Virginia Thomas calls Anita Hill in the wee hours and oh-so-graciously invites her to prayerfully apologize.
Huh?

We’ve entered a bizarro world.  I don’t think Virginia Thomas understand the basic lessons of the “Prodigal Son”, and I can not quite suggest this is an Inverse example of that story.

Drearily, the only thing to do is to watch as she parades onto various right-wing media outlets to a hero’s welcome, assumption that the Truth is behind her and she was only reaching out to a woman — “a little bit slutty and a little bit nutty” — who smeared her husband oh so many years ago — a political plot by a bunch of hypocritical Liberals.
Assuming that side of the story… we run back again to… “Huh?”  The only answer is it’s part of a politically charged Ideologically driven Gambit.

But we’re lost in a fog of Historical Revisionism.  What are these people thinking?
4th Graders in Virginia received new textbooks last month. The textbook grossly distorted the Civil War and African Americans role in it. The textbook claims that two battalions of African American soldiers fought for the Confederacy under famed Gen. Stonewall Jackson. It is a deliberate misrepresentation in order to bolster a political agenda. Carol Sheriff, a Civil War expert at the College of William and Mary, discovered the error in her daughter’s copy of the offending book, “Our Virginia: Past and Present.” “As far as we know from the historical record, not a single black person participated in a battle under the command of Stonewall Jackson,” Sheriff wrote on a web chat on washingtonpost.com. “There is historical evidence that individual blacks, usually servants who followed their masters to the front, occasionally picked up guns in the heat of battle. But it was illegal in the Confederacy to use blacks as soldiers until the waning days of the war (early 1865). A few companies . . . were raised then, but none saw battle action, as the surrender followed shortly thereafter. Stonewall Jackson had died in 1863, so no black soldiers could have served under his command.”

One of the “disinfo” books has a piece about black Confederate soldiers with the “Yep!  They existed!” aura of quirks of history.  It makes for a historical footnote, and no more.  I suppose an interesting hour long documentary could be made out of the historical examples, or an interesting little book, but not without a bit of stretching.  It is a drop in the bucket against a vaster background of what you’d expect — slaves running to the oncoming Union troops en masse, escaping to the North to fight themselves, various items of civil disobedience.  A history book can be complete without mention of this anomolous.  I suggest that if you’re a Southerner in the mind to embarrass the North or flood past the simplistic narrative of the Cold War, a better tact would be to the more historically significant sentiment of desertions in the Union around the Emancipation Proclamation with the opinion “Why should I fight to free the negro?”, and the atmosphere of various draft Riots. 

Here’s something.  A Rutherford Hayes is running for president.
Which brings a new and interesting sentiment to these proceedings I have never seen expressed before:  I have never seen Rutherford Hayes expressed as the Worst President before now.
I tend to think History plays a neat trick with this question, such that now — here in the year 2010, we should be able to agree on the answer to the worst presidents.  It’s a thought I had when I stared at the cover of the American Spectator.

“Yeah, whatever“.
If we consider Slavery the Original Sin of America, and if we consider that there was a general consensus at the Foundation of the nation that Slavery was a “Necessary Evil” that would be moved to an end — if somewhere in the future — and we consider that this consensus was supplanted with the prevailing ideology gaining in the South switching to one of a “positive good” tied to the Way of the South.
The worst four presidents would have to be the ones who intentionally sought the extension of slavery — Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan — and then the man who dashed Emancipation at its inception — Andrew Johnson.
But this note on “worst ever”, which I see posted a few other spots, is in keeping with the historical ratings where Grant has risen and Hayes has fallen — appropriately as we realign the historical narrative.  (Hayes seems to have been at the 25 to 33 percentile of presidents, where he is now at the 67-75.)  But Hayes was following popular sentiment, expressed by Grant with — (quick easy cheat from wikipedia:).  the whole public is tired of these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South,”, insisting that state militias should handle the problems, not the Army. Grant was concerned that increased military pressure in the South would cause white supremacists in the North to bolt from the Republican Party,  Grant’s second to last State of the Union address full of Pleas for Racial Justice, his last one devoid of the topic.
… Or so goes my historical understanding.

The new Rutherford Hayes, grabbing some attention as your fringe political candidate, is no Rutherford Hayes.

Getting back to the gambig of personal historical revisionism:

The ad got a lot of attention in the blogosphere mainly as a kind of liberal Rorsach test: some loved its aggressiveness, others hated that it went after Paul’s religiosity (or implied lack thereof). But I had no idea, until I arrived in Kentucky, what a big deal it is here. The controversy is absolutely dominating local coverage of the race: as a news story on all the local channels, in the newspapers, and of course on television as the ad itself (and Paul’s rebuttal that Conway is “bearing false witness”) is in constant rotation. This is after it originally flared up as a serious issue over the summer.

I spent the morning in Louisville talking to some local politicos (mainly Republicans), who think Paul is going to pull it out, but agree that the race is still close and that Paul isn’t doing a good job of handling “Aqua Buddha.” For one thing, it’s clearly gotten under his skin, and his campaign has gotten totally off message: He’s stopped talking about Obama (which is every Kentucky Republican’s most effective cudgel). What’s more, he’s guaranteed that the story will drag on for at least a few more days because at the end of the first candidate debate, Paul dramatically announced that he would not shake hands with Conway because of the ad and would not participate in the next debate, scheduled for Monday. Complicating matters for Paul is that he won’t deny the story. It’s certainly his right to stand on principle and refuse to discuss a matter he says is beneath his dignity, but in a raw political sense that’s keeping the story going. […]

Is there anyone out there who does not believe that Rand Paul did not do that college-era stunt?  The cleverest explanation of its relevance — Ron Paul and Rand Paul represent two strands of Libertarianism, Ron Paul the cranky old guy “Get off My Lawn” variety, Rand Paul the arrogant Adolescent frat boy variety — is lost in this electorate outside the insistence on the “bearing false witness” line of crappola.
Maybe there are partisans who think this story is a lie (as opposed to meaningless), who stretch credulity in demanding that this woman throw away her anonymity.

… even if history shows that twenty years from now, she may face a creepy phone call suggesting repentence in apology form.

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