Posts Tagged: George


22
Dec 10

George Moonbat Tries to Spin Snow and Cold as Global Warming

The global warming hoax jumped the shark when its corrupt proponents changed its name to “climate change” in response to people noticing that it hasn’t been getting any warmer. Yet moonbats tenaciously cling to the decomposing farce even now. Britain, which supposedly wasn’t going to be getting any more snow, is heading into yet another brutal winter. All the snow and ice has inspired the absurd George Monbiot to proclaim that This Is What Global Warming Looks Like.

Daniel Hannan rebuts this preposterous lie:

It just seems remarkably convenient that any climatic trend is the fault of greenhouse gases. Getting hotter? Global warming! Getting cooler? Global warming! Average overcast October day? Gaea is on her last legs!

Although I am sceptical of some of the political schemes put forward in the name of the Rio-Kyoto-Copenhagen-Cancun agenda, I have so far refrained from entering into a debate about the meteorology, being acutely aware that I have no scientific qualification. But I’m starting to realise that this doesn’t inhibit anyone else; possibly because, for partisans on both sides, it was never about the science in the first place.

With increasingly humorous desperation, envirofascists have been trying to convince us that even though it’s cold everywhere people are around to actually witness the temperature, up in the Arctic where the sacred polar bears suffer it’s far too hot. This claim is flimsily supported by data from well-compensated ideologues in the NASA bureaucracy, who make up temperatures for places so remote that there are no temperature sensors, as documented at The Telegraph and Watts Up With That?

You are well within your rights to laugh in the face of anyone who asks you to take global warming seriously.

stop-global-warming-sign-snow.jpg
Stop it? If only we could start it.

On a tip from Byron.

Moonbattery


21
Dec 10

Was General George S. Patton Assassinated Sixty-Five Years Ago Today?

Sixty-five years ago, on December 21, 1945, America lost one of its greatest champions of liberty – Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., a largely unsung hero today of the Liberal-Conservative battles that have raged in America most of this century. There is evidence he was assassinated.

Patton, perhaps America’s greatest fighting general, died twelve days after a mysterious vehicle accident outside Mannheim, Germany, December 9, 1945. He was the only person injured. Sitting in the rear of a chauffeured Cadillac limousine with an aide beside him, Patton suffered a broken neck when a two-and-a- half-ton US Army truck suddenly veered into the Cadillac’s path without signaling. Patton’s driver, who couldn’t avoid the crash, would later privately tell his son that the truck had been waiting for them on the side of the road as they’d started up from a railroad track stop. All on-scene reports and military investigative reports of the incident have vanished.

Patton when he was injured on that fateful Sunday was just a day away from leaving Europe for good. During and after the war he’d angered the Roosevelt Administration with his antagonism toward the Russians. FDR, believing the Soviets crucial to maintaining world peace, wanted them appeased and had acquiesced to their domination of Eastern Europe at Yalta. Patton, an ardent anti-communist who foresaw the Iron Curtain descending over Russian-occupied countries, wanted to fight them; in effect, start World War III. “We’ve kicked hell out of one bastard (Hitler),” he lamented, only to “help establish a second one (Stalin)…more evil and more dedicated than the first.”

By late 1945, with the like-minded Truman continuing FDR’s pro-Kremlin policies, he was the lone, high-ranking voice against the Democrat administration’s foreign policy. His bosses, political and military, no longer needed him to win battles and had exiled him to an almost meaningless command. He was angry. And, on the eve of the crash, Patton was vowing to reveal “blockbusting” secrets about the war, including how badly it was conducted by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, and to rally Americans against the Soviets when he arrived home, possibly even run for office. Patton, in late 1945, was high on the list of most popular Americans and the loudest critic of the Left’s love affair with the Soviets, who had clandestinely infiltrated the White House and other top US government branches and were manipulating them for communist aims.

We now know how extensive this infiltration was through the “Venona” revelations. “Venona” was the ultra-secret US deciphering of Russian codes at that time that only recently was declassified. It details the Russian spying in America but had just started when Patton was injured. While the driver and passengers of the truck that hit him mysteriously disappeared – as did the sergeant driving the jeep leading his limousine – Patton was taken, already paralyzed, not to the nearby Mannheim hospital, but to Heidelberg where it was assumed he would die soon. But Patton rallied and was soon deemed fit enough to withstand a grueling trans-Atlantic flight home. On the eve of that flight, however, he had a sudden and unexpected relapse, dying from a spate of embolisms that migrated to his lungs, stopping his breathing.

Although he was the highest ranking general in Europe at the time, he had uncharacteristically requested a guard be posted outside his room. After his death, rumors immediately circulated that he’d been assassinated. Curiously, there was no autopsy.

Patton had suffered clots years before but not in such profusion or so deadly. His wife, Beatrice, had enough doubts that she hired private detectives to investigate her husband’s death. But officials hurriedly pronounced the December 9 crash accidental and Patton’s death natural. Since then however two key witnesses emerged to claim that the general was assassinated – and in a unique way: a vehicle accident followed by a lethal drug dose. This method of assassination was used by many clandestine services—particularly the Russians. Stalin preferred it. It raised little suspicion at the time. And if the road job was botched, it could always be finished later in the hospital by an assassin posing as a doctor or nurse.

Douglas Bazata was the first of these two witnesses to go public. An Office of Strategic Services (OSS) “Jedburgh” in World War II, the forerunners of the US Special Forces, he claimed that as an OSS assassin, he was asked to kill Patton by OSS chief Gen. William“Wild Bill” Donovan. The order was the culmination of a long-running plot during the war that had started as a non-lethal “stop Patton” plan. Later, in interviews with me, he enlarged that scenario, claiming that he, along with an NKVD (Russian military intelligence) accomplice, set up the December 9 “accident,” and that others – he believed the Soviets – had completed the task in the hospital.

It is not well known except amongst certain historians that Donovan forged a cooperating alliance between the OSS and NKVD, beginning in 1943. And despite the fact that he was sometimes played for a fool by the Russians, whose spies already riddled the OSS and therefore the NKVD did not need the cooperation, he continued working with them throughout the war and after.

The other witness was Stephen J. Skubik, a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agent attached until war’s end to Patton’s armies. Afterward he continued working as a CIC agent among Soviet-dominated Ukrainians whom, he said, warned him that Stalin had put Patton on an NKVD hit list. Skubik, who wrote a privately-printed book entitled, The Murder of General Patton, claimed three top Ukrainians – Gen. Pavlo Shandruk, Prof. Roman Smal-Stocki, and the Ukrainian nationalist leader, Stepan Bandera– each separately warned him that Patton was marked for murder. But when he reported the plot to Wild Bill Donovan himself, instead of being grateful, Donovan had him jailed. Following Patton’s death, Skubik was forced to flee Germany for fear of being murdered himself. For several years he lived in hiding in America.

These two witnesses are highly credible. Their stories mesh without either having known about the other. Bazata, who left the army as a major, was one of the most decorated Jedburghs, having jumped into, among other harrowing missions, Nazi-occupied France to help organize local resistance in preparation for D-Day. He spent 25 years after WWII in Europe as a clandestine, was a good friend of fellow Jedburgh and ex-CIA director William Colby, and ended his career as an aide to Secretary of the Navy John Lehman during the Reagan Administration.

Skubik, after emerging from hiding, rose to a top managerial position in the Prudential Insurance Company in Washington D.C., and aided Republican presidents from Eisenhower through Reagan as an expert on Eastern European affairs. I vetted both men extensively through secret documents at places like the National Archives and through interviews with those who knew them. They both died in the 1990s. But if this case were ever brought to a grand jury, their preserved testimony, I believe, would be enough to get an indictment.

Even without such testimony, Patton’s death remains an unsolved mystery. In the months before he died, for instance, he was involved in at least two other highly suspicious accidents.

On May 3, 1945, Patton was almost decapitated when a farmer’s wagon with some sort of scythe-like instrument protruding from it suddenly rolled out unattended from a side street towards his passing jeep and “missed us only by about an inch,” he wrote in his diary.

The other “accident,” just a few weeks before, on April 10, 1945, is even more suspicious. Patton was visiting units in his light observation plane when four Polish Spitfires supposedly mistook his tiny aircraft for a Nazi fighter and attacked it. While three circled and acted almost as lookouts, the fourth Spitfire made repeated attacks. If not for the ground hugging and evasion skills of Patton’s pilot, the general surely would have been killed. As it was, the attacking Spitfire couldn’t pull up after one of its steep diving attacks and crashed. The Russians by that time controlled Poland. Patton was livid, and an aide accompanying him in the plane vowed to find out what happened. But to this day, there is scant information about the attack beyond what both wrote in their diaries.

The December 9 crash alone remains a major mystery. What was the truck doing waiting for the Patton car on the side of the road? Why did it suddenly turn without signaling into Patton’s path? The driver, Robert L. Thompson, was not authorized to drive the vehicle, and had two mysterious passengers with him “in violation of rules,” according to former intelligence agent Ladislas Farago, a US intelligence officer and author, and one of only a few who ever investigated Patton’s death.

Although the crash occurred on a remote road on a quiet, no-work Sunday morning, a large crowd of mostly military personnel quickly descended on the scene. These included: a brigadier general accompanied by a major; two sets of military police who, it is written, made official reports; a mysterious “Lt. Vanlandingham” who appears to have been a clandestine; a lone provost marshal, and various groups of helpers, all military, including a set of medical officers with an ambulance whose officer in charge opted for the lengthier trip to Heidelberg rather than nearby Mannheim.

At least two on-scene reports and three post-crash investigations are recorded as having been made – five (5) in all. But all such primary, close-to-the-crash documents have vanished. One or two being lost or misplaced is understandable. But five? That’s a cover-up. They’ve been removed – except for quoted bits and pieces that have survived as parts of other documents. Thompson and his passengers not only were not charged, they vanished, although Thompson was reported to have been whisked to London for a brief time. Years later, I tracked him. He had died but even his family said it didn’t surprise them if he’d been involved. He’d been an opportunistic black marketer in post-war Germany where in his secret dealings he’d made a “suitcase” of money.

Similarly, the sergeant in a jeep leading the limousine to the crash, as it were, disappeared. That fateful morning Patton and his aide decided to spend the general’s last day in Europe hunting, one of Patton’s favorite pastimes. The sergeant was familiar with the route to the hunting grounds, carried the rifles, and had to be within sight and sound of the limousine in order for it to follow. But he never came to the crash scene. This was the tough General George S. Patton, the highest ranking general on the continent, whom he was charged with leading, and he failed to turn around and return to the crash site? It beggars belief.

The sergeant was conveniently misidentified in the official army records but I tracked him down, too. He died a strange, mysterious death after leading a life similar in several respects to that of OSS assassin Douglas Bazata.

A Cadillac similar to that in which General George S. Patton was
traveling when struck by a waiting 2.5 ton U.S. Army truck.

For years The Patton Museum in Ft. Knox, Kentucky advertised that it had on display the limousine in which Patton was injured. That limousine we know from pictures and records was a 1938 Series 75 Cadillac sedan, a rare type. I figured I would go there and examine the vehicle from the crime scene, so to speak. I invited Cadillac’s historian to join me from Detroit. After his examination, he told me the Cadillac at Ft. Knox was not a 1938, but a doctored 1939. Among other incriminating details, he showed me where the car’s hard-to-find vehicle identification number (VIN) had been crudely filed off the metal chassis. Every vehicle has a VIN so it can be traced or verified for potential buyers. The museum wasn’t aware of the fraud until we informed them of our findings. So if the museum’s car wasn’t the Cadillac in which Patton was injured, where then was that car? I believe it disposed of in an effort to destroy evidence.

Since his death, a number of people in positions to know came to believe Patton was murdered. These included Lieutenant General George E. Stratemeyer, a Patton contemporary who was so convinced that he informed the FBI that if he were found dead, supposedly a suicide, it was because he was actively espousing such a view, and Ralph de Toledano, a former Newsweek editor and one of the National Review’s founder. De Toledano, who died in 2007, wrote me that Raymond Murphy, who headed the U. S. State Department’s security department during and after the war, told him that the OSS killed Patton. De Toledano’s good friend, John A. Clements, part of a secret Marine Corps intelligence operation which penetrated the Kremlin, had also told him they had learned Patton’s “accident” was an OSS-NKVD hit. Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer, an aide to Gen. George C. Marshall, he of the Marshall Plan, and another of de Toledano’s friends, confirmed that the Soviet’s top officer, Marshal G. Zhukov, an outspoken enemy of Patton’s, had pressured Eisenhower to “get rid” of Patton.

Rumors that Patton was assassinated have grown since his death. Although I’ve only mentioned a few, motives to kill him abound. It seems clear that what actually happened to him has been covered up. The disappearance of all reports and investigations from that fateful day, as well as the car in which he was injured, are strong indications of foul play. Add two credible witnesses testifying to a plot to kill Patton, the inconsistencies surrounding the accident itself, and his questionable death in the hospital, and there are compelling reasons to initiate an official investigation even sixty-five years later. Until the truth is revealed, the rumors about his accident will persist, crucial history may be lost, and an enormous crime may go unpunished. Patton deserves better.

Big Peace


21
Dec 10

No early release for ex-gov George Ryan

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Kankakee Republican, was denied a request for an early release from prison because of the poor health of his wife, Lura Lynn, who may just have a few months to live.

Rod Blagojevich’s predecessor has served almost half of his six year sentence for fraud and tax violations.

Continuing to defend Ryan is another former Illinois governor, Jim Thompson. Once again, I have to mention that the image of an ex-GOP governor defending another ex-GOP governor-one who is a convicted felon-presents a horrible image for the state party.

Technorati tags:  

Marathon Pundit


21
Dec 10

Jesse Jackson calls for George Ryan’s release

Add the Reverend Jesse Jackson to the list of those who want to see former Illinois Governor George Ryan released early from prison.

The 76 year-old Kankakee Republican is serving a six year sentence on various corruption charges mostly related to his eight years as Illinois secretary of state.

Ryan’s wife, Lura Lynn, is suffering from cancer and may only have a few months to live.

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Marathon Pundit


16
Dec 10

George Osborne says 20% VAT is here to stay as he and Janet Daley clash over tax cuts

By Jonathan Isaby The Spectator’s bumper Christmas issue includes an interview with George Osborne, an extended version of which is now available online here. It is what the Chancellor says about VAT and tax cuts which will be of most interest. On the former subject, he makes it clear that he has no intention of reversing the soon-to-be-introduced 20% rate of VAT (it comes into effect on January 1st): “The VAT rise is not temporary. It can’t be. We are talking about a totally different scale of revenue and the VAT rise is a structural change to the tax system…
thetorydiary


14
Dec 10

Cuccinelli’s Anti-Health Reform Argument Has A George Washington Problem

In an interview with CBS News today, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) claimed that the Affordable Care Act must be unconstitutional for the same reason that Congress could not require people to buy guns:

Never before in our history has the federal government ordered Americans to buy a product under the guise of regulating commerce. Imagine, Bob, if this bill were that in order to protect our communities and homeland security, every American had to buy a gun. Can you image the reaction across the country to that? Well, the truth of the matter is, the same legal power is at stake in ordering us to buy health insurance.

Cuccinelli’s comparison between health care and guns is unfortunate, since it reveals his utter ignorance of American legal history. Indeed, rather than trying to “imagine” what the reaction to such a hypothetical law might be, Cuccinelli could learn exactly what America’s reaction was to an actual law simply by picking up a history book. As it turns out, President George Washington signed a law that was almost identical to the one Cuccinelli railed against on CBS:

[E]very citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.

Sadly, this failure to familiarize himself with an important historical fact is par for the course for Ken Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli’s original legal brief challenging the Affordable Care Act was riddled with legal errors, including an embarrassing claim that the Boston Tea Party somehow renders health reform unconstitutional. Likewise, Cuccinelli still refuses to drop a witchhunt against a leading climate-change scientist despite the fact that his office’s own incompetence already got him tossed out of court once.

ThinkProgress


14
Dec 10

George and Hugh, Together Again

President Bush went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show to talk about his recently released memoir. Here's one nicely unself-aware exchange on "idealistic souls that convinced others that their vision for the future was the right one":

HH: Did you, in all the reading that you did, and you did a lot of reading when you were president. Did you think any of the previous presidents had become intoxicated with power? Did anyone stand out? I mean, you obviously admire Lincoln, and of course, your father. But was there anyone out there that you marked out as someone who just fell prey to all those intoxications?

GWB: Interestingly enough, not American presidents, because it’s hard to become so totally intoxicated with power when you’re responsive to the people. But the people that became intoxicated by power that affected me were like those idealistic souls that convinced others that their vision for the future was the right one, whether it be the folks who led the French revolution, or those who bought into Mao, or those who corrupted the Leninist movement in Russia. These are people that became so intoxicated with power that they ended up being murderers.

Wait, there's more:

HH: How crucial is it for the president to keep reading and reading and reading the way that you were doing?

GWB: Well for me, it was important. I didn’t watch much TV, or hardly any TV. Instead, I read. And it’s just a fascinating experience to be reading history and making history. And one of the things that I put in the book was when I read about Truman, and realized that many of the decisions he made were affecting my ability to do the job, such as a democratic South Korea made peace more possible in the Far East. And one of the contributions I think we made to the country was to get in a law, tools necessary for presidents to help protect the country. Some presidents may use them, some presidents may not use the tools, but they’re all available.

To the civil libertarian's ear that sounds ominous. Later in the interview, Bush asserts that some people in the CIA were strategically leaking information prior to Election 2004 in an effort to oust him from the White House.





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The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan


13
Dec 10

George Monbiot: It’s God’s Fault That It’s So Cold When It’s Actually Too Hot

George Monbiot jumped the shark on behalf of the liberal elite long ago. Yet the popinjay continues to chatter. Recognizing the “Gore Effect,” by which gatherings of leftists scheming to use the global warming hoax as a pretext to loot and oppress are invariably accompanied by cold weather, Moonbat becomes so agitated as to denounce God Himself:

Is the divine presence a Republican? Or is He/She/It running an inter-galactic fossil fuel conglomerate? As His name doesn’t feature on the exxonsecrets site, the Congressional funding database or any of the other sponsored denier lists, we’ll never know, but whatever the explanation may be, the Paraclete appears to be as determined as any terrestrial corporate frontman to prevent a successful conclusion to the climate talks.

How do I know? Because every time anyone gets together to try to prevent global climate breakdown, He swaths the rich, densely habited parts of the world with snow and ice, while leaving obscurer places to cook.

Even now, Moonbat expects us to believe in the discredited global warming farce. The world really does have a fever, except that it’s only hot in obscure places, where the brown-skinned urchins are forced to run barefoot and the polar bears gasp with heat, all because capitalists are too greedy to turn over planetary totalitarian control to radical statists like Moonbat.

chill-map-december-13-2010.gif
Few of the obscure places God and Big Oil have been oppressing with warmth show up here.

On tips from J.

Moonbattery


13
Dec 10

Scarborough On Tax Deal: ‘George Bush Has Won’

Somewhere, George Bush is laughing . . .

That was the image in Joe Scarborough's mind this morning.  The Morning Joe host repeatedly made the point that whereas Dems continue to control the White House and massive congressional majorities, they now are looking at the Bush tax cuts, which for years they vilified, as their last best hope.

When it comes to Republican and Dem support for the tax cut deal, Joe—concerned about the $ 1 trillion being added to the deficit—has been in pox-on-both-their-houses mode.  He seems to side with opponents of the bill including Jim DeMint, Rand Paul. . . and even Bernie Sanders.  But Scarborough took particular delight today in skewering the Dems.  As he put it, they are still in charge, and thus "own" the bill.  Summed up Scarborough: "George Bush has won."

View video after the jump.

read more

NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias


13
Dec 10

Scarborough On Tax Cut Deal: ‘George Bush Has Won’

Somewhere, George Bush is laughing . . .

That was the image in Joe Scarborough's mind this morning.  The Morning Joe host repeatedly made the point that whereas Dems continue to control the White House and massive congressional majorities, they now are looking at the Bush tax cuts, which for years they vilified, as their last best hope.

When it comes to Republican and Dem support for the tax cut deal, Joe—concerned about the $ 1 trillion being added to the deficit—has been in pox-on-both-their-houses mode.  He seems to side with opponents of the bill including Jim DeMint, Rand Paul. . . and even Bernie Sanders.  But Scarborough took particular delight today in skewering the Dems.  As he put it, they are still in charge, and thus "own" the bill.  Summed up Scarborough: "George Bush has won."

View video after the jump.

read more

NewsBusters.org blogs


13
Dec 10

Scarborough On Tax Cut Deal: ‘George Bush Has Won’

Somewhere, George Bush is laughing . . .

That was the image in Joe Scarborough's mind this morning.  The Morning Joe host repeatedly made the point that whereas Dems continue to control the White House and massive congressional majorities, they now are looking at the Bush tax cuts, which for years they vilified, as their last best hope.

When it comes to Republican and Dem support for the tax cut deal, Joe—concerned about the $ 1 trillion being added to the deficit—has been in pox-on-both-their-houses mode.  He seems to side with opponents of the bill including Jim DeMint, Rand Paul. . . and even Bernie Sanders.  But Scarborough took particular delight today in skewering the Dems.  As he put it, they are still in charge, and thus "own" the bill.  Summed up Scarborough: "George Bush has won."

View video after the jump.

read more

NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias


11
Dec 10

Denver’s George Karl gets his 1000th NBA coaching victory – Los Angeles Times


TSN
Denver's George Karl gets his 1000th NBA coaching victory
Los Angeles Times
The Nuggets win at Toronto, 123-116, making Karl, who has survived cancer twice, the seventh coach in NBA history with 1000 wins. Associated Press George Karl earned his 1000th coaching victory Friday night, as Al Harrington scored a season-high 31
With win in Toronto, Nuggets' Karl gets 1000th career victoryDenver Post
Denver Nuggets coach George Karl gets his 1000th league victory | NBASeattle Times
Denver Nuggets coach Karl gets his 1000th win@NewsOK.com
SportingNews.com –msnbc.com –HoopsWorld
all 1,294 news articles »

Sports – Google News


10
Dec 10

Was George Washington a Christian?

One of the stupidest historical debates I’ve ever tried to follow concerns the personal religious conviction of our founding father George Washington. Presently there seem to be two opposing schools of propagandists. They can be divided more or less into Beckites and Obamaites, and both seem obsessed with Washington’s theological leanings. The generally leftist historian Joseph Ellis is eager to tell us in his relevant work that Washington was not on the evidence a Trinitarian Christian. Although he dutifully attended Anglican-Episcopalian services with his wife Martha, he avoided taking communion after the American Revolution.

This lack of ritual practice, which was clear to Washington’s minister in Philadelphia (and the local Episcopal bishop), William White, supposedly reveals a great deal about the American founding. Like Jefferson and Franklin, Washington was a free-thinker influenced by the European Enlightenment, and to whatever extent Washington and his fellow founders went along with popular religious enthusiasm, they were simply masking their true feelings. If alive today, they would all no doubt be welcoming the removal of Christian religious symbols from the public square, and in all probability they would be cool with gay marriage and with substituting “holiday greetings” for a “blessed Christmas.”

The other side, following Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and other authorized “conservative” voices, insist that Washington was a pious Christian, who spent his time in solemn religious meditation. The reason his gravestone and his last will and testament are full of references to Christ as well as to God the Father is that George was in fact a believing Christian. Presumably if still around, our first president would by now would be rallying to the GOP. He might even be on the Glenn Beck show, seated next to Rabbi Daniel Lapin and Martin Luther King’s niece. Here he would join the other guests in decrying abortion and calling for “family values.”

In point of fact, the depth of Washington’s Christian beliefs is totally irrelevant to his vision of the country he helped found. It is no more relevant than whether or not Leon Trotsky really believed in Marx’s historical materialism when he led the Red Army. It is only our American obsession with personal authenticity that would cause us to worry about whether Washington was inwardly Christian. This is joined to the equally questionable notion that if Washington did not truly accept the Thirty-Nine Articles of his confession, this lack of faith had profound implications for the republic he helped set up.

Such beliefs tell more about the quality of American journalistic debate than they do about the problem of historical impact. From his statements, Washington intended the American people to be religious Christians and allowing for certain exceptions, he probably hoped they would be Christians of the Protestant variety. The fact that he and other founders include in their addresses stern affirmations on the link between religious faith and social virtue indicate they were not smirking at Christian theology, whatever their private reservations.

These founders were most emphatically not modern secularists, and Washington was not an exponent of modern democracy. Our first president was a man of the eighteenth century, who believed in the benefits of property relations and gender-specific education, and, perhaps above all, as he tells us in his Farewell Address as president, in the public need for religious beliefs. In these respects he was little different from the English monarch his countrymen broke from during the Revolution.

His proclamation of the first Thanksgiving holiday in October 1789 was most certainly not about celebrating democracy, which is a false connection that U.S. presidents since LBJ have drawn. It was a defense of ordered liberty in a society in which God “would incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government and entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another and the citizens of the United states at large.” We citizens are urged “to demean ourselves with the charity, humility and pacific temper of mind which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion.”

There is no need to contrast these tempered passages to Obama’s most recent Thanksgiving dithyramb, with its homage to Native American enrichments and to “our fledgling democracy,” to grasp the utterly transformed public purpose now assigned to Thanksgiving. Since the 1960s this holiday has become closely identified, perhaps most grievously by Bush II, with a democratic liberating mission and with celebrating the democratic progress of our global society.

But the original proclamation, which came from Washington and may have been edited by Bishop White, bears no resemblance to current justifications for Thanksgiving. Moreover, even the decision of Lincoln in October 1863 to establish a yearly commemoration of the Pilgrims’ arrival in New England, an act prompted by the desire to link the nation’s birth to pro-Union New England rather than to Confederate Jamestown, does not really change the significance of Washington’s holiday.

Even in 1863 during a fratricidal war, the U.S. and its leaders continued to view the country in some sense as it had in Washington’s time. (Lincoln too was not a regular churchgoer, but his oratory is bathed in Old Testament phrases and Calvinist laments about the wages of sin.)

But Washington is explicit in calling for citizens to subordinate themselves to others. What he had in mind was probably a local constabulary and not, in any case, a modern welfare state. His language about authority issues straight out of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, while in the second paragraph there is an Old Testament citation from the prophet Micah. Washington also commends “our blessed religion,” which presumably is not an early allusion to Kwanzaa. It is indeed hard to think of how any president today could draft such a proclamation, even transposed in the appropriate gobbledygook, without being attacked for hate speech.

Current attempts to understand the social-religious view of eighteenth-century Virginia gentlemen by relating them to modern-day fixations are an infantile project. The most we can hope to do by making comparative studies is to understand how different the past was from the present. Washington was no more a precursor of our egalitarian, post-Christian times than he was Donald Duck. And he could easily entertain theological doubts without wishing to hand over his country to cultural radicals, and especially not in a government that he would no longer have recognized as his. Equally important, his understanding of religion was anchored in non-modern social concepts, like deference and authority. Washington may have been the commander who finished the work begun with the Tea Party in 1773. But his solution in the end was as stately as the man himself and the holiday he proclaimed.

The American Conservative


9
Dec 10

Kevin Garnett reaches out to George Karl – USA Today


CBC.ca
Kevin Garnett reaches out to George Karl
USA Today
Celtics superstar Kevin Garnett reached out to Denver coach George Karl last night to clarify his use of the word "cancerous" to denigrate Pistons forwardCharlie Villanueva in a game last month. Karl, a cancer survivor, said previously he would have
Nuggets committing to trade Carmelo AnthonyYahoo! Sports
Celtics take a little cruiseBoston Globe
Karl's agents propose 3-year extensionDenver Post
Boston Herald –Philadelphia Daily News –News & Observer
all 946 news articles »

Sports – Google News


9
Dec 10

Kevin Garnett reaches out to George Karl – USA Today


CBC.ca
Kevin Garnett reaches out to George Karl
USA Today
Celtics superstar Kevin Garnett reached out to Denver coach George Karl last night to clarify his use of the word "cancerous" to denigrate Pistons forwardCharlie Villanueva in a game last month. Karl, a cancer survivor, said previously he would have
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Karl's agents propose 3-year extensionDenver Post
Boston Herald –Philadelphia Daily News –News & Observer
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