Discounting for a moment the appeal to the leader of a revolutionary army in making an appeal for TEA Partiers to take fewer risks and fight smarter, let’s just take a quick look at the premise, as summarized in an email I received:
ICYMI, my new Washington Post column "The Tea Party needs a General Washington." Washington refused to send his troops on suicide missions, picking smaller, winnable fights instead, and defeating the British in a war of attrition. That is the approach the Tea Party should have taken in the fight against Obamacare.
Best,
Marc
Marc A. Thiessen
Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Columnist, The Washington Post
I wrote back, and this time, it really was a short response:
See, Trenton, Battle of
Regards,
Jeff
As most of you know, the Battle that turned the revolutionary war in the favor of the rebels occurred at Trenton, after Christmas night 1776, when Washington took troops — exhausted, hungry, many shoeless and in nothing by stockings, their feet wrapped in rags — across an icy Delaware river, surprised a groggy and hungover mercenary army of professional Hessian soldiers, and captured over 800 enemy soldiers and officers. The code words for the raid were “Victory or Death.”
It was, or at least potentially could have been, a suicide mission. The whole “or death” thing being a giveaway.
This is the art of the possible. This is the kind of brazen maneuver that defeats a complacent, arrogant opponent. And that history is being essentially rewritten here to suggest that waging war against the British Crown for an idea that had never been tried in human history is a lesson that aligns with GOP establishment pragmatism and persistent surrender is, in a word, astounding.
The art of possible? How about a raid on Trenton so unimaginable — and so unlikely to succeed — that confident professional soldiers took to partying all night instead of guarding against an incursion by rebels.
None of which is to say that every battle needs to be fought this way, or will succeed against such odds. Only that pragmatism is not only about always falling back. Sometimes, the pragmatic move is to make sure everyone knows where you stand, what you’re willing to do to take that stand, the odds you’re willing to fight, and that the tut-tutting of the professionally risk-averse and entrenched power brokers won’t dissuade you from taking that stand.
Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have made it quite clear that it is the TEA Party and the grass-roots “extremists” — the Hobbits, the “anarchists,” the wacko bird “arsonists,” the “terrorists” and “jihadis” bent on bringing about “default” by crazily arguing that egregious deficit spending is going to cause an economic collapse — who have been trying to keep the government from actually implementing a horrific and unwieldy law that will change the nature of the relationship between citizen and subject, allow the government overarching control of health care choices, and is bound — as it has always been — to cause harm, either through increased costs, delays in treatment, or a “fundamental transformation” of America into a permanent debtor nation headed toward single payer care that will, in the end, bring about the glorious Utopia of socialism (with the ruling class kept comfortable and fat, a reward for the difficult job of managing the herd, the “economic units” upon whom their schemes rely and upon whose labor and liberty they grow contented and secure).
And they did this against the wishes and will of their own contented Party, who thinks show votes and “deals” will fool us into thinking they are truly fighting for our interests.
What Thiessen is calling for here is not a TEA Party George Washington, therefore. He’s calling for a TEA Party John McCain. As if we don’t already have Kelly Ayotte or others who, once entrenched, disregarded the wishes of those who elected them to represent their liberties in order to fall in line with the feckless ruling elite.
Losing more slowly is still a strategy for losing. Sometimes, you just have to wrap up your feet, brave the sleet and ice, and tell the Hessians — and the King who controls them — to get the fuck out of your face.
The GOP’s hubris, far from abating as it might have done — had the establicans understood what confronts them — seems to be growing in volume and imbecilic confidence. Pity, that. Their shock when nemesis arrives will be all the greater for their want of recognition now.
How poorly equipped were the Americans?
Two died on the march to Trenton.
There were no American deaths during the attack.
Sadly I think we are more in Valley Forge mode for the time being.
We are Americans. We will kill you in your sleep on Christmas morning if you force us to…
Save The Knives For ObamaCare: Four Ways To Actually Defund The ACA
What Thiessen is calling for here is not a TEA Party George Washington, therefore. He’s calling for a TEA Party Charles Lee.
FTFY [just to keep the two contemporary to each other].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Charles_Lee
I think Cruz makes an adequate general. What we need to do is throw Benedict Arnold out of the Senate minority leadership position.
What we need to do is throw Benedict Arnold out of the Senate minority leadership position.
Senate Conservatives Fund Endorses Matt Bevin for U.S. Senate
Arnold’s treason came much later [1780] and he was the main force that made for the victory at Saratoga which made American final victory inevitable.
Mitch Mc is no Arnold, he has never done anything that lead to any victory for our side.
Using the wrong form of lead there.
>Mitch Mc is no Arnold<
well mitchy did the con for awhile before switching sides
Washington was a man of extraordinary faith, which is what made Washington possible.
This is the art of the possible.
so obamacare can be overturned by “reconcilliation”?
see that’s what i want to hear from gop “leaders”: that they will use every parliamentary tactic to eliminate O!care. aye mitchy don’t inspire much confidence.
Why does every state have an emergent anti-establican for the Senate except Georgia? We’ve got Derrick Grayson and Eugene Yu in the running who are untainted by political careers or dynastic connections, but I’ve heard nothing that indicates who’s getting traction.
What would be the point of electing another Saxby?
The Tea Party isn’t going to find its Washington by looking to the Republican Leadership in D.C.
Gages and Arnolds, the lot of ’em
That’s how they passed it so it should be fair game.
And that history is being essentially rewritten here to suggest that waging war against the British Crown for an idea that had never been tried in human history is a lesson that aligns with GOP establishment pragmatism and persistent surrender is, in a word, astounding.
Ouch
Politicians hardly ever make excellent field marshals, and vice versa. George Washington was a field general before becoming a (reluctant) politician.
What we need is not a seated politician to lead the TEA Party, but a General Patton, complete with one of those jolly black flags. And soon, I fear.
Generals lead armies. We don’t have an army in the mass yet, let alone the organization of an army. Seems to me what we want is a master statesman-rhetorician(s), fit to give voice to the inchoate longings of people now in political distress, and in providing such a voice, rallying and building the (metaphorical political) army — or maybe let’s just call it a party — the party that must rise to accomplish the work of an electorate intent on once again being represented in government.
the proggtards had a 2 year timetable too eff us(2008-’10) time to eff then back with gusto. aholes like mitchy, goldberg, krautman, will et al and mccain can go eff themselves. comity = commies dickheads.
“People taking the initiative and acting alone is what made us a great nation. And if you’re captured, there’s nothing to reveal.” — George Washington
How interesting if the Cruz had read Washington’s Farewell Address during his filibuster. Without identifying it, which would have made the pundidiots spin.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.
Anarchist! Treason! and etc
No kidding. Things have come to a pretty pass when standing up for the ideals of the Founders equals sedition.
see the idiots and clowns
General Giap
Vo Nguyen Giap, who drove both the French and the Americans out of Vietnam, died on October 4th, aged 102
seethesteve likes the commies. pol pot mr. intellectual.
>sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.<
a calm fuck you
“You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.” — Charles A. Beard
As I said in a previous thread, the Vikings will give the Giants their first win of the season.
So let it be written, so let it be done.
We need(ed) a Barack Obama, a ‘Community Organizer’ who can lie to his grandmother with a straight face. And persuade the stupids who somehow have the privilege to vote that he’s riding a unicorn to bring them to the Promised Land.
Problem is, most Conservatives are smarter than the average easily-suckered Democrat; a Conservative by definition won’t fall for a Community Organizer Commie Marxist Pol Pot wannabe. We’d run him out of town on a split rail faster than Michael Moore woofs down a dozen donuts.
I just read the entire piece. With friends like Thiessen…
I’m thinking more along the lines of a statesman with the persuasive power of speech of the rank of a Churchill, a Lincoln, Thatcher or Reagan who are not solely capable of seeking the truth about our political situatedness, but capable of expressing it in a way that instantly makes contact with the people who are in need of it . . . . . if, that is, we may be permitted to elide the (few) powerhouses on the political left like FDR whose concern for the truth tends to take the hindmost to their concern for power for its own sake.
You Maniac! You blew it up! Damn you. Damn you to hell!
(btw, I love the way Yul Brunner says that in The Ten Commandments I’ve been known to use that on my kids from time to time. Doesn’t work on the wife though….)
I think what really needs to happen is for every single one of the incumbent establishment types to be primaried.
The corrupt old fucks need to be an object lesson on who needs to fear whom.
Won’t happen of course. They’re too far up the ass of the corporations with the deep pockets.
We’re fucked, there’s nothing for it but stocking the lifeboats.
sorry, but I was reminded of another of Bill Whittle’s genius essays, “Sanctuary”:
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/2005_05.html
I’ve never been married, and I know that won’t work on any wife I’ve ever met.
I entirely agree as to primary contests wherever possible LBascom, which can be a project concurrent (run by locals for locals, even) with the building of a party founded on reintroducing representation of Constitutional principle as well as representation of constituencies on those very grounds.
Seems to me that truth-telling in everything political is the best means to that end, which in turn may often mean truth-telling as naming names and citing particular instances of offense given by the very same old-bulls to be ripped in the primaries.
Heck, the mere contrast and shock of a truth-telling politician after these many decades of little but lie upon lie may be a sufficiently novel point of interest in itself to capture the attention of the ordinarily inattentive. Who knows?
this one only works before the kids. After? well, priorities.
Tell the truth?!?
What are you? Some kind of fucking radical?
/sarc
Some kind of fucking radical?
Called as much to my face just the other night . . . by a progressive Democrat, no less. A member of the scary hicktarded bible thumping atheist cretin hoard of free marketeers who want only to lock up the poor in debtor’s prisons and watch the rest die without medical services of any sort. When we’re not starting wars, poisoning the environment and burning up the atmosphere, that is.
Terroristic truth telling! HELP!
On the bright side, that morsel of knowledge is clarifying.
Bonus Pixy Misa in the comments thread.
Washington and his rag-tag army fought against hard men, well trained and equipped; many of them veterans of ugly campaigns.
Thiessen would have us cower before a gaggle of cackling pamphleteers. Fuck him.
Pamphleteers? Pamphleteers!? Slooooowly I turned…
Actually, I just recently had to post a sign in my front window warning off pamphleteers, salesmen, politicians and missionaries. Because of the missionaries.
I’m sure the Christophobes expect my house to be firebombed by said theocrats-what-is-just-like-the-Taliban-only-worse. Me, I expect to be left alone.
Right? If the implied shock troops are anywhere near as effective as ObamaCare, we’ve got nothing to worry about.
Seriously — we’re in a war against the Ruling Class, their army of bureaucrats, and their cheerleaders in the media. It’s a long, hard, frustrating, tedious slog of a war, but they don’t have artillery pointed at us.
Yes, the feds are spying on us, and using their bureaucrats to harass us in an effort to keep us from organizing or standing up for ourselves. But the truth is that Obama’s minions are currently armed with powerful computers and dubious laws and regulations. For all the stories of how many rounds this administration is hoarding, it doesn’t actually have an internal security force that is “disappearing” our friends and associates in the middle of the night. And the day that they decide to resort to such measures is the day this simmering little cold war turns very, very hot. And that’s the last thing they want, if only because they know that there are several million well-armed pissed-off deer hunters within half a day’s drive of the Beltway, not to mention the several tens of millions more west of the Mississippi.
I swear, idiots like Thiessen look at consequences like getting their cocktail party invites yanked, or having Jon Stewart poke fun at them or Paul Krugman lecture them, and tell us it’s not worth putting up a fight. It would be laughable, if there weren’t so much at stake.
Interesting analogy. Didn’t General Washington shoot a number of deserters?
Didn’t General Washington shoot a number of deserters?
We might say “He had them shot — in a pointed contradistinction to shooting them himself — by commanding their friends to shoot them, and by being obeyed at the order.”
He had mutineers shot.
Sdferr wrote: …Seems to me what we want is a master statesman-rhetorician(s), fit to give voice to the inchoate longings of people now in political distress, and in providing such a voice, rallying and building the (metaphorical political) army — or maybe let’s just call it a party — the party that must rise to accomplish the work of an electorate intent on once again being represented in government.
Why just one ‘master statesman-rhetorician’? In the days of The Founding, you had Patrick Henry in Virginia, Ben Franklin in Pennsylvania, Sam Adams / James Otis / John Hancock in Massachusetts.
Sadly, Mike Lee is a rather bad speaker, but Ted Cruz, Bill Whittle, Sarah Palin, etc. are rather good at it.
I’m not advocating for a single voice. Far from it. Take the phrase as a quirk of poor rhetor, merely. On the other hand, such men and women as the examples elicited don’t just grow on trees, and in some instances in history, may be nowhere to be found at all.
To put it another way, our needs are not necessarily associated with our equipment.
Further, to ride a dear hobby horse once again, we might be tempted to ask “How came it to be that there were so many learned, decent and capable men at the time of the Founding, such a collection of political minds as the world has never seen in one place and at one time?”
And if our answer is that their education and upbringing was peculiarly fit to the life of a free man, we wouldn’t be far off, I reckon. But how, then, does our education and upbringing today resemble theirs? Answer: it doesn’t.
So ought there to be any surprise that in a nation now many multiples of millions larger, we find ourselves with hardly a single man who can measure up to the standard which was evidently a commonplace at the time of the Founding?
“Tell me about it!” he said forlornly, glancing downwards at his own personal equipment.
sdferr, I now more completely understand why you queried me earlier in regard to my own “path to enlightenment” (such as it is). Indeed, it was not fostered by the education provided to me; rather; it was a product of my upbringing. If our younger and future generations have neither, what hope do we have of producing such men and women?
. . . what hope do we have of producing such men and women?
So far as I can reckon it, any hope we retain resides in our capacity to ask the right questions in the light of the problems, such as, for an instance, the very question posed here. How come they could do this and we seem to fall so far short?
So ought there to be any surprise that in a nation now many multiples of millions larger, we find ourselves with hardly a single man who can measure up to the standard which was evidently a commonplace at the time of the Founding?
After spending the last few decades bashing patriotism, insisting that there is no such thing as “truth”, there is no such thing as “American exceptionalism”, there is no such Being as “God” (although we’re willing to stipulate to that Allah fellow, because beheading is so final, y’know?), and that good intentions matter more than actual results (no ‘pass/fail’ in schools, and no games where there can be only one winner), you wonder why there is no one able to do things that seemed so common back then?
“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.” — C.S. Lewis
There may be something else at work in this case, Drumwaster, since after all, the Founders and Framers were one and all educated and brought up in a time before anything named the United States of America existed, was dreamt, even , so they wouldn’t have owed their fitness to that political entity in any respect we can see. To what, then?
Something in the air? Something in the water? Having readily available frontiers? By the turn of the century, most American frontiers were conquered, and the progressives started aforce. Correlation/causation?
I dunno, sdferr. I need to think about that one.
Air, water, earth, fire . . . or, the otherwise unnamed quintessence? heh. choices choices.
I suspect the distinction is situated in what was for them a formal theory of education, inherited, to be sure, but developed over many centuries of carefully selection and elimination, refined, so to speak, with a view to an exquisite end: freedom, or, human flourishing.
But our educational antecedents knew better, and tossing the lot of their own inheritance, summed in the (belated) chant of the late 60s, early 70s: Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go! Belated because, little did they know, those chanters, it had been gone in principle for 80 years already.
We have lived for so long in comfort and security that most of us have forgotten what the Gods of the Copybook Headings stand for. Hell, most of our “leaders” claim that the old gods were slain generations ago.
What is the re-election of the Boy Pharaoh if not a living example of the fool sticking his hand back into the fire?
brought up in a time before anything named the United States of America existed, was dreamt, even , so they wouldn’t have owed their fitness to that political entity in any respect we can see. To what, then?
They were all citizens of the greatest Empire on the planet at that time, on which The Sun Never Sets. They read philosophers of millennia ago and philosophical authors of their own time and recent past, and still managed to think outside the box to correct what they saw as the many problems of a monarchy. Too much power concentrated in one man? Easy, split up the power among two branches made up of hundreds, then make them stand up and get their fellow citizen’s approval every now and then. Judges kowtowing to the Crown? Make them an independent part of the government, and safe as long as they keep their noses clean.
“Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure ‘good’ government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare – most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the ‘backseat-driver syndrome’.” — Robert A. Heinlein
The thought about the lack of frontiers beginning the Progressivist movement is an interesting thought, but caution about the differences between correlation and causation should be taken.
We are the first generation where it became acceptable to be Stupid and still live to breed. The ones now running things are the children of Stupidity, and think that wishes = results.
They are wrong, and the Grandchildren of Stupidity will pay the inevitable price, whether it’s bloodshed or slavery. God willing, it won’t be both.
To be fair, the Founders also came from a culture where class lines were still fairly well defined. We can bemoan the endumbening of America, but let’s not pretend that the average street urchin of 1765 was a lot more educated than his counterpart of 1965.
If you want to put your finger on the most salient difference, look to the difference in quality between the “elite” of then and now. Then, the successful farmers, merchants, and craftsmen actually did have a liberal education (or at least made damn sure their children got one), which is to say that they were well versed in history and literature and philosophy. Today, our dissipated elites believe that they’ve transcended classical knowledge, having had their brains filled with a lot of postmodern crap.
So I would posit that the reason we lack for revolutionary statesmen today is that most of our potential candidates think people like Zinn and Chomsky are the cutting edge.
Tocqueville certainly had a favorable view of the educational attainments of American ordinaries (the demos) in 1835, if we may describe them so, albeit he speaks of mountain men or mere mechanics of arts as opposed to street urchins. And I suppose he contrasts these with the demos he knew back in the European state from which he came to visit.
To be fair, Chomsky was a pretty sharp language guy, but as Heinlein said, “Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.”
I have no opinion of Zinn, having never wasted time reading anything he has written.
“To be fair, Chomsky was a pretty sharp language guy”
His model works well for computer languages, not so well for natural languages.
I always found the “poverty of the stimulus” claim totally unpersuasive.
“And I suppose he contrasts these with the demos he knew back in the European state from which he came to visit.”
A lot of that came from the much-maligned Puritan ethos, at least if you believe Robert Merton. Certainly the Puritan colonies had mandatory schooling long before such existed in England, much less pre-revolutionary France.
In other news, the ObamaCare help line operator who spoke to Sean Hannity was fired from her job. Hannity had her on his show, and offered to pay her a year’s salary ($26K) and help her find a new job.
http://tinyurl.com/mwlgq2d
Can’t be pulling the wool over people’s eyes if the phone operators are going to let the real facts get out!
The thrust of Tocqueville’s overall concern — the unleashing of the idea of equality as the governing principle of politics upon the world — makes for a sharp eye toward examples of the effects of such a principle, I reckon. So he’s looking for it, as well as finding it. Evenso, I take his report as honest regarding what he found.
But bound up in his analysis is a description of the leveling effects of democracy, no less with education than with other social institutions: a willingness to pull down structures which had come before and been established in a scheme wholly undemocratic.
[Intro to DiA] *** This, however, is what we think of least; placed in the middle of a rapid stream, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins that may still be descried upon the shore we have left, while the current hurries us away and drags us backward towards the abyss. ***
(where, by the way, he cites the street urchin by way of use in a metaphor: *** The most powerful, the most intelligent, and the most moral classes of the nation have never attempted to control it in order to guide it. Democracy has consequently been abandoned to its wild instincts, and it has grown up like those children who have no parental guidance, who receive their education in the public streets, and who are acquainted only with the vices and wretchedness of society. Its existence was seemingly unknown when suddenly it acquired supreme power. ***)
I never wanted to know firsthand what the twilight of a golden age looked like, nor the eve of a Dark Age. But I’m finding out.
I wonder who will write The Decline and Fall of Liberal Civilization?
“by Edward Gibbon and Penelope Spheeris”.
Good on Hannity, by the way.
Yes, McG, let’s hope that someone is setting up some 21st Century monasteries to capture all of this.
Anyone read the Wool series yet? Dystopian, but fun. In Decline of the Roman Empire sense.