Crazeee Beck got into this at CPAC Saturday night, just saw a link where Jonah Goldberg over at National Review inveighs against it as well.
Here’s the Teddy Roosevelt quote that so offends Beck, with additional context added:
The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class […]

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Honestly, how stupid do you have to be to be a Glenn Beck fan?
Looking straight into the camera, and in all apparent seriousness, Beck warned that progressives have been working for years to strip Americans of their individual rights, and that in earlier times they would be called “tyrants” and “slave owners.”
Hmmm… no, Glenn, the […]

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History buffs might have already seen this, but it’s amazing nonetheless: On the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher appealed to Mikhail Gorbachev to keep Germany divided:
Thatcher:
We are very concerned about the processes taking place in Eastern Germany. Some big changes could happen there, forced partly by the state of the […]

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Wingers. They should’ve paid more attention in history class:
On his radio show yesterday, Beck declared, “You can’t convince me that the founding fathers wouldn’t allow you to secede. The constitution is not a suicide pact. … [States] have a right to back out.”
Hmmm… this sounds familiar… where have I…
Oh yeah:

You can draw a direct, ideological […]

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Venting about the bailout, Glenn Beck asks a question that any reasonably intelligent 5th-grader might answer:
BECK: So the question is, do states have the right to secede anymore? Because it was a compact. It’s not perpetual. In fact, in the Declaration of Independence it says it is our right, it is our responsibility to get […]

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Sarah Palin on the Pledge of Allegiance:
11. Are you offended by the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
SP: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.
“Under God” was added […]

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Grrrr…..
One of the reasons I detest wingnuttery is that Lancaster County is a wingnut kind of place. If I lived in San Francisco, I’m sure I’d be writing newspaper columns about how unhinged liberals are - and getting mail from left-wing readers demanding apologies, “proving” me wrong, insisting I be fired - the flip side of what goes […]

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See, there’s a reason I don’t do this in the first place.

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Of the Civil War, exactly 145 years ago today. Fascinating stuff.

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Vanity Fair has a tremendous account of Bobby Kennedy’s doomed presidential campaign of 1968 that’s just fascinating in a lot of respects, but I’m most struck by how he was able to articulate so persuasive a moral case against the Vietnam war - words that, but for 40 years, might be repeated today, with the […]

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So now, if I hadn’t spent much of the week waiting for two of the three county commissioners to get back to me (ahem) for a story I’m working on for Sunday, I might have liked to swing by the Millersville Holocaust conference, which continues today. As noted here on several occasions, not only am I studying history but […]

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Co-worker brought me in his copy of “Downfall,” (Der Untergang), the German movie about the last 10 days of Hitler, deep in his fuhrerbunker as the Red Army fights its way into Berlin. I was interested in the subject long before I started studying history again, but especially now - in that this semester’s class […]

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Some of the best letters I get are from people who say they don’t want their name in the paper, but they just wanted to point out this or that. Today comes one from a 72-year-old local gentleman who, upon perusing last week’s bit about Huckabee and the Constitution, tells me that I’m actually treading way […]

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Story running in the NYT tomorrow about how J. Edgar Hoover, on the eve of the Korean War, wanted Truman to suspend Habeus Corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty:
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I […]

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I’d seen parts off Tom Brokaw’s “1968” on the History Channel, enough to catch the shots of the Chicago riots outside the Democratic Convention and, of course, the black-and-white footage of people dancing around in San Francisco. But I didnt’ see enough to catch the overall insinuation:
He shows the electoral map of 1968, saying if […]

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Wonks only, below the break.

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Discussion in my history class the other evening about the Progressive era, the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th and the movement that in fact realized many of its most ambitious aims - from reforms in the way government related to the people (direct election of Senators, for example) to Prohibition, […]

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And apparently, we didn’t even know the half of it.

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I’ll bite on this, Helen…
Reading now about the Civil War era in class, the reasons people fought. Which I’ve always considered the most interesting aspect of the Civil War; how is it that the ordinary farmer was motivated to drop his scythe, go pick up a gun and fight for slavery. But of course they […]

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Wow. The history behind this photo, taken just over 50 years ago. The anniversay is being marked today.

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