Articles

Below (scroll down):

Remove the Washington Monument - Why Stop There?
Structural Racism
What Is The Electoral College
The Odd Behavior of Colin Kaepernick & Company
They Completed the Founders’ Vision - A Monumental Achievement
Face-Off: MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Patton vs. The ‘Bonus Army’ of the Great Depression
"If We Can Save One Life!"- What Happens When You Make the Perfect the Enemy of the Good

Previously

Remove the Washington Monument - Why Stop There?
- An Immodest Proposal for Achieving Total Wokeness in Our Lifetime
by Ed Moser
September 4, 2020

PERMALINK

News Item: D.C. Mayor’s Report Calls for Removing Washington Monument, Other Memorials

The Report obviously doesn’t go far enough--

Take the name of the city. Washington, D.C. If you’re going to remove the Washington Monument, obviously you must remove the name of the city named for Washington.

And D.C., the District of “Columbia” too. Columbia is named after Columbus. If you’re going to remove the statue of Columbus at Union Station, obviously you must remove the part of the city named for Columbus. Perhaps change the city name to Potomac City, D.C.C., with D.C.C. meaning District of Cancel Culture.

By the way, if you remove the Washington Monument, how are you going to pull that off? You’ll need a mighty big crane. Or lots of explosives. The same goes for the Jefferson Memorial. Maybe blow it up on July 4th as a fireworks display, and save money.

The Lincoln Memorial as well. Many want to take down the Emancipation Statue, of Lincoln with the freed slave, so why keep his far bigger, and even more offensive, Memorial?

The FDR Memorial. President Franklin Roosevelt interned Japanese-Americans, and against the advice of that noted civil liberties advocate, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He also had Hoover spy on his political foe. Make the Memorial into softball fields again, while banning organized sports during the pandemic.

The White House. If you don’t remove it, at the very least change the offensive name, to the Rainbow House or something.

The Air and Space Museum. Its atrium contains the “Spirit of St Louis” plane of Charles Lindberg, a Nazi sympathizer. And the V2 rocket of Werner von Braun, a Nazi. In fact, von Braun was the guiding force behind the Apollo program to the Moon, which makes up much of the Museum’s contents. Clear the whole place out.

The MLK Memorial. MLK’s biographer recently disclosed that King at a minimum, condoned and witnessed, and may have taken part in, a serious sex crime. Due to this terrible act, the Memorial must go.

The Alexander Hamilton statue in front of the Treasury. Many have recently attacked the play “Hamilton”, as the Treasury’s founder ignored civil rights in his time. (Though he did co-found, with Aaron Burr, New York’s first society for abolition.) Pack the Broadway star’s figurine off to the Great White Way, um, to Broadway, where it belongs.

The Albert Pike statue. The authors of the Report, in recommending the removal of the image of the explorer, chief Mason, soldier, poet, and defender of Native-American rights, were apparently unaware the statue was toppled and set on fire by rioters from Antifa and other groups several months ago. However, down the street from it, in front of the Old City Hall, is another statue of Lincoln. Get rid of it.

By the bye, the Old City Hall, now the D.C. Court of Appeals, was designed by George Hadfield, a friend of Hamilton and Jefferson. Guilt by association, baby. Turn it, like most historic buildings nowadays, into condos.

The Frederick Douglass statue at National Harbor. Douglass fiercely argued that female suffrage should only come after African-American male suffrage. Such a patriarchal oppressor deserves elimination.

Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington was the name of an estate managed by Robert E. Lee (so that he could put its financial affairs in order, to free its slaves). Moreover, the Arlington House mansion was designed by Hadfield. In any event, anything to do with the Lee name must be annihilated. The graves might be disinterred, and the remains returned to their original resting places.

Theodore Roosevelt Island. As big-game hunter, TR was contemptuous of environmental protections. He was also a militarist who won fame in the Spanish-American War and as President built, you can’t make this up, something called the “Great White Fleet”. Return the island to its original moniker, George Mason Island, after the civil libertarian who authored the Bill of Rights. But on the other hand, Mason was a plantation owner who also owned…

Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In World War Two, Ike had an affair with his female Jeep driver. An unforgivable MeToo violation. (Though Eisenhower did help, with Churchill, a vile imperialist, to save the world from the likes of Werner von Braun.) Goodbye, EEOB.

The Museum of African-American History. The very name reveals it to be racialist and race-centered. Change the term, or perhaps remove the whole edifice, returning the locale to the colorful Hookers Alley neighborhood of yore. However, by all means keep its Food Court, for its delectable Southern cuisine.

The Kennedy Center. The number of MeToo violations associated with the Kennedy clan are beyond the power of a supercomputer to count. Concerts there are cancelled indefinitely, so who needs the place anyway? Transform the site back to its previous incarnation, a brewery. Not a micro-brewery, however, a name that slurs the vertically challenged and the height-disadvantaged.

The Museum of the Bible. An in-your-face violation of church and state. Gonzo. Ditto the National Cathedral. Not to mention Maryland, named after a religious figure, and Virginia, which refers to a safe-sex practice of religious zealots. Rename those states. Further, John’s Church in Lafayette Square was only partially burned during the recent bedlam. Put it fully to the torch.

Lastly, the Boss Shepherd and Marion Barry statues outside City Hall. As his nickname suggests, Shepherd was a corrupt politician, a man who bankrupted his city. (Though he did provide it with paved roads, drinkable water, and a workable sewerage system for the first time). Barry was a crackhead (though also, early on, a significant civil rights leader). Toss these false idols, these graven images.

Moreover, City Hall spawned the farcical Report on removing and renaming the capital’s grand monuments and memorials. For that offense alone, it must be bulldozed into the Potomac.

Or turned into condos.

________________________

Ed Moser is a veteran and book author. He was formerly a speechwriter to President George H. W. Bush and writer for Jay Leno's The Tonight Show. Ed’s latest book is The White House's Unruly Neighborhood: Crime, Scandal and Intrigue in the History of Lafayette Square

STRUCTURAL RACISM
February 2011
Editor's Note 8/29/20: This was written by a Tea Partier in 2011. Everything came true, except it only took nine years and it's being carried on by self-declared "trained Marxists".

------------------------

Highlights
* The Left is misusing race under the banner of 'structural racism' as a weapon to advance its collectivist, redistributionist agenda.
* Structural racism advocates are making significant inroads in both civil rights circles and popular thought.
* Unless somebody with influence starts standing up to the structural racism crowd, structural racism will become a 20-year overnight policy success. It's already well on its way.
* Anyone hoping to compete with structural racism advocates rhetorically had better come to the battle well-prepared and able to match their sophistication.

CONTINUED HERE

What Is The Electoral College
by Save Our States
August 2020

PERMALINK

The Electoral College unifies, moderates, and protects American politics. It is part of what makes the
United States a republic.

For more than two hundred years, the United States has enjoyed a uniquely peaceful and prosperous
existence under a system of constitutional and representative government. One reason is the Electoral
College.

The Electoral College is, to be exact, the group of representatives (Electors) chosen in each state to cast
the official ballots (electoral votes) for President of the United States.

Each state gets as many Electors as it has members of the U.S. House and Senate—the math is the
same as in Congress.

Before the presidential election, each political party nominates people to become that state’s
Electors—people who pledge to cast electoral votes for that party’s presidential candidate.

When citizens vote in a presidential election, we are really voting for our candidate’s Electors—if our
candidate wins in our state, those Electors will represent us in the Electoral College, casting their
electoral votes for our candidate.

The Constitution gives state legislatures the power to figure out how Electors are selected. In 48 states
and DC, all the state’s Electors are chosen based on the statewide vote—this is called a winner-takeall
system. In Maine and Nebraska, one Elector is elected from each Congressional District, and the
remaining two are elected based on the statewide vote.

The Constitution requires Congress to set the day when Electors are chosen (Election Day) and the day
when the Electors meet and cast electoral votes. The Constitution requires Electors to meet in their
own states (the whole Electoral College never meets together—the Framers put this in the Constitution
to avoid corruption). Once the Electors cast their electoral votes, the results are sent to Congress
to count them and certify the official outcome. (See a full Electoral College timeline at the National
Archives website.)

Every once in a while, an Elector doesn’t vote the way he or she pledged (so-called “faithless” Electors),
but this has never come close to affecting the outcome of an election.

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution created the Electoral College as a way to minimize the risks of
corruption, regionalism, and back-room politics in the selection of the nation’s executive. They rejected
a national popular vote because it offered no protection against regional candidates and they feared it
could be more easily manipulated.

The Electoral College forces candidates to build national support, unifying rather than dividing the
country. (Our greatest failure of domestic tranquility, the American Civil War, occurred only when
other political forces overcame the Electoral College incentives that favor moderate, two-party politics
and national unity.)

The Electoral College works even better than the Framers expected. They thought the system would
often deadlock as Electors exercised their independent judgment, leaving the final decision to the
House of Representatives. In fact, Electors became faithful representatives of their states and the
election has only gone to the House twice—in 1800 and 1824.

Because most states choose electors by winner-take-all, presidential candidates must have both a
base of states where a majority of voters support the candidate and then must reach out into the most
moderate, evenly balanced states to build enough support for an Electoral College majority.

The Electoral College turns swing states into microcosms of America, where candidates are forced to
go beyond the big cities and reach out to all kinds of people. At the same time, safe states are essential
for a party to have any claim to national status or any possibility of winning the presidency.

The system forces campaign strategists both to build national campaigns and to focus their outreach
in the most politically balanced states. And while the Electoral College does not require a two-party
system, it creates a healthy incentive for people to build the large coalitions that usually result in two
big, diverse political parties.

To become President, a candidate must win a majority of electoral votes—currently 270 out of 538
____________________
Save Our States is the one group dedicated to defending the Electoral College from the dangerous National Popular Vote campaign, which would nullify the Electoral College without a constitutional amendment. Potomac Tea Party is a member of the Save Our States coalition.

The Odd Behavior of Colin Kaepernick & Company
by Ed Moser
August 15, 2020

PERMALINK

It's weird to watch all those ballplayers, supposedly for the sake of civil rights, kneeling before the American flag.

Under that emblem, American soldiers and sailors:

Crushed the Slave Power during the Civil War
Defeated the Nazis, the worst racists ever
Beat King George, one of the monarchs who, with African chieftains & Arab traders, set up slavery in the New World
Took on mass murderers like Stalin and Mao in the Cold War
Enforced the end of school segregation in America
Ended the slave trade in the Mediterranean during the Barbary Pirate wars
Vanquished Germany's tyrannical Kaiser
Annihilated the slave state of ISIS.
Toppled Imperial Japan, and its mass atrocities against the people of Asia.
And much more

Very odd indeed.
________________________
Ed Moser is a veteran and book author. He was formerly a speechwriter to President George H. W. Bush and writer for Jay Leno's The Tonight Show. Ed’s latest book is The White House's Unruly Neighborhood: Crime, Scandal and Intrigue in the History of Lafayette Square

They Completed the Founders’ Vision - A Monumental Achievement
- Thoughts on the Recent Statue Wars from a Memorial Organizer

by Maurice A. Barboza
Founder, National Mall Liberty Fund D.C.
August 2020

PERMALINK

No, America, do not consider renaming the Washington Monument or evicting Thomas Jefferson from the Tidal Basin, or Rochambeau and de Grasse from Lafayette Park. These statues do not exist in a vacuum. They interrelate with buildings, museums, landscapes and other monuments nearby. From the Colonists’ bold experiment in government ‘by the people’ to the search for a more perfect union and the Articles of Confederation to the 27 amendments of the U.S. Constitution, they voice our nation’s story.

Persuaded that a crucial element is missing from Washington’s Monumental Core, Congress approved a new memorial in 2012 to contemporaries of the Founders. These were African Americans who fought for a vision of independence that foretold the 13th, 14th, and 15th Reconstruction Amendments. They passed down patriotism to their children and grandchildren who would fight for emancipation and to save the union in the Civil War.

While monuments to the Founders present only one side of the story and are silent on the issue of slavery, they state timeless, universal principles of liberty, individual rights, and a unified nation. These principles drove African Americans forward despite the legal and informal constraints designed to keep them enslaved and, later, out of sight. Both the Founders and African Americans are indispensable to complete the story of America. If we carelessly chop away at the Founders’ imperfections, our footings could collapse, thus endangering our political stability.

Confederate monuments are different; they signify the obliteration of the Union and the slaughter of 600,000 in the Civil War, including my own great-great grandfather. Over the past weeks, they have been pulled down, burned, dismembered and declared unworthy. The Confederacy was accustomed to violence, so it is poetic, though unfortunate, that violence, instead of due process, became the arbiter of statuary fate. Admirers of these traitors will suffer no psychic or economic trauma. A noble Confederacy never existed, and its rhetoric never rang true in any authentic version of the American narrative. No sculptor can transform a Confederate into a patriot, regardless of how high on a horse they elevate the traitor.

Yes, the Founders were flawed and passed on an incomplete Constitution lacking equal protection and universal freedom. But the principles they championed manifested in a relentless patriotism that created a nation capable of improvement. Even at the cost of a civil war, future generations were animated to preserve the nation and continue the drive to a more perfect union. The proof is in the thousands of African Americans eager to do battle by the Founders’ side and defend the nation against its enemies during the Revolutionary War. While the Founders’ generation, and later Confederates, manipulated principles to maintain racial superiority, African Americans refused to accept enslavement as permanent or America as permanently flawed. Although unlettered, they grasped the quintessential meaning of the Revolutionary War: ‘Those principles apply to me, too’. The Confederacy strenuously fought this inexorable logic and perished.

With a record on slavery somewhat mixed, but morally objectionable overall, many Founders bought, sold, and abused human beings with a ferocity equal to the Confederates who would come later. They broke up families and caused succeeding generations to be without roots -- uncertain of parentage and their history. Gen. Washington held over 300 enslaved and Jefferson, who declared “all men are created equal” clung to 600. Gen. d’Estaing promoted the importation of slaves into Haiti and Gen. Galvez sanctioned the sale of stolen slaves in Florida. But he led nearly 1,700 black troops in battle. Lafayette supported abolition as Franklin and Rush did in later life. Cmdr. Jones gave up the trade before 1776. Haitians fought alongside Pulaski at Savannah. Kosciuszko and Hamilton advocated abolition. Upon his death, Washington became the liberator of Mount Vernon.

I have been convinced for decades that a modest addition to the National Mall could transform existing Revolutionary War monuments and sightlines into a grand Revolutionary War remembrance zone. The approved National Liberty Memorial would honor up to 10,000 free and enslaved persons of African descent, who bartered for freedom and volunteered to serve as soldiers, sailors, and marines on the side of the Founders. The names and residences of as many as 5,000 are known. More will become known as the memorial advances. They fought in every major battle, from Lexington and Concord to Yorktown. Connected to 24 states, they were killed, wounded and acknowledged for bravery by Washington, Lafayette and others. In addition, tens of thousands fled plantations or performed acts of patriotism, such as spies, waggoneers, miners and bakers.

Many forgotten patriots received pensions and bounty lands afterwards. They used the wealth to grow families, churches and self-help groups, even as others took from them what was theirs through unjust laws and the destruction of communities, such as Tulsa’s Black Wall Street in 1921. A tradition of self-support culminated in the thought of Booker T. Washington and, later, the Civil Rights Movement. Whether by petitioning, suing, fleeing, buying freedom, or fighting, they remained unshakable in the belief that liberty was just beyond the next barrier. John Lewis expressed this in 1963 during the March on Washington: “Get in and stay in…until the revolution of 1776 is complete.”

In 2014, Congress designated the contributions of African Americans to the Revolutionary War of “preeminent historical and lasting significance to the nation,” putting the approved monument on a par with all other monuments on the Mall. The favored location is the West Side of the Jamie L. Whitten Building, between Jefferson Drive and Independence Avenue, across 14th Street from the Washington Monument. This is the hub of the remembrance zone and the busiest gateway into downtown Washington from Virginia and the former Jefferson Davis Highway. Two generations ago, Dr. King described a “dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” Standing at the Lincoln Memorial, he could see the Washington Monument and Capitol beyond the Reflecting Pool and know the truths this alignment expresses.

From Lafayette Park to the Jefferson Memorial, comprising the great cross-axis of the Mall, 15 Revolutionary War monuments plus the Lincoln, King, and World War II memorials and African American History Museum could contextualize these separate events in history and restrain disorder in the streets by reminding one and all of the timeless principles that unify us. Using sightlines and proximity, the yet unfunded National Liberty Memorial will record how persons desperate for citizenship -- in a nation built on their free labor -- served honorably under Gen. Washington and beside their diverse compatriots; struggled to win freedom and equality decades before Lincoln's birth and the Emancipation Proclamation; sought to incorporate the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution; fought and died in all wars, from the Revolution to the present (including the Civil War); and ultimately prevailed in their vision for America.

______________________________
Maurice A. Barboza is the Founder of the National Mall Liberty Fund DC, a 501(c)(3) authorized in 2013 and 2014 to construct a memorial to as many as 10,000 African American Revolutionary War fighters and patriots at a location in Washington, including the last available site on the Mall. Website: National Mall Liberty Fund D.C.

Face-Off: MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Patton vs. The ‘Bonus Army’ of the Great Depression
- An excerpt from the forthcoming book Cockpit of the Capital: The Wild, Hidden History of Capitol Hill
by Ed Moser

July 25, 2020
Copyright © 2020 by Edward P. Moser and Rowman and Littlefield
PERMALINK

On June 17, 1932, thousands of veteran soldiers gathered on the east promenade of the Capitol Building.... Under a 1927 federal law, the men of the “Bonus Expeditionary Force”, or B.E.F., could take out loans against their bonuses. However, they couldn’t receive the full payments until 1945. So, with most out of work and out of savings, they demanded the money now. For themselves, and for the 4.7 million other Americans who’d served in the Great War....

Starting in late May [1932], some 25,000 veterans, wives, and children had gathered in Washington to rally for the bonus. Out-of-work farmers, miners, factory hands, clerks, and mechanics had come in from every region in the U.S., and had thrown up 27 makeshift camps around the city. Quite a few were African-Americans, integrated into the novel army....

The House voted to approve payment of the pensions, by a vote of 211-176.... The Senate was much more reluctant about the precedent of granting funds under pressure, as well as the bill’s cost. On June 17, it debated the measure throughout the day and into the evening. The milling crowd of veterans, law enforcement officers, and the curious, about 10,000 in number, waited anxiously on the grounds. Mocking George M. Cohan’s hit First World War tune, “Over There,” and its lyrics, “The Yanks are coming”, some sang out: “The Yanks are starving, the Yanks are starving…”

... A bit of trouble came to Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, as his driver took to him to Capitol for the vote. A stone hurled by a protestor smashed through his car window. It landed next to his startled grandson, future novelist Gore Vidal. He would remember his granddad telling him, “’Shut the window.” The perceptive lad recalled seeing “shabby-looking men holding up signs and shouting at occasional cars…{reminding me of} white skeletons like those disjointed cardboard ones displayed at Halloween.”

Walter W. Waters, a lean, excitable, and rather inconstant man, was the head of the Bonus Army. From Oregon, and in his early thirties, he’d been a sergeant and a medic in the war. At 9:30 p.m., Senate aides called him into the legislative chamber.

He soon strode outside with news of the outcome. He announced to the veterans the Senate had voted the bill down.

There was silence among the multitude. And fear at what might happen next....

Read the rest of the story in Ed’s forthcoming book, due out later this year, including these exciting topics:

Tear gas and tanks on Capitol Hill
The irony facing Patton
How MacArthur behaved true to form
How Eisenhower thought one way and acted another

-----------------
Ed Moser was a speechwriter to President George H. W. Bush and writer for Jay Leno's The Tonight Show. Ed’s latest book is The White House's Unruly Neighborhood: Crime, Scandal and Intrigue in the History of Lafayette Square

"If We Can Save One Life!"- What Happens When You Make the Perfect the Enemy of the Good
- What the Coronavirus and Floyd George incidents have in common and what they tell us about our society

by Loren Spivack
July 18, 2020

PERMALINK

At first glance, a Chinese virus and a bunch of loathsome fanatics burning down cities simply because they are incapable of producing ANYTHING themselves (and, don't kid yourself, that IS the motivation) don’t seem to have much in common. (Except metaphorically.) But these, the two leading news stories of 2020 (anyone looking forward to the next one?) do have a lot to teach us about our underlying social maladies.

The cult of false perfectionism. It has long been a staple on the left that society MUST be perfect. We're entitled to perfection! So, all the socialist has to do is point to some, apparently, imperfect outcome of capitalism: usually some reprobate making too much money (i.e. more than the socialist is.)

This becomes proof that capitalism is "irredeemable." And so socialism must be instituted. It's no use pointing out that every, single, solitary time socialism has been tried in the past, it's made things a million times worse. Because, you see, they've fixed the flaws of socialism and THIS time everything's going to be perfect.

The truth is, conservatives (and libertarians too) don't believe in perfection. God is perfect. Humans aren't. And no human society is ever going to be perfect unless it’s run, directly, by God. (A consummation devoutly to be wished, but we don’t have the ability to institute it!) So, capitalism is merely way better than every other option. And that just doesn't have the same flair as "perfect." Especially, if all you focus on are it's (relatively few) flaws instead of its (enormous) benefits.

The latest twist in the cult of false perfection, is the need to abolish death. The truth seems obvious: every single one of is going to die. And, in the cosmic scheme of things, we're all going to die really soon! There is a psychological need in the modern west to pretend otherwise. That's why parents get arrested for letting their 10 year old walk 2 blocks to school alone. (As if it's less damaging to the kids to see their parents arrested!) Does anyone, (ANYONE?) really believe that altering the angle of your airplane seat, by 2 degrees, makes any meaningful difference in the likelihood that you'll survive a crash? But it's enforced more strictly than the laws against armed robbery

But in the immortal words of Governor Cuomo, "if we can save one life..."

And that's exactly the problem. What we do to save one life, almost always costs very many more. It’s pretty clear that when the Corona madness has come to an end, far more will have died from the lockdown (suicides, drug overdoses, alcoholism, delayed medical care, lack of exercise, etc., etc.) than died from the virus. But no one will care. Because a key feature of this cult of "perfection" is, that since actual immortality is impossible, particular causes of death get fetishized and others ignored.

We see the same thing with gun control. There is no question that guns save more lives (particularly of the good guys) than they take. But try explaining that to your left-wing neighbor when some lunatic shoots people, and it's on television. Any attempt to confiscate the guns of 100 million Americans (door to door?) would cost more lives than leaving them where they are. But that doesn't matter "if we can save one life!"

So, George Floyd was wrongfully killed. Reasonable people are going to understand that in a country with 330 million people there are going to be murderers. That's why we have police! And, as we've learned, among the tiny number of police shootings that are actually criminal (on the part of police) most involve white victims. And black-on-black crime claims many, many, many times more lives, etc., etc.

But it's more than that. The Washington Post, in an effort to prove the opposite, started cataloging police shootings and found a grand total of two (2) unarmed black suspects who were killed by police that weren't ruled justified. (And the officers were tried and convicted.) Compare that to 100 African-Americans who die in bathtubs every year. More than 100 die falling down the stairs. Unjustified police shootings may actually be the least likely cause of death for African-Americans that there is! (The only challenger for that title seems to be shark attack.) And, of course, the resulting riots have killed more African-Americans. And the anti-police attitudes that have been spawned will result in far more African-American deaths. But, hey, if we can save one life....

This is really just one dimension of the current decadence of American society. We have more prosperity, convenience, opportunity, luxury, etc. than any society in the history of the world. And less disease, violence and, yes, less racism than any society ever. We amuse ourselves by going crazy over silliness. Our ancestors who faced REAL epidemics (without global lockdowns!) and REAL racism (without a 10th of the anger of our spoiled brats today) would be shaking their heads.

I suppose the ultimate decadence is destroying the civilization that has made life so easy. Then our children can start with nothing again.

Location

We Get Compliments

Contact Us

Join Our Mailing List Today!