Day: April 14, 2011

Politics Is The Art Of Compromise? Not According To The Republican Leadership!

Ronald Leave a comment

One learns in any American Government class that “Politics is the Art of Compromise”!

But, apparently, the Republican Party in Congress and in the states that have Republican Governors, believes just the opposite!

Remember that the Constitution came about through compromises in 1787 in Philadelphia!

Remember that Henry Clay, the greatest member of Congress in American history, promoted compromise as essential for progress!

Bipartisanship has been an important part of much of American history, as for instance, the bipartisanship demonstrated in Congress during the Cold War period, supporting Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower in their reaction to the Soviet threat!

When compromise has not worked, we had the Civil War, which killed 620,000 Americans!

When compromise has not worked, we have seen the stalemate and gridlock that has paralyzed government, and led to inability to take care of the needs of the nation!

Republican Governors have declared war on the concept of compromise, pushing many states in reverse on basic labor rights and human rights!

So the future looks gloomy, as the Republicans have continued to make clear that they will use every method to stop any part of the Obama agenda!

The battle over the 2012 national budget and the national debt is going to be an historic struggle, with no certainty that anything positive will occur! And the future in many states is also gloomy!

The Assassination Of Abraham Lincoln 1865: Still Affecting America Today!

Ronald Leave a comment

On this day, at around the hour I am writing this, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC, by actor John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, who wished to reverse the Union victory accomplished five days earlier by the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

Lincoln looks better all of the time, and we are now commemorating the sequicentennial of the Civil War, which lasted officially from April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865, and killed two percent of the population, approximately 620,000 men!

The sectionalism that helped to cause the Civil War still exists, and much of the South is celebrating the Civil War anniversary, rather than just commemorating it!

American history would have been quite different if Lincoln had lived, and it is still the greatest human tragedy of the nation’s history, as far as any individual’s role in history is concerned.

Much is published regularly about Lincoln, but the mountain of material never stops, and a lot of attention will be given to it over the next four years because of it being 150 years ago, a notable anniversary!

A movie well worth seeing, opening tomorrow, is THE CONSPIRATOR, which portrays the assassination of Lincoln, and the supposed complicity of Mary Surratt, who ran the rooming house where the Lincoln conspiracy was discussed by the group involved in the plot, including her son, John Surratt, who escaped punishment for his complicity in the event, but had his mother become the first woman executed in American history, due to a military tribunal illegally condemning four of the conspirators to death, rather than having trial by a civilian jury!

The movie informs us of the unconstitutional actions taken by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was in such a hurry to eliminate the conspirators that he broke the Bill of Rights, a troubling followup to the tragedy of the Civil War!

It is a warning that even in crisis, we must not forget the Constitution and Bill of Rights, too often ignored in the name of national security!