Biden Said What?

From a speech Biden gave a couple of days ago in Atlanta, speaking about the Democrats' "Voting Rights Bill":

"I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?" Full Speech

Um, what? First of all - what able-bodied (or un-able-bodied for that matter) person in America today is unable to vote? Even in states with the most strict rules regarding voting (you know, the ones that require *gasp* an ID to vote), there is early voting and absentee voting available weeks before the conclusion of a Federal election. The polls are open, in the vast majority of states, for 13-14 hours on Election Day. There are organizations that will provide transportation to the polling place if you need it. There is little to no excuse that any would-be voter has, for not being able to vote. Lest you think that it stops at simply trying to make it easy for people to vote...oh no, this Bill also gives the Federal government control over how states conduct re-districting (also referred to as 'gerrymandering'). It also makes the Department of Justice the Federal agency that will have the final say about whether individual states can change laws related to voting. It is a complete overhaul of how elections are run in this country...

Democrats are woefully tone deaf on this issue. This is not an issue of race or ethnicity. This is an issue of integrity, and in ever-increasing numbers, Americans are rightfully questioning the security and legitimacy of elections. This isn't something to just dismiss as 'crack-pottery'. If there isn't overriding confidence in the security and legitimacy of elections, that erodes at the very foundation of the Republic. The descent from doubt to chaos, in lieu of something to shore up confidence, will be short and and fast. THAT is the importance of this issue...but the Democrats want to make it sound like we are back in the 1940s and 1950s and that certain segments of the population are being purposefully suppressed. That *might* be true in very specific individual cases (a small handful of them), but it is not true on the whole, not even close.

Federalizing elections and election laws is Unconstitutional and this Bill needs to be stopped. Think about what Biden said - he is basically saying, if you don't agree with him, you are an enemy of the United States. Jefferson Davis was the leader of the Confederacy. George Wallace was a proponent of segregation. Bull Connor stood against the Civil Rights Bill. Biden is saying that if you disagree with him, you are like those people (all of them Democrats by the way). What an insult!

Destructive Hyperbole

 I read this article this morning and the following quote came to mind:

"Hyperbole is in common use, as much among the unlearned as among the learned, because there is in all men [and women] a natural propensity to magnify or extenuate what comes before them, and no one is contented with the exact truth." - Quintilian

Modern political discourse in the United States, on both sides of the aisle, has become almost pure hyperbole, to the detriment of our political institutions, to political dialog among the people and, ultimately, to the Republic itself. No, January 6th was not a 'violent insurrection'. It was more a failure of Capitol security than anything else. Some people were hurt, yes, but these trespassers did not have weapons and they certainly did not have any meaningful organization as a whole (there were small groups of folks who came to the protest together). One of the trespassers (Ashli Babbitt) was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer, one police officer died the next day (Jan. 7th) as a result of a heart attack. Two others died of heart attacks during the event and one woman died of an amphetamine overdose. One dead capitol police officer, 4 dead Trump supporters and the only one killed by violence was a Trump supporter who was shot by a police officer. These are the actual facts. Only those who seek to serve their own (or their party's) agenda would argue otherwise. At the same time, we can all agree that those people involved in trespassing at the Capitol that day, along with any of the other illegal activities they engaged in as a result, should and will be held accountable to the law. Many of them have been incarcerated and many of them have been tried and convicted of crimes. It is possible to believe that the events of January 6th were, at the same time illegal, but not insurrection.

I would argue that if you believe in the "January 6th was a violent insurrection" narrative, then you haven't read anything that disagrees with that narrative. There are actual facts surrounding these events and it is worth the time to find out, insofar as one can, what actually happened that day. A failure to do so is to abdicate on your responsibility to think critically. Once you're into that kind of habit, you can be lead to believe pretty much anything.

Bloodlands

I'm currently reading the book "Bloodlands" by Tim Snyder. I cannot remember reading a more difficult-to-stomach book. He published it in 2010,  and it is the definitive account of the killing machines of Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. It chronicles, in painful detail, the attempted extermination of the Jews by Hitler. It chronicles, in painful detail, the horrifying conditions of widespread State-sanctioned starvation in Ukraine and some of the other Western Soviet Union countries during the early part of WWII, that saw people resort to cannibalism (sometimes of their own children!) to stay alive. It chronicles, in painful detail, mass shootings and mass poisonings of all sorts of different groups of people by the evil governments of Germany and the Soviet Union. It sometimes prompts audible reactions of horror from me as I read. To fully comprehend the evil and the bloodshed of non-combat civilians during the period from 1937-1945 is staggering. I love this quote in the book - a reason why remembering and knowing all of this is important:

"It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding...Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible. To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history."

And then one more:

"...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life..."