Rump's Bankrupt Relationship with History

[Pogo]

I'm just gonna leave this here and pick it apart when time is available, but it's a hoot --- I know the source is Dimbart but it does contain actual quotes so.... game on.

>> “You’re right—100 percent,” Trump told Breitbart News when asked about how the Republican Party led the way on ending slavery, the Civil Rights movement and women’s suffrage.

On Tuesday night, when now presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton assumed the leadership of that party, she whitewashed the Democratic Party’s history of racism, sexism, support for slavery and long history of standing against civil rights for all in America. In fact, as the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major political party in America, Clinton attempted to align herself with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, the first ever women’s rights convention organized in large part by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

“Tonight’s victory is not about one person,” Clinton said in her speech accepting her role as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible. In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls, in 1848. When a small but determined group of women, and men, came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights, and they set it forth in something called the Declaration of Sentiments, and it was the first time in human history that that kind of declaration occurred. <<
​

Conveniently left out, of course, is the glaring fact that (a) women (in this case) are a fixed entity that can only ever advocate for the unchanging status of "being women" while political parties are malleable entities that exist only to consolidate power, not to represent a fixed ideology, and (b) that at the time the new Republican Party was the home of Liberals (in the Abolitionists) and that half a century later it would take on the interests of the wealthy, corporations and upper class while the Democrats absorbed the Populist Movement...

(Article continues....)

>> Abraham Lincoln, the president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery then led the country through the Civil War preserving the Union until his assassination, was a Republican. <<
​

-- conveniently ignoring the fact that the EP didn't abollish slavery --- that would be the 13th Amendment after Lincoln was dead --- but was a war tactics move. Then it goes on to imply a continuous line from the Republicans of the 1860s ideologically to the present....

It continues this temporal conflation later down the page:

>> Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader in the women’s rights movement in the 19th Century, was a Republican, as was Susan B. Anthony. So were many of the others involved in the effort. In fact, it was Republicans who led the effort for decades that eventually saw passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which granted women the right vote. <<

The source article is here.
​

-- It could have added that the RP was the preference of the black community and most of the founders of the NAACP ---- back then. But as the RP took on the rich and the DP took on Populism, when that party split between the conservative corporate interests (in Taft) and the Progressive Movement (T Roosevelt) resulted in handing the Presidency to a racist, sexist asshole (Wilson) with less that 42% of the popular vote, the seeds were sown. Once the Great Depression vacated the Republicans in large numbers, FDR completed the sweep, the black community has identified with the DP ever since, and eventually the hyperconservative Solid Southern wing bolted, did the unthinkable and turned Solid Republican, and as continued to push the Party to the right, ever further from its own roots.

So much for that "continuous" line, which is anything but.

We can go on much further, and we will. Still to come, that pesky Civil Rights Act and the mythology that Everett Dirksen made it happen, which is a bit like saying Lennon and McCartney could never have had the success of The Beatles without the real power behind the throne, Mal Evans carrying the gear.

But the bottom line in all this is going to be watching Donald Rump at some point get grilled on his erudite knowledge of American political history and watching him insert his foot in his mouth -- and then when his canyonesque gaps are exposed, Doubling Down on the Dumbness.

Of course, he's prolly got tiny feet as well.......