Adam Serwer: ‘The Myth of the Kindly General Lee’

From The Atlantic:

The myth of [Robert E.] Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together. 

There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error. 

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.” 

Read the full article.

Seth Meyers: ‘Trump Threatens to Deploy Military in Response to Protests’

Francis Wilkinson: ‘American Politics Is Now Democrats Versus Authoritarians’

Cartoon by Dave Granlund

From Bloomberg.com:


The proximate cause of the difficulty for Democrats is that Republicans are suddenly fond of subpoenas again. They plan to issue them to “a wide variety of Obama administration officials” in connection with the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week: “The American people deserve answers about how such abuses could happen.”

This is a lie, of course. Not the part about subpoenas. The untruth is the notion that imagined past abuses by Obama officials, rather than present abuses by Republican senators, will drive these investigations....

One hallmark of authoritarian politics, in addition to an adversarial relationship with the truth, is ignoring the law as it applies to party interests while deploying it as a weapon against political opponents. For example, party politicians might ignore lawful subpoenas intended to expose their corruption, while subsequently using subpoenas of their own to construct a phony case of wrongdoing by opponents.

Read the full article.

David Parkman: ‘Election Whisperer Rachel Bitecofer Explains Everything’

“Democrats fall in love, and Republicans fall in line.” —old Washington saying about the respective political parties’ attitudes towards their presidential candidates