Tom Toles for November 01, 2017

What kind of potato head thinks like that ?

Must be something in the water in the White House.

I thought Kelly was one of the “adult supervisors” in the White House. He is starting to sound as crazy as Trump.

I liked the “compromise” suggested by an online commenter: white people and black people would trade off being slaves on different days. Sounds fair to me.

COMPROMISE DOESN’T ALWAYS PAY OFF – {rhyme}

Kelly’s word to the wise:

Focus on “compromise”. -

- The Union would better survive

were the percentage seventy-five

when we counted a slave as if sort-of human.

No Civil War. Our union a-bloomin’. …

… Kelly was wrong when he thusly opined;

such thinking would keep the slavery enshrined.

=========

No one gave a rat’s ass about the slaves. It was agreed to balance the States votes in the House of Representatives.

Another victim of “Swamp Fever”. Sad.

Any war in the history of mankind could have been avoided by a compromise. …..Why is everyone getting their undies in a wad about his comment?

The right wing brainwash is getting less effective as it gets stupider.

Oh, right. Whether it’s 3/5 or 4/5 of a person, problem is, it was the slave owners who benefited from that idea and not the slaves. Seems J.K. has little idea of this fact.

Such a disappointment when you discover that the adult supervision in the room turns out to be your racist Uncle John

Just another racist member of 45’s Administration. Let’s summarize:

The Civil War was about SLAVERY, pure and simple.

- The seceding states said so in their documents of secession

- The VP of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, said so explicitly in the “Cornerstone Speech”

- Their constitution was identical to the US Constitution of the time, with exactly two differences: slavery was immutable, and states’ rights were enshrined — but it was states’ rights TO SLAVERY that triggered the Civil War.

How do you compromise over enslaving human beings? Answer: you don’t. “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free.” – Abraham Lincoln

WORST of the WORST – {limerick}

Trumpism’s the worst of the worst

of the eras in which we’ve been cursed.

Our bubble is burst; -

- we tumble head-first

in this century the twenty-first.

========

@MOTIVEMAGUS very well said!!!!!!. I don’t think that you can get anyone whose mind is already made up by having been brainwashed previously by either their parents or their social peers. There is no cure for stupid. Just as there is no cure for “not listening on purpose because I don’t want to know any truth other than my own”.

It must be very hard to defend any person who can say with a straight face that it is possible to compromise with slavery. That’s almost as hard as defending a person who believes that nuclear war will solve all of the world’s problems.

Whataboutism:

(also known as Whataboutery) is a form of defensive propaganda used to counter criticism (usually from “the West”, and usually on blatant human rights abuses) with a “What about…?”—question vaguely, if at all, related to the original issue.

It is a specialized red herring version of the tu quoque fallacy, sometimes implementing the balance fallacy as well.

An old favorite of Communists (especially tankies), the strategy originates from the Soviet era, and was usually used in the form of “And at your place, they hang black people”.

Simply put, whataboutism refers to the bringing up of one issue in order to distract from the discussion of another.

It does not apply to the comparison and analysis of two similar issues in terms such as why some are given more social prominence than others.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Whataboutism

More “both sides” BS from the GOP.

“Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic giant step (on) the Earth and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe & Asia could never take a drink from the Ohio River, or make a track along the Blue Ridge. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever, or die by national suicide.”-Abraham Lincoln, 1838, speaking in Congress.

We need a man or woman of the caliber of a Lincoln, Jefferson or Washington.

The compromise that john Kelly was referring to was enshrining slavery, allowing whites to own people. The Civil War was, in fact, preceded by decades of compromises over the freedom of African-Americans.

Kelly’s understanding of American history and the Civil War is piss-poor and willfully ignorant. To claim that the treasonous Confederate cause and its leaders such as Lee were “honorable” people is to confuse the white supremacist fiction and propaganda channeled by movies like “Gone With the Wind” and “The Birth of a Nation” with empirical reality, historical rigor and actual scholarship. Unfortunately, Kelly’s delusions do not exist in isolation: They are shared by many other (white) Americans as well, including Donald Trump.