War Of Northern Agression

Suffering from Perry-tonitis

Texas governor Rick Perry is the Tea Party’s very own Frankenstein’s monster, a creature stitched and stapled together from the crazy, cast-off ideas that give every rational voter nightmares. The only difference is that as he lurches across the countryside uttering incoherencies, the mob with torches and pitchforks don’t chase him in anger; they follow him in adoration.

Then again, maybe he’s the product of a bake-off between the Right’s very own Weird Sisters: Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley:

Distill the oily slickness of game show host and professional shill Chuck Woolery.

Stir in Bush the Lesser’s speech patterns and the analytical skills of Jethro Beaudine.

Gussy it up with the shoe polish-black hair and Day-Glo skin toner of John Boehner.

Then toss in a sodden lump of that pseudo-cowboy tough guy shtick that comes across like a lounge comic doing his worst Dubya imitation.

Hey, give the guy his due: he flew C-130s after college, and collected a few entitlements; then he worked on the farm, and the Socialists paid him 9 grand a year for not growing anything; and since then he’s dedicated almost three decades of his life to serving his country in elected office.

Some might call that living off government handouts for nearly 30 years.

Since 1984, he’s been elected a state rep, agricultural commissioner, lieutenant governor, and governor. That’s 26 years on the Texas taxpayers’ dime… the last 11 in public housing. Remember the last Southern governor accused of that?

Oh, and that public housing – the Texas Governor’s Mansion -- has been upgraded considerably since it burned a couple of years ago. Thoughtful Rick Perry only let his fellow Texans pay about half of the $22 million price tag. Washington can be consequential sometimes.

Ana the Imp: The War of Northern Greed

It’s October, 1861. In American the Civil War has been underway for some months, really just the overture to what was to become a tragedy of epic proportions. That same month a German exile living in London summed up the situation as he saw it – “The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty,” A few months later similar sentiments were to be found in the words of another writer, an Englishman of impeccable liberal credentials – “The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.” He goes on to say "...Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils... The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel." Who were these men? Karl Marx was the first and Charles Dickens the second, not people one would expect to have very much in common, the prophet of world revolution and the prophet of moral reform, the one a hard-nosed theorist and the other a bourgeois sentimentalist. But they were both, in their individual ways, absolutely right: the War Between the States had nothing to with slavery or any other great issue of principle. But myths die hard if they die at all. I open the latest issue of the BBC History Magazine . There is an article by Paul Cartledge, professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge, on slavery in Classical Athens ( Democrats and Slaves ). He offers this view in his preamble – “One hundred and fifty years ago…the northern and southern States of the (dis)United States went to war in large part over these very issues.

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