The Passing Parade: Cheap Shots from a Drive By Mind

"...difficile est saturam non scribere. Nam quis iniquae tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus, ut teneat se..." "...it is hard not to write Satire. For who is so tolerant of the unjust City, so steeled, that he can restrain himself... Juvenal, The Satires (1.30-32) akakyakakyevich@gmail.com

Thursday, November 06, 2014

Braxton Bragg on the wave



It seems to me that the best comment on the 2014 mid-term elections came from General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A., who made the comment in 1863.  Reviewing the outcome of the Battle of Missionary Ridge, a battle in which the Confederate Army of Tennessee got its clock cleaned by the Union Army of the Cumberland, General Bragg wrote to Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States that “the disaster admits of no palliation and is justly disparaging to me as a commander.”  He then spent the rest of the letter explaining why the disaster wasn’t entirely his fault.  I thought of this while watching the former junior senator from Illinois trying to explain why the Democratic unpleasantness that occurred on Tuesday had nothing really to do with him. He may actually believe this, although he may still be trying to process what just happened.  I have often thought that our Illinois Incitatus appears to think of his current office as being akin to being the Mayor of Chicago, except with better golf courses and nuclear weapons.  For any Mayor of Chicago, the Republicans are something of an abstraction; you know that such people exist somewhere, but they are not anyone you have to deal with and they are certainly not people whose opinions you have to give any consideration.  For our prairie solon, the first two years of his term must have seemed like a golden age, a time when He was the master of all he surveyed, but all such ages must come to an end, and now his enemies surround him like paparazzi on a red carpet.  I think that it’s going to be an interesting two years, yes I do.

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5 Comments:

  • At 12:21 PM, Blogger Dick Stanley said…

    Hopefully Wormtongue will stick to the golf courses and leave the nukes alone. As for Bragg, I like what his chief published critic Sam Watkins had to say: "Bragg was the great autocrat…He loved to crush the spirit of his men. The more of a hang-dog look they had about them the better was General Bragg pleased. Not a single soldier in the whole army ever loved or respected him.”

     
  • At 12:54 PM, Blogger Akaky said…

    Sam was right. On the other hand, if Bragg had been replaced by someone competent like Cleburne or Bedford Forrest, or, in a real stretch of the historical imagination, Davis moved Lee to Tennessee and given command of the ANV to Jackson while he was still living, the history of the United States would have been entirely different. So I guess Bragg being a complete shit worked out for the country in the long run.

     
  • At 8:46 AM, Blogger SnoopyTheGoon said…

    Re these two years: you know that old saying about chicken and pig's relation to eggs with bacon meal: the chicken is participating but the pig is committed. Our puny little state here is in the pig's situation as far as these two years are concerned... oh well, we have survived the pharaoh...

     
  • At 2:00 PM, Blogger Dick Stanley said…

    Don't worry too much, Mr. G. The Worm ain't near as powerful as he looks from a distance. The new Republican congress can cut off his money supply whenever they feel like it. And his own party, having taken a drubbing, isn't likely to sit still for him doing anything outrageous and making their future worse. You saw the outcry over the "chickenshit" nonsense. He's mostly bluster at this point.

     
  • At 2:03 PM, Blogger Dick Stanley said…

    Once more on Bragg: I believe he was the inspiration for that post-war Broadway character Jubilation T. Cornpone who was famous for leading charges to the rear.

     

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