: “If two sections can no longer live together, they can no longer live apart in quiet until it is determined which is master. No two civilizations ever did, or can, come into contact as the North and South threaten to do, without a trial of strength, in which the weaker goes to the wall…. We must remain master of the occasion and the dominant power on this continent.” [53]

Thus, the American ideological war was born; it had taken decades to reach the point of no return. It had taken years of frustration, and attempts at compromise by politicians who attempted to dodge the moral issues inherent in slavery. Time could not heal the wounds caused by slavery as long as “one section of the country regarded it as a blessing, the other as a curse.” [54] Frederick Douglass observed: “Whatever was done or attempted with a view to the support and secularity of slavery on served to fuel the fire, and heated the furnace of [anti-slavery] agitation to a higher degree than had any before attained.” [55]

As a Post Script I would add that it appears that the Trump Led Republican Party is on the same path as the Southern Democrats who first split their party and then the Union.


Notes

[1] Ibid. Oates The Approaching Fury pp.355-356

[2] Ibid. Goodwin Team of Rivals p. 310

[3] Ibid. Goodwin Team of Rivals p. 310

[4] Ibid. Oates The Approaching Fury p.338

[5] Ibid. Oates The Approaching Fury pp.338-339

[6] Ibid. Oates The Approaching Fury p.355

[7] Ibid. Guelzo Fateful Lightning p.134

[8] Ibid. Oates The Approaching Fury pp.354-355

[9] Ibid. Goldfield America Aflame p.184

[10] Ibid. McPherson Drawn With Sword p.50 These words are little different than the words of many conservative Evangelical Christian pastors, pundits and politicians today in relation to the legalization of Gay marriage.

[11] Ibid. Rable God’s Almost Chosen Peoples pp.38-39

[12] Ibid. Holzer Lincoln and the Power of the Press p.256

[13] Ibid. Goodheart 1861 p.77

[14] Ibid. Goodheart 1861 p.77

[15] Ibid. McPherson The Battle Cry of Freedom p.238

[16] Cooper, William J. We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War November 1860-April 1861 Alfred a Knopf, New York 2012 p.75

[17] Ibid. Catton The Coming Fury pp.46-47

[18] Ibid. Catton Two Roads to Sumter pp.250-251

[19] Ibid. McPherson The Battle Cry of Freedom p.237

[20] Ibid. Freehling The Road to Disunion Volume II p.398

[21] O’Connell Robert L. Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman Random House, New York 2013 p65

[22] Ibid. Catton Two Roads to Sumter p.248

[23] __________ Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union. Retrieved from The Avalon Project, Yale School of Law http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp 24 March 2014

[24] Ibid. Levine Half Slave and Half Free p.251

[25] Ibid. Levine Half Slave and Half Free p.253

[26] Ibid. Oates The Approaching Fury p.342

[27] Ibid. Catton The Coming Fury p.122

[28] Ibid. McPherson The Battle Cry of Freedom p.238

[29] Ibid. Dew Apostles of Disunion p.18

[30] Ibid. Stampp The Causes of the Civil War p.189

[31] Ibid. Catton Two Roads to Sumter p.250

[32] Ibid. Dew Apostles of Disunion p.48

[33] Ibid. Dew Apostles of Disunion p.48

[34] Ibid. Foner Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men p.145

[35] Lincoln, Abraham First Inaugural Address March 4th 1861 retrieved from www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html 24 March 2014

[36] Ibid. Oates The Approaching Fury p.429

[37] Ibid. McPherson Drawn With Sword pp.50-51

[38] Cleveland, Henry Alexander H. Stevens, in Public and Private: With Letters and Speeches, before, during and since the War, Philadelphia 1886 pp.717-729 retrieved from http://civilwarcauses.org/corner.htm 24 March 2014

[39] Ibid. Oates The Approaching Fury p.382

[40] Ibid. McPherson The Battle Cry of Freedom p.244

[41] Ibid. Dew Apostles of Disunion p.66

[42] Ibid. Dew Apostles of Disunion p.67

[43] Ibid. Korda Clouds of Glory p.232

[44] Osborne, Charles C. Jubal: The Life and Times of General Jubal A. Earl, CSA Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC 1992 p.49

[45] Ibid. Catton The Coming Fury p.365

[46] Goodheart, Adam The Ashen Ruin in  The New York Times: Disunion, 106 Articles from the New York Times Opinionator: Modern Historians Revisit and Reconsider the Civil War from Lincoln’s Election to the Emancipation Proclamation Edited by Ted Widmer, Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, New York 2013 p.71

[47] Ibid. Catton The Coming Fury p.365

[48] Ibid. Potter The Impending Crisis p.510

[49] Ibid. Foote The Civil War, A Narrative. Volume One: Fort Sumter to Perryville p.53

[50] Ibid. Foote The Civil War, A Narrative. Volume One p.53

[51] Ibid. Cooper We Have the War Upon Us p.80

[52] Ibid. Wills  Lincoln at Gettysburg p.130-131

[53] Ibid. Foote The Civil War, A Narrative. Volume One p.43

[54] Ibid. Catton Two Roads to Sumter p.143

[55] Ibid. Levine Half Slave and Half Free p.253

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“There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots – or traitors” The Words of Stephen A. Douglas and Padre Steve for Today

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Sorry I have not written in the past few days but I’ve been trying to sort out all that is going on in our nation between the relentless Coronavirus 19 Pandemic and the threat to our Constitution and Republic posed by the domestic terrorists, so-called militias, White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, fascist authoritarians, Conspiracy theorists, QAnon thugs, and Christian theocrats dedicated to the person of Donald Trump. Their assault on the Capitol, Congress, and Vice President Pence should have exposed Trump and these thugs to his anyone and the criminal he is. However, according to an AP poll some 80% of Republicans and identified Trump supporters refused to admit that he was responsible in any way for that terrorist assault that he organized and cheered before, during and after it.

Now instead of a normal celebratory inauguration the Capitol is locked down with about 25,000 National Guard troops and countless Federal police from a multitude of Federal Law Enforcement agencies. Meanwhile around the country similar precautions are being taken due to the FBI assessment of potential violence of these violent Trump Cultist groups attacking Statehouses, Governors mansions, and other government offices, Federal, State and local. I personally expect them to make attempts to seize military weapons and equipment from National Guard armories as well as Army and Marine Reserve Centers not located on actual military bases.

We are not in a good situation. We face raging pandemic coupled with the very real threats of declared enemies, weakened alliances, a crumbling economy, and a tremendously unstable and narcissistic sociopath President capable of unleashing any destructive and dishonorable actions in his last few days in office cannot be underestimated.

Thankfully nothing happened over the weekend outside of small protests by armed protestors in a number of state capitols. That doesn’t mean that there have not been upticks in chatter about possible attacks, but it is possible that the response of the FBI in identifying and arresting the terrorists who attacked the Capitol and killed and wounded Capitol and Metro Police, the investigations by Congress, the Capitol Police, and FBI into the real possibility that Republican members of Congress, staffers, and members of the Capitol Police might have aided the attack.

Likewise the strong the stand of senior military commanders ad the deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and units, 25,000 in Washington D.C. alone and thousands in State Capitols might have acted as a major deterrent despite the threats of some of the terrorists to begin another Civil War. They banners they flew in their attack on the Capitol showed just that. They are not conservatives even though many call themselves Republicans. The are anti-U.S. Government radical extremists who hate the Constitution, its limits on Presidential power who are willing to kill to overthrow the government. That is demonstrated by history.

They are anti-United States Government, so long as they hold the Presidency, and absolutely committed to overthrowing it if they don’t hold it. These traitors bet their all on Donald Trump to be their Führer and savior. But Trump failed. He sent them into an attack and the abandoned them. So long as they think he has a minute chance they still might storm the Capitol Wednesday and attack soft targets in other states. But with just a few exceptions over the weekend they remained curiously silent, as if waiting for another order to attack.

That being said given the opportunity or a word from Trump they might might make another attempt before he leaves Washington or to cause death and destruction at the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. That too is a real possibility given the situation, there are some who have gone so far down the road of sedition and treason that they cannot turn back. Their only recourse is violence now, or violence later once they think they have a better opportunity.

I think that there is the possibility of both, but their failed Coup D’tat encouraged  by Trump and his surrogates for weeks failed and  more and more are being caught up charged, jailed and paraded before the world to see might tamper more large assaults. The more dangerous threats now are against individuals they identify as their enemies or raids or attacks on soft government targets, be the Federal, State, or local. That would include National Guard Armories and Army, Marine, or Navy Reserve Centers not located on an actual military base but those in the community where they might get inside help to seize military weapons. An up-armored HUMMV was stolen from a National Guard armory in Bell California over the weekend. Most of these armories or reserve centers have very few personnel on duty on non drill days, and an insider could facilitate the theft of weapons and vehicles that would facilitate further large or small scale attacks.

After Biden takes office I am more concerned about small terrorist cells or individuals making assassination attempts, kidnappings, and other violence against individuals or specific targets they believe to be vulnerable and which would send a statement. Terrorists of every kind resort to such tactics when defeated at the ballot box or military force. Our own history or Reconstruction and it’s subsequent defeat by Klansmen and other racist paramilitaries used such violence as to ensure that President Rutherford Hayes ended Reconstruction and threw newly freed and no enfranchised blacks to the wolves not only in the South but the entire country. After the failed Kapp Putsch and Bier Hall Putsch German right wing terrorists used individual assassination tactics throughout the 1920s instead of insurrection.

Like I said at the beginning of this article I apologize for not posting sooner. Even though I started this article days ago I had to wait complete it.

As always I have been getting threatened and harassed by Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, and Christian Taliban and dealing with them and real life has been exhausting and I just didn’t have the energy to complete it.

Likewise, I put out a post on my Facebook page that if I found out that any member of my family or friends took part in or supported the attack on the Capitol that I would turn them in. Shortly after a cousin who I have sparred with many times because of his attacks on me his theocratic fascist beliefs, and unremitting support of Trump dropped and blocked me from his Facebook account.

I cannot prove it yet, but I believe that he might have be a conspirator or participant in this plot to overthrow the government. I plan on contacting the Norfolk FBI field office to let them know of my suspicions. I have his contact info and a recent photo to help the in their investigation. If he wasn’t involved I would be surprised.

Some would same that family ties should be stronger, but for me loyalty to the country, Constitution, and our democratic norms matter more. I cannot sit by and allow the Union to be overthrown by seditious traitors, regardless of the are family or friends. The American Civil War pitted brother against brother and so such threats against our Union pit me against anyone who threatens it.

I can only echo the words of Senator Stephen A. Douglas after he lost the 1860 Presidential election to Abraham Lincoln because his former Southern Democrat friends decided to splinter the party and torpedo his Presidential campaign by supporting a second Democratic ticket headed by James Buchanan’s Vice President and former Kentucky Senator John C. Breckinridge. Douglas, knowing he lost toured the South to try to convince Southern Democrats not to rebel or support secession. For doing so he was condemned. When the Confederates fired on Fort Sumpter, Douglas who had spent most of his political career brokering compromise said:

“There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots – or traitors”

Douglas, a man who had spent his entire career to further compromise with men who refused to do so finally recognized that the secessionist traitors were just that, and that there was not way to describe them as anything else. He was absolutely correct. Those who assault our Capitol, kill and injure police officers defending it, and calling themselves “Patriots” are not Patriots or freedom fighters. They are domestic terrorists, insurrectionists, and enemies of everything our founders believed was right and true. Honestly, I don’t care if the are blood relatives or long time friends. Anyone who attempts to overthrow this Union is my enemy. I did not spent nearly forty years in uniform swearing my sacred Oath to the Constitution not to tolerate or resist attempts by anyone regardless of their relationship to me to overthrow that Union and Constitution. I might be retired now, but I will remain faithful t my oath, and if any group ever launches an insurrection against the United States I will volunteer to my new State, the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Federal Government to serve to defeat it, not as a Chaplain but as a line officer in any component of the State or Federal military who will accept my service. With my experience as a company commander, battalion, group and brigade staff office before I was ever a minister, and my advanced military education I could command a company, battalion, or regiment of volunteers willing to fight for the Union.

I am angered by the insurgents and terrorists who turned their backs on the Constitution and our country to support the Coup by Trump and his Cult to overthrow it on 6 January. They are traitors. If anyone I know or are related to or served alongside supports their attempted overthrow of of our Republic and Constitution, they are my enemy. There is no room for compromise. There are only two sides now.

So until Tuesday I wish you the best. I have to finish an article for the German newspaper Die Zeit about pastoral for the dying in mass casualty and pandemic events where combat triage, that is treating those most capable of surviving first and giving palliative care to those who cannot. The. I have to finish my photograph credit section of my book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory! Racism, Religion, Ideology and Politics in the Civil War Era and the or Continuing Importance, to send to the publisher and my agent by Wednesday.

I have more work to do after that, but I won’t stop writing or telling the truth. I know too much about these people to from previous associations with them and listening to their propaganda three to nine ours a day before I went to Iraq. I feel for it from the time I was a teenager and while never an extremist by any means I never spoke up against the lies and conspiracy theories until I came back from Iraq in 2008 to find out that most of the GOP, and other supposed conservatives neither cared about the international law that we as a nation established against war crimes at Nuremberg, the country or people of Iraq, or the military personnel sent to either conquer, subjugate, or occupy that unfortunate country. By May of 2008 I knew the GOP war party had betrayed all of us. They bankrupted the nation, abandoned the troops, and the people of Iraq who initially welcomed us as liberators only to find that we were not liberators but another in a long series of occupiers, from the Assyrians, to the Persians, to the Greeks, the Sunni forces of Mohammed, the British and finally us. I saw the suffering there, I met our friends and allies, and I saw the destruction that we did to that country. If we were held to the standards of the Nuremberg trials our nations leaders would have easily been convicted of the crimes that we charged convicted, and either jailed or executed the Nazis for their crimes. With the exception of committing genocide our leaders and military forces could have been convicted of three of the four counts we convicted the Nazis.

So now, some 57 hours before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take their oaths as President and Vice President and former President Trump holds some kind of seditious rally when he trundles down the steps of Air Force One for the last time, without any military honors as he departs Washington D.C. he doesn’t deserve any honors of any kind. He has again been impeached and this time he may well be convicted. Likewise, he is going to face a multitude of State and Federal charges. I hope that he is put in the dock and convicted of every one of them. He needs to spend the rest of his natural life in prison as a traitor to the United States, as do many of his violent seditious followers.

So, until Tuesday, peace, be safe, and turn in anyone suspected of attempting to overthrow our Republic, Constitution, or those who want to do harm to our validly elected leaders.

Again I apologize for my delay in writing.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Beginning of the Trump Coup and Insurgency: It is Not Going Away

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I have longed warned that President Trump and his supporters would not go quietly. I have lost count of the number of warnings I have given since Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 and how he described the loyalty of his supporters when he said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible…” 

At the time many thought that he was joking. I knew he wasn’t  joking because I had run ins with those supporters long before he ever announced his candidacy. They were a ready made constituency. Since the late 1980s frustrated conservatives led by pundits like Rush Limbaugh and dozens of others, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, hundreds of right wing radical pastors, and an increasingly radicalized Republican Party with the Tea Party Movement, and the Congressional Freedom Council.

Over the past three decades the Republican Party, once a mainline Conservative party was transformed into an anti-democratic, theocratic, racist and authoritarian party completely devoted to overthrowing the Constitution and Republic all because Trump lost the election and incited them to violence. That violence culminated today after Trump and Rudy Giuliani encouraged them to violence at a rally. Trump told them to continue to fight, Giuliani told them to prepare for combat, further inflaming the mob which charged down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Building.

Following that rally the crowds marched on the Capitol Building, where they were met by Senator Josh Hawley who encouraged them from the beginning and then threw up a clenched fist as if he was leading a revolution. The insurgents overwhelmed the few Capitol Police who were manning the barricades giving little resistance to the insurgents. Some actually appeared to be friendly and supportive of the insurgents. After breaking through the lines broke into the building and took over both chambers of Congress, occupied Senate and Congressional offices, and vandalized the building, causing a great deal of damage. During their rampage those outside the buildings they attacked reporters and bystanders. Inside the building they planted Improvised Explosive Devices, and and someone shot and killed a woman, while the insurgents trampled her body as they advanced.

They flew many flags with the name of their leader on them, Donald Trump. They flew numerous variations of the Confederate Battle Flag, the Gadsen Flag, White Nationalist flags, Christian Flags including one that had a Jesus Fish with the name Jesus in black, in a white oval surrounded by a red banner. I have never imagined that the most ancient symbol of the Christian faith would be turned into a Nazi symbol. By the way, Wal-Mart sells it and it is out of stock.

Vice President Pence and the members of the Senate and House had to be evacuated to safe areas where they holed up for hours as the building was cleared.

Trump and his Fascist thugs are trying to overthrow the election and the Constitution. Don’t call them “conservatives” because they are radical, anti-democratic, insurrectionists bent on sedition and treason. How they were so easily breach security at the Capitol is beyond me. This attack was telegraphed by Trump, Giuliani, Cruz, Hawley, and others. Trump is still even this moment inciting them on Twitter justifying their actions. One woman was shot and killed, circumstances still unknown, numerous others injured, IEDs inside the Capitol disarmed, much of the Capitol damaged, further threats of violence and worse is to come.

In June the crushing police and military assault on the peaceful protesters of the George Floyd Murder, begs me to ask how come peaceful protestors, mostly Black were the subject of an unprovoked violent assault while mostly White Trump supporters who violently attacked the US Capitol were treated with kid gloves. There are two systems of justice. One for the violent Trump Cult and one for others, especially Blacks.

In the wake of this very few of the insurgents were arrested or charged. Can you imagine if Black Lives Matter protesters had done the same how law enforcement would have reacted. They would have opened fire, beaten, arrested, and maybe killed the protestors. The protestors would not gotten past the plaza in front of the Capitol before their protest would have been crushed. You and I know it. The evidence from Charlottesville, Lafayette Park, and so many other cities  is irrefutable. The racist tenor of how Whites and Blacks are treated under the law has not changed since Dred Scott, or Plessy v. Ferguson.

President Trump and his allies and enablers have ensured that the stain of racism, nationalism, and Trump’s cult will remain free to infect our country for the foreseeable future. In the next few weeks I believe that these insurgents will attack various state houses. After President Elect Biden and Vice President Elect Harris I expect the insurgents to take a lower profile but engage in targeted assassinations of Trump’s opponents regardless of their party. They are domestic terrorists and should be treated as such. They need to be hunted down arrested and brought to justice. While we want them to be arrested and brought to justice, if they decide to resort to violence in that they deserve whatever happens to them. Though I am against the death penalty I believe that those who assault our Constitution and Republic are deserving of death, and I hope that these people are brought to justice, and if these choose to resort to violence then they deserve whatever happens to them. If we cannot depend on Trump’s Department of Justice to do the job then we will have to depend on Attorney General nominee Merrick Gerland to prosecute them To the full extent of the law.

Tonight the Senate and House are going through what used to be a ceremonial vote to approve the results of the Electoral College vote. The violent coup attempt shook up many Republicans including those who were willing before to to support the objections. It appears that they now lack the fortitude to support Trump’s Coup attempt. It is amazing to see what happens to people when they are threatened by violence, especially by the people of your political party.

“There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots – or traitors”


That being said Senator Hawley, Senator Cruz, and the four others who supported the move to invalidate Arizona’s Electoral vote still did so without censure by their party. Not only that but Senator Pat Toomey who excoriated Trump as a demagogue but said in rejecting further objections said that he wanted Trump to win. I cannot understand how someone can call a man a “violent demagogue” could say they wanted him to win. Really, what kind of morality and ethics allows that?

Their votes are still going on but Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to be the President and Vice President of the United States with a House and Senate Majority that would not have occurred without Trump’s hubris. He has destroyed his presidency, he has destroyed the GOP Senate majority, and he has done everything he could to destroy the foundations of our nation. The man is a criminal, a traitor, a seditionist, and a serial liar, except for one tiny thing: he has promised to overthrow the election, he has promised not to give up his fight, and not to leave power peacefully. In those things he was telling the truth, proving that a serial liar can on occasion tell the truth, and many people will fight and die for his illegal actions.

That is why I said that this is the beginning of the Trump Coup and Insurgency. He and his followers will begin a campaign of violence like the KKK, the Red Shirts, the White Leagues, White Liners, and Nazis. They are a doomsday cult led by an unbalanced, unhinged, unstable and unimaginably evil and demented President who still has two weeks to do his worst.

He needs to be removed from office by Vice President Pence and the Cabinet by the 25th Amendment or by an immediate move to impeach him. Military commanders need to be ready to disobey any unconstitutional actions by Trump in the country or attempts to send the nation to war.

In the next few hours the Senate and House will certify the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but that will enrage these insurgents, elected or not to more violence.

I fully expect the situation to get worse before it ever gets better. Our nation’s reputation and honor is stained with the blood of Trump and his Cult. Over half of the GOP House still supports Trump and his illegal actions. That shows that the GOP is hopelessly corrupt and unable to reverse the decades or rot that it has cultivated and encouraged.

That is not the worst. The fact is, unless Trump is removed through the action of Vice President Pence and the cabinet by removing Trump from by the 25th Amendment, or the House fast tracking impeachment chargers and the Senate trying and convicting him, he retains the control of the Presidency and could even launch us into war or further attempts to overthrow the Constitution and Republic. The next two weeks are going to be incredibly dangerous and violent as Trump and his Cult, including those in elected office or law enforcement work to throw the country into chaos. Such people are domestic terrorists but our laws don’t treat them as such. Laws on terrorism need to be changed to include such people.

Sadly, I fully expect that these people will resort to further violence before Trump leaves office. If they do commit further violence they deserve no mercy. Hopefully they can be arrested and tried, but I do not believe that many will submit to that. I expect them to commit violent acts including murder of law enforcement officers attempting to arrest them, as well as assassinating those they believe are their political enemies. If they do so law enforcement officials should be able to resort to deadly force to put down their insurrection.

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Be ready for anything. I know these people, many are decent people but others are lawless, racist, authoritarian, and theocratic and they do believe that their so called “God” is one their side. That is what the Taliban, Al Qaida, the Nazis, and others believed. Should they commit any more violent acts I believe that our only recourse is force, and if the situation requires, the lifting of Posse Comitatus and use of the active duty military to crush them. This is no longer about the election, it is about an insurrection to overthrow our government.

The President is committing criminal acts, inciting insurrection and needs to be removed from office before he can destroy the country and Constitution.

This is not some histrionic prediction, it is based on his words and actions since 2015. The man is certifiably insane and willing to commit violence to keep power. What happened today was an attempted coup and what happens next will be violent insurrection and assassinations, as well as possible war against foreign enemies.

Donald Trump, his enablers and the violent actors who attack Congress today have to be brought to justice. Senators Cruz and Hawley need to be removed from office as well as 130 house members who have completely disregarded their oaths of office to fight for Trump. Senator Mitt Romney offered a devastating critique of Republican objections. My respect for Romney has risen incredibly since 2012. Romney has become a voice of conscience for conservatives but far too many supposedly “conservative” Trump supporters don’t get it.  That is because they are cultists, and one cannot convince cultists, be they religious or political.

So until tomorrow this now retired Navy Chaplain, veteran of nearly 40 years of military service, and historian of both the Weimar, Nazi, and post-war Nuremberg trials, as well as American slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow Eras will settle into bed. However, I will never stop exposing these criminals for what they are. How can I not as a Priest sworn to my vows, a military officer sworn to uphold the Constitution, and a historian who is committed to speaking and writing the the truth.

The President and his violent supporters attempted a coup, the began an insurrection and they are not done. They will kill many more people before they are done. Any American regardless of their party needs to stand against them. As Stephen Douglas said after he lost the election of 1860 and his former friends attacked Fort Sumter in 1861:

“There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots – or traitors”

That my friends is the the crux of the question. Trump encouraged yesterday’s violence and failed. That doesn’t mean that this amoral narcissistic sociopath is done and neither are his supporters.

If Americans of all political types do not resist the damage will take decades to repair if ever. All over the world allies are weeping and enemies rejoicing over what happened yesterday. Some things cannot be unseen or undone, and those events will forever redound against the United States. Honestly, with so many Trump supporters now fighting an insurgency against our legally elected government what nation or people could ever trust us regardless of how hard President Biden tries to repair the damage to our Republic?

If you can answer that with any positive response you are much more optimistic than me. However, we are now facing a long term violent insurgency with right wing death squads similar those we have condemned in other nations or the insurgencies in Iraq or Afghanistan.

This is all on us, our President and his cult. The threat is real because you can bet that Russia, China, Iran, and many other adversaries are now wondering and planning how they well take advantage of the unpatriotic chaos unleashed by Trump and his goddamned cult are done. This is far more than a domestic political crisis, it has ramifications for our national security and peace around the world.

This was an attempted Coup no different that the Kapp Putsch or Bier Hall Putsch in Weimar Germany. We need to be vigilant and very concerned. In an hour or so Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be the undisputed President and Vice President elect and nothing apart from a violent revolution and insurgency can stop it. If that happens all bets are off.

So until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Time to Stand against the Coming Coup of the Trump Cult

Munich Police Defeat Hitler’s Bier Hall Putsch at Odeonsplatz

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

As the evidence continues to mount that President Trump and his nefarious Cult which encompasses most of the GOP minority in the House of Representatives and many Senators, as well as thousands of violent heavily armed Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, Fascists, and conspiracy theorists are plotting a Coup to keep Trump in power it is time for every American who stands for our Constitution and Republic to resist them.

Even a few weeks ago most people brushed off the words of Trump and the words and violent actions of his Cult members including the Proud Boys, the Bugaloo Boys, QAnon followers, Christian theocrats, so called self proclaimed Militia outfits, Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, Anti-Semites and other authoritarians with a grain of salt.

But our Founders were always concerned about such movements. Historian Timothy Snyder noted in an interview with Sean Illing: “We think that because we’re America, everything will work itself out. This is exactly what the founders refused to believe. They thought human nature is such that you have to constrain it by institutions. They preferred rule of law and checks and balances.”

That is not the way of President Trump and his violent Cult. On  March 14th of 2020 Trump proclaimed:

“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,”

However, since Trump’s  indisputable loss in the election by over 7 million popular votes and a wide majority in the Electoral College he has become ever more desperate. His legal team filed over 60 lawsuits to challenge election results all of which were shot down in flames with prejudice because there was no evidence of voter fraud. While those lawsuits were going on and recounts were being conducted Trump supporters threatened election officials, and even Republican judges in the contested states. Even after the recounts, in the case of Georgia three of the, still showed that Joe Biden won, the results were certified, and the electors voted, the threats kept coming.

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt wrote something that is completely descriptive of Trump and his followers: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” 

Each day they got more menacing. Now the President has issued a call to his followers to gather and disrupt the ceremonial count of the electors in Congress on Wednesday. At least 12 Senators and over 100 GOP Congressmen and women have said that they would object to the count, which at best will delay the final certification by a few hours. However, there is nothing in the Constitution that allows Congress to overturn elections held in the various states. That is a fact. It is part of our Federalist structure of government which gives states certain powers not ascribed to the Federal Government. Congress cannot overturn certified election results in any state.

The German pastor, theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was killed on the express order of Adolf Hitler wrote:

“The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, be it of a Leader or of an office, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here is infringing eternal laws and taking upon himself superhuman authority which will eventually crush him. The eternal law that the individual  stands alone before God takes fearful vengeance where it is attacked and distorted. Thus the Leader points to the office, but Leader and office together point to the final authority itself, before which Reich or state are penultimate authorities. Leaders or offices which set themselves up as gods mock God and the individual who stands alone before him, and must perish.”

The fact that so many GOP Senators and Representatives are willing to follow Trump into the abyss of his Götterdämmerung shows that they stand against the Constitution and are willing to violate their oaths all in the service of a criminal President. The President’s criminality was on full display last weekend as he was exposed as he attempted to browbeat, bludgeon, and threaten the Georgia Secretary of State and his Chief Counsel to change the votes cast in the election. That is a felony and the men he was threatening were Republicans who voted for him and wanted him to win, but have the integrity and honor to remain faithful to their oaths and obey the law. The same is true in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In all those states elected officials upholding the law and their oaths were and are continuing to be threatened with violence.

Arendt also wrote about the Germans of the Nazi era words that are frightening when one takes a look at the hold that Trump and his propagandists on Fox News, Newsmax Television, OAN, talk radio, and on thousands of fake news conspiracy theory websites and podcasts proclaim:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”


Over the past five years the President has made multiple threats to unleash his followers on opponents. Trump’s statements to that effect are so numerous that I have lost count of them. They began during his campaign and haven’t stopped, in fact they have only gotten worse and on June 1st 2020 he led a violent attack on peaceful protesters by officers of a number of Federal police agencies in Lafayette Park and the historical Saint John’s Church for a photo opportunity outside the Church. It was one of the most lawless acts ever committed by an American President against the American people.

Now we stand at the precipice of violence and insurrection incited by a lame duck President. If Vice President Pence whose life has been threatened by these people had a single working testicle or a couple of solid vertebrae in his back he would move to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from power, but Pence is not a man of courage or honor. Since Pence claims to be a Christian that is even more damning. Not only does he defy his duties under the Constitution, but his obligations to the truth as a Christian. Unfortunately, the Christian faith he represents is theocratic, authoritarian and undemocratic. In fact his version of Christianity is little different than the German Christian movement that wholeheartedly threw itself into supporting Hitler. Jesus Christ is not their God, just a slogan to make them feel good, their God is Trump which is the very definition of idolatry.

Yesterday, the ten living former Secretaries of Defense including former Vice President Dick Cheney all published and signed a letter about the existential threat of Trump to the Republic. That demonstrates the seriousness of what they see on the horizon.

Supporters of President Donald Trump rally outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office Friday, Nov. 6, 2020, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

A coup to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, overturn a free and fair election that Donald Trump lost, and to overthrow the Republic is gaining momentum. It is no different than 1860 when eleven Southern States seceded from the Union and brought about the most deadly war in American history. Senator Stephan A. Douglas who lost the election to Abraham Lincoln when the Democratic Party split into a pro-slavery Southern faction worked as hard as he could to prevent secession after his loss. He could not stop secession and went  back to Illinois where he proclaimed:

“There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots – or traitors”

Armed pro-trump militia members demonstrate in Louisville Kentucky on the day of the famous Kentucky Derby, which is held in the city.

Today the Party of traitors are not Jefferson Davis’s Southern Democrats, but the Dixiecrats and theocrats who took over the Republican Party and sold their souls to Donald Trump. Trump didn’t start this, he merely took advantage of a party that grew more unhinged by the decade beginning in the 1960s. Today the Republican Party is not the party of principled conservatism, it is a radical authoritarian party with dreams of dictatorship and most of Trump’s followers imbibe of the falsehoods proclaimed by him, his administration, supporters in Congress and media propagandists proclaim. William Shirer was one of the few American news correspondents in Hitler’s Germany following the Nazi takeover to the German declaration of war against the United States wrote of his experiences with the German Press, propagandists, and people:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

After January 20th the blood orgy of the Trump Cult will continue as they work to destroy the remaining conservatives in the GOP and probably destroy the Party in the process. It will be like the Night of the Long Knives, but they won’t have help from the military.

Make no mistake. There can be no more sitting on the fence hoping that things will blow over and return to normal as much as all of us, including me would like them to be. The next few days and the days leading to January 20th will be critical to the survival of the country our Framers painstakingly crafted together. What they created wasn’t perfect, the Union had flaws, especially in regards to slavery and our treatment of the peoples of our First Nations, but it was an experiment meant to see the continued increase of liberty for all.

If Trump and his Cult succeed in their plans the country we know is dead. In 1933 old line German Conservatives led by former Chancellor Franz Von Papen had President Hindenburg appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. In less than five months all of their political parties were dissolved and Hitler’s Nazis took sole power. A year later, Hitler turned on his former allies in the Night of the Long Knives, killing hundreds of his most loyal supporters, as well a German conservative leaders and some senior military officers.

I am now convinced that between January 6th and 20th we will see a wave of political violence and unrest we have never known in this country. I dearly want to be wrong, but when I look at Trump’s actions and statements, the violence already being committed by his followers, and the proliferation of threats by them against all opponents or those they suspect of not being loyal enough to Trump, I know worse is to come.

Yale Historian Dr. Timothy Snyder wrote:

“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”

That warning is now becoming a reality unless real patriots be the liberal or conservative are willing to stand up and be counted. That especially matters for police and military leaders. General Ludwig Beck the Chief of Staff of the German Army in 1938 resigned in protest over Hitler’s decision to invade Czechoslovakia. In retirement he became part of the resistance against Hitler and on the night of July 20th 1944 when the attempt to kill Hitler and take over Germany failed he was faced with immediate execution or the chance to kill himself. He attempted to kill himself but was just badly wounded and was finished off by an executioner. However before the attempt was made he sounded a warning to military and police personnel about duty to their country against a dictator. He wrote:

“Final decisions about the nation’s existence are at stake here; history will incriminate these leaders with bloodguilt if they do not act in accordance with their specialist political knowledge and conscience. Their soldierly obedience reaches its limit when their knowledge, their conscience, and their responsibility forbid carrying out an order.”

I pray that over the next 15 days that true patriotism and loyalty to the Constitution prevails. If it doesn’t our country is doomed.

So until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

 

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One Republican Senator of Moral Courage and Clarity: Mitt Romney and Impeachment

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

The foreordained impeachment trial of President Trump is over. Fifty-Two GOP Senators prostrated themselves on the altar of Trump, primarily because they were afraid of him and his followers. Of course since some of the highest ranking of the GOP Senators publicly admitted that they would not be an “unbiased jury” even before taking the oath that required them to do that during the impeachment trial.

Only one, Senator Mitt Romney had the courage to vote for impeachment. I was getting seen by a doctor and waiting for prescriptions to be filled to see any of it. However, I did read Senator Romney’s speech announcing his vote and it was a monumental speech for a Senator to go against a sitting President of his own Party. The only action I can compare it to is the passionate leadership and opposition by Senator Stephen A. Douglas to the attempt of the Buchanan Administration and the Southern Democratic Senators trying to bypass the law to have Kansas admitted as a Slave State in 1858. (see my 2015 article https://padresteve.com/2015/10/09/17673/.) Such an event seldom happens unless there is such a great divide and animosity between the parties, or divisive sectionalism.

But Romney, though he has voted with Trump and the Republicans 80% of the time, cast party loyalty to the wind and placed Country and Constitution over it, proclaimed in the Well of the Senate:

The Constitution is at the foundation of our Republic’s success, and we each strive not to lose sight of our promise to defend it. The Constitution established the vehicle of impeachment that has occupied both houses of Congress for these many days. We have labored to faithfully execute our responsibilities to it. We have arrived at different judgments, but I hope we respect each other’s good faith.

The House managers presented evidence supporting their case; the White House counsel disputed that case. In addition, the president’s team presented three defenses: first, that there can be no impeachment without a statutory crime; second, that the Bidens’ conduct justified the president’s actions; and third that the judgment of the president’s actions should be left to the voters. Let me first address each of those defenses.

The historic meaning of the words “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the writings of the Founders and my own reasoned judgment convince me that a president can indeed commit acts against the public trust that are so egregious that while they are not statutory crimes, they would demand removal from office. To maintain that the lack of a codified and comprehensive list of all the outrageous acts that a president might conceivably commit renders Congress powerless to remove a president defies reason.

With regards to Hunter Biden, taking excessive advantage of his father’s name is unsavory but also not a crime. Given that in neither the case of the father nor the son was any evidence presented by the president’s counsel that a crime had been committed, the president’s insistence that they be investigated by the Ukrainians is hard to explain other than as a political pursuit. There is no question in my mind that were their names not Biden, the president would never have done what he did.

The defense argues that the Senate should leave the impeachment decision to the voters. While that logic is appealing to our democratic instincts, it is inconsistent with the Constitution’s requirement that the Senate, not the voters, try the president. Hamilton explained that the Founders’ decision to invest senators with this obligation rather than leave it to voters was intended to minimize—to the extent possible—the partisan sentiments of the public.

Yes, he did.

The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.

The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.

The president’s purpose was personal and political.

Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.

What he did was not “perfect.” No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.

I am aware that there are people in my party and in my state who will strenuously disapprove of my decision, and in some quarters, I will be vehemently denounced. I am sure to hear abuse from the president and his supporters.Does anyone seriously believe I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?

I sought to hear testimony from John Bolton not only because I believed he could add context to the charges, but also because I hoped that what he said might raise reasonable doubt and thus remove from me the awful obligation to vote for impeachment.

I acknowledge that my verdict will not remove the president from office. The results of this Senate court will in fact be appealed to a higher court: the judgment of the American people. Voters will make the final decision, just as the president’s lawyers have implored. My vote will likely be in the minority in the Senate. But irrespective of these things, with my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me. I will only be one name among many, no more or less, to future generations of Americans who look at the record of this trial. They will note merely that I was among the senators who determined that what the president did was wrong, grievously wrong.

We’re all footnotes at best in the annals of history. But in the most powerful nation on earth, the nation conceived in liberty and justice, that is distinction enough for any citizen.

I wish I had seen him speak it live. Within hours he was accused of what amounts to be treason on Twitter by the President, as well as the President’s son Donny Junior, who called for Romney, whose personal and family credentials as Republicans far outweigh the Trump family claims as Republicans to be the purveyors of Republican fidelity. However, as illogical as that sounds, the Trumps do represent  what the GOP has become, a cesspool of creatures indebted to propagandists like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, the Christian preachers who sold out every last vestige of their faith to publicly lie for the President, and even anti-government right wing militias, mostly made up of White Supremacists.

I would not be surprised if anyone who has publicly opposed Trump, or tried to obey their oath of office will become targets of violence as a now unencumbered President takes revenge on them. I would hope to be wrong about that, but everything points to the United States becoming an authoritarian nation cloaked in a facade of supposedly free elections, just like Russia, Turkey, and so many others. Be assured that the Evangelical leaders of Trump’s will certainly condemn him for being a Mormon and therefore in no way a Christian. Of course the punishment for heresy is often death, or ostracization from the community, and in this case it is not the Church, but Trump’s Republican Party.

I am going to leave it there for the night. I want nothing but the best for our country and its citizens, but I fear that we are on the brink of the abyss. The President will speak today about his impeachment and acquittal. What he says, and what his confederates in the Congress, Administration, media, and pulpit say and do will determine that.

I will not talk about the General Election, but it is clear that as in 2016 Trump and his minions will do all they can, even break the law and work with enemy powers to win.

Until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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Where Will Trump and His Followers Thoughts, Words, and Actions Lead?

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Last night I wrote about the Racial Rubicon that President Trump and his followers at a rally crossed. It was sobering, because what I and others have said about him since the day he announced his candidacy was on full display. Trump had ignited the bonfire three days before by telling people to send four Congresswomen of color back to their country of origin. All are American citizens, three of the four born in the USA and one a naturalized citizen.

Never before has a sitting President opened the doors of racism so wide as President Trump, even James Buchanan and his work to tip the Supreme Court In the Dred Scott decision, and his attempt to overthrow the law by attempting to have Kansas admitted as a Slave State, an effort that was successfully opposed by Senator Stephan A. Douglas, Democrat from Illinois, a member of Buchanan’s own Party. Buchanan threatened him, but Douglas, otherwise not a friend of slaves held his ground and built a bi-partisan coalition in the House and Senate to defeat Buchanan. Unfortunately, there is no one like the late Senator from Illinois. Douglas paid the political price, though the Democratic nominee in 1860, the party split and in a second nominating convention nominated John C. Breckinridge, Splitting the party and bringing Abraham Lincoln to office.

So where does this lead? That is a question one of my readers asked on Twitter today. I wish that I knew. But I remember the words of Mahatma Gandhi:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words,

Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits,

Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.”

I sincerely believe that Donald J. Trump is incapable of discerning truth from lies. He lies so much that it has become ingrained in his very soul. In regard to this aspect of Of Trump’s personality, I am reminded of the words of Adolf Hitler’s Finance Minister, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, who noted: “He wasn’t honest with his most intimate confidants…. In my opinion, he was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between truth and lies.

Today the President attempted to pass the blame, and in effect through his chanting supporters under the bus, saying that “He did not like it, he did not agree with it,” but the problem is that he started it, he planted it through his tweets and statements in the days before. He reveled as the crowed chanted as he spoke against Representative Ilan Omar of Minnesota “Send her back, Send her back!” Representative Mark Walker, Republican from North Carolina (who I actually met and drank beer with in 2017 after the Congressional Baseball Game) immediately voiced his concern and consternation about the display, but very few other Republicans found anything to complain about. Senator Lindsey Graham blamed it on Trump’s narcissism, and the statements of Omar and the other Congresswomen, not racism, despite the decades of evidence demonstrating the latter.

Gandhi’s words are as true today as when he wrote them. Americans today have the choice of being, to use the words of Yehuda Bauer “The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.” 

If you wonder how such events happen in a democracy, look no further than the words of Yale Historian Timothy Snyder:

“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”

The questions for all Americans today, will we be perpetrators, victims, or bystanders, or will ordinary Americans find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands.

Those are the questions after Trump and his followers actions over the past few days. Believe me, people I know, people I would have believed in ordinary times to be good and decent people are mocking those who criticize the President and making excuses for the illegal and immoral racist words and policies of his administration. For me that is frightening.

Where does it end? I leave that to you, but as a historian, ethicist, and Priest I have to say that if Trump remains in power by ballot or bullet, it will be something that will bring such shame to our country that generations from now our descendants will burdened with, just as the descendants of the Nazis. Sadly, we never did that with our Slave owners and those who brought about the Civil War, including my ancestors.

Until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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The Contempt For Facts: Trump, the GOP, and the Cohen Hearings

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

A Short thought to begin the weekend that kind of follows my posts of the last several days. Hannah Arendt wrote in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism this poignant fact and warning:

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.” 

In my life which now spans almost 59 years I have never seen an American political leader attempt to present a full-blown counter-factual narrative to support their desire for power; but that was before the presidential campaign and presidency of Donald Trump. This not only comes from watching the campaigns of various presidential candidates and the actions of those men who have gained the Presidency, but from my study of history. Yes, I have seen Presidents lie with varying degrees of success. I have seen politicians twist facts and numbers for specific ends, but I have never seen one do so on such a scale and magnitude as our current President; nor have I seen any President so boldly attack and attempt to discredit the institutions established as checks and balances in the Constitution.

Likewise, I have never seen members of Congress stoop to such lows as I did this week. Will there ever be a Stephan A.Douglas with the courage to confront at the risk of his political career again? Sadly, I don’t see such a man or woman in today’s Republican Party.

This week we had the opportunity to watch Republican Congressmen do all they could to protect their master without actually defending him. Instead they attack the messenger, the President’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen. Instead of wrestling with facts, or troubling themselves with truth, these men by their actions surrendered all sense of honor and decency to attack a man who has already admitted to his wrongdoings on behalf of the President, rather than actually attempting to defend the President, because in their heart of hearts they know that they cannot. Instead of admitting the truth, they still spew forth the President’s propaganda, as they drink the dregs of the mirth of Trump, and it will kill them.

Hannah Arendt’s words describe in terribly precise detail the kind of propaganda campaign that has been waged by the President and his advisers since the beginning of his Presidency, which is reinforced by his spokespeople on a daily basis. Arendt wrote: “The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.” Arendt’s statement is very descriptive of this administration and the President’s Congressional sycophants. I am going to leave things here for now, but it takes honesty to to face that truth.

So until tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+

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Filed under ethics, History, laws and legislation, Political Commentary

Wanted, One Senator Of Courage: Will Any Republican Make a Principled Stand Against Trump?

Stephen A. Douglas

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I wrote this in June of last year and as we go into the fourth week of a pointless partial government shutdown, the effects of which are now beginning to be felt, I thought it pertinent. So I did a few edits The shutdown and the President’s determination to find a way to build his wall, even publicly musing about declaring an imaginary national emergency to get his way, would be enough by themselves without all the charges that will be proven against him will certainly will enshrine his place as the worst President in American history. As such, James Buchanan is probably rejoicing in his grave that he has competition.

Likewise, it has become apparent that it is very unlikely anyone in his Trumpified Republican Party will rise to the occasion to lead a principled opposition against him, as Senator Stephen Douglas did against Buchanan. But then, Douglas was willing to stake his political career on defending the country and Constitution against the unconstitutional actions of a President of his own political party.

As I watch President Trump’s administration attack the law, the Constitution, and violate the civil rights and human rights of citizens as well as people who have come to the United States to flee oppression and danger at home; to threaten freedom of speech and freedom of the press; to categorize political opponents inside and outside of his party as traitors; to legitimize the most repressive dictatorial regimes while attacking longstanding allies; even as he works to destroy the work of American Presidents and diplomats to build a world order that has brought great benefit to the United States and the world by defeating the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and eventually the Soviet Union. He has chosen the choice of being a rogue superpower rather than being the moderating and stabilizing force in the world that it has played since World War Two. Robert Kagan wrote in the Washington Post on June 14th:

“The United States’ adversaries will do well in this world, for Trump’s America does not want war. It will accommodate powers that can harm it. It will pay them the respect they crave and grant them their spheres of interest. Those that depend on the United States, meanwhile, will be treated with disdain, pushed around and used as pawns. At times, they will be hostages to be traded for U.S. gain. The United States and the postwar liberal order protected them and helped them prosper, but it also left them vulnerable to any American leader willing to offer them up as sacrifices to appease aggressors. That is a kind of realism, too… It recognizes no moral, political or strategic commitments. It feels free to pursue objectives without regard to the effect on allies or, for that matter, the world. It has no sense of responsibility to anything beyond itself.”

The President and his administration show little regard for the Constitution and established law in this country and our treaties and agreements with other nations. He appoints men and women who had they been Germans after the Second World War would have been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity to high office. He defends White Nationalists and Neo-Nazis. He confounds loyalty to himself with patriotism and loyalty to the country. His threat of declaring a national emergency if he doesn’t get his Wall demonstrates that fact to a tee.

He uses propaganda to demonize those who seek law and justice. In any normal time a cry would arise from his own party saying “no more,” but his party does nothing, and even those leaders who occasionally speak out against his policies take no actions because they are afraid of retribution. That happened to long time conservative Congressman Mark Sanford in South Carolina this week when the President tweeted his support for his primary opponent. During the primary season White Nationalists, self-proclaimed Nazis, and other Trump supporters advocating the most extreme, unconstitutional and abhorrent positions often swept the field against conservatives who themselves would have been considered extremists just a few years ago. The GOP is on the Party if Trump and it took less than two years to become so.

Barbara Tuchman wrote in her book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam something that we are observing up close and personal as President Trump and his administration flounder in a sea of make believe, a cloud cuckoo land of alternative facts, alternative truth, and alternative history:

“Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.”

To be true, the Trump administration is not the first in history, in fact not even in our own country to ignore facts when making decisions. However, it is remarkable in its ability not only to shun facts but to make up its own narrative that depends on denying reality while impugning the character, honesty, and decency of those who present facts and truth that is verifiable. To be sure, competence and prudence are not and probably will never be marks of President Trump, his closest advisors, or his enablers in Congress. My hope is that some Republican in either the House or Senate rises up to confront the ineptitude and folly being demonstrated on a daily basis.

President James Buchanan

In some ways the incompetence and refusal to deal with reality by the Trump administration reminds me of the administration of James Buchanan during the years before the American Civil War. Buchanan’s collusion with Chief Justice Roger Taney regarding the Dred Scott decision before his inauguration stained him from the beginning and poisoned his relationship with Congress by declaring that the Congress never had the right to limit slavery as it had in the Missouri Compromise. Buchanan’s presidency is considered by most historians to be the worst in American history, incompetent, arrogant, and ineffective.

Likewise, Buchanan’s attempt to jam the Lecompton Constitution through Congress as a reward to Southern Democrats blew up in his face. The Lecompton Constitution was a gerrymandered bill which ignored the will of the vast majority of Kansas’s settlers who were anti-slavery. The work of the pro-slavery element in Kansas was so onerous that it brought Republicans and Northern Democrats together for the first time as Southern Democrats threatened secession if Kansas was not admitted as a Slave State. Ignoring warnings that supporting a measure that would open the door to slavery in all the western territories would split his party, Buchanan pushed on. His intransigence on the matter brought Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois to the fore in opposing it. Nicknamed “the Little Giant,” Douglas was the odds on favorite to be the Democratic nominee for the Presidency. Douglas was not against the institution of slavery, and he was a racist, but he had no tolerance for those who would upend carefully crafted compromises to expand it through the whole country. Thus he  took his case to the floor of the Senate and to the President himself.

The Confrontation between the Senator and the President was unparalleled. Douglas recalled:

The Lecompton constitution, I told Buchannan bluntly, was a blatant fraud on the people of Kansas and the process of democracy, I warned him not to recommend acceptance of it. With his head titled forward in that bizarre habit of his, he said that he intended to endorse the constitution and send it to Congress. “If you do,” I thundered, “I’ll denounce it the moment that it is read.” His face turned red with anger. “I’ll make Lecompton a party test,” he said. “I expect every democratic Senator to support it.” I will not, sir!

Angry and offended by the confrontation of Douglas, Buchanan cut the senator off and issued his own threat to Douglas and his political career saying:

“But I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from an administration of his own choice without being crushed….Beware of the fate of Tallmadge and Rives,” two senators who had gone into political oblivion after crossing Andrew Jackson.” The redoubtable Senator from Illinois was undeterred by the President’s threat and fought back, “Douglas riposted: “Mr. President, I wish to remind you that General Jackson is dead, sir.”  

Douglas,s action was unprecedented. Never before had a sitting Senator, to confront a President of his own party and threatened to oppose him in Congress. It was simply not done, but now Douglas was doing it, but doing so to his President’s face, and the consequences for him, his party, and the country would be immense.

Undeterred by facts, Buchanan and Southern Democrats fought for the bill’s passage. When Buchanan’s supporters pushed for Lecompton’s approval and the admission of Kansas as a Slave State, Douglas fired back, warning:

 “You do,” I said, “and it will lead directly to civil war!” I warned the anti-Lecompton Democrats of the North that the President intended to put the knife to the throat of every man who dared to think for himself on this question and carry out principles in good faith. “God forbid,” I said “that I ever surrender my right to differ from a President of the United States for my own choice. I am not a tool of any President!”

Under Douglas the Northern Democrats joined with Republicans for the first time to defeat the admission of Kansas as a Slave State. Douglas recalled the battle:

“After the Christmas recess, the Administration unleashed its heavy horsemen: Davis, Slidell, Hunter, Toombs, and Hammond, all southerners. They damned me as a traitor and demanded that I be stripped of my chairmanship of the Committee on Territories and read out of the Democratic party. Let the fucking bastards threaten, proscribe, and do their worst, I told my followers; it would not cause any honest man to falter. If my course divided the Democratic party, it would not be my fault. We were engaged in a great struggle for principle, I said, and we would defy the Administration to the bitter end.”

Douglas and his supporters did just that, Buchanan and his supporters were outfought and outmaneuvered by Douglas’s Democrats and their Republican allies. The bill was sent back to Kansas where in a new election the people of Kansas voted solidly against the Lecompton Constitution. In the following Congressional elections the thoroughly discredited Democrats lost their majority, their party now hopelessly divided with Southerners determined to destroy Douglas at any cost, even if it meant losing the presidency, the conflict opened the door for the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

I wonder if there will be a Republican in the Congress with the courage that Stephen A. Douglas displayed in confronting the incompetent and vindictive President Buchanan during the Lecompton Crisis. Will there be a Republican with enough courage to stop the insanity of the Trump administration even if it means in the short term to divide the party and doom their political future? Honestly I doubt it as does conservative Republican political strategist Rick Wilson. Wilson wrote:

“Nothing you do matters to this Congress. No matter what damage you inflict on our economy, our alliances, trade, our stature in the world, our role as an exemplar of democratic values, our ability to serve as an honest broker in the international community, and our security, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will lay supine before you.” 

But if Trump’s march of folly is to be stopped, someone in the Republican Senate or House will have to have the courage to stand up and defend the necessity of thinking for themselves, and doing what is right, sadly there is no Stephen Douglas in today’s GOP.

Have a great day.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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“Our Nation Aches for Truth Tellers” Rest In Peace Senator John S. McCain

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Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Today the United States and the world lost a voice of honor, decency, and courage. Senator John McCain died today after a gallant yet futile battle with an aggressive brain cancer, the same cancer that took the life of his friend Senator Ted Kennedy a decade ago. Senator Ben Sasse remarked: “Our nation aches for truth-tellers. This man will be greatly missed.”

I have always admired Senator McCain for his military service. This included his courage in one of the most frightening and dreadful things a sailor can experience, a fire at sea; in his case the disastrous fire aboard the USS Forrestal which killed over 150 of his shipmates and left him injured. Then his courage under fire and his indefatigable spirit while a prisoner of the North Vietnamese for five years. As a Senator he hewed his own path, while loyal to his party he did not hesitate to oppose it when its policies went against his sense of honor, dignity, or humanity.

I could go on but it is very late. I have been working in my house all day to get ready for laying more flooring in the morning. In fact I didn’t sit down until One A.M. While I was working Judy told me that Senator McCain had died. A few hours later I have to say that Senator Chuck Schumer, who certainly disagreed with McCain more often than not during their time in the Senate said it best:

“As you go through life, you meet few truly great people. John McCain was one of them. His dedication to his country and the military were unsurpassed, and maybe most of all, he was a truth teller — never afraid to speak truth to power in an era where that has become all too rare. The Senate, the United States, and the world are lesser places without John McCain.”

I will take some time to process his death and what it means. But for tonight I will just remember his remarkable life and hope that we as Americans can again rise to the ideals of our country that he tried hard to embody, even when he acknowledged that he had failed to do.

He was a rare man. I think that his defiance of President Trump was very much like that of Senator Stephen A. Douglas against President James Buchanan in the 1858 confrontation regarding the LeCompton Constitution. Like Douglas, McCain was demonized by the President and his supporters in his Party. But honestly I could hear Senator McCain echoing Douglas’s words against Buchanan and his administration:

“After the Christmas recess, the Administration unleashed its heavy horsemen: Davis, Slidell, Hunter, Toombs, and Hammond, all southerners. They damned me as a traitor and demanded that I be stripped of my chairmanship of the Committee on Territories and read out of the Democratic party. Let the fucking bastards threaten, proscribe, and do their worst, I told my followers; it would not cause any honest man to falter. If my course divided the Democratic party, it would not be my fault. We were engaged in a great struggle for principle, I said, and we would defy the Administration to the bitter end.”

Regardless of whether one agreed or disagreed with Senator McCain on the issues, one could never dispute the fact that he tried to operated and stand on principle, especially over the last two years of his life and career where like Douglas he had to stand on principle against an unprincipled President and his equally unprincipled supporters. I only wish that McCain had lived to see his principles overcome the malevolent machinations of President Trump, his unprincipled administration, and his cult like supporters.

Until tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+

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Filed under ethics, History, leadership, Military, News and current events, Political Commentary