Mitt Romney utilized the word "immediately" in his recent tweet and voiced his anger and outrage over the shooting. Governor Haley by now bringing a new focus on the flag is opening up the debate once more as she clearly indicates how close a political ally she is to Gentleman Mitt! Jack Hunter is an intelligent man. He says what he thinks. He just laid out a major insight. "I now have different priorities. Dylann Roof is a reminder of what’s at stake." Kids like Dylann Roof must be talked to. Right after May of 1865 our Civil War ends, in part because Jefferson Davis is captured by Union troops after he leaves Abbeville, South Carolina. I looked at the film COPPERHEAD online because I missed my opportunity to see the film in a local movie house. Likewise, THE CONSPIRATOR, the "indie" film that Robert Redford directed so well and competantly in a theater near me is another missed opportunity. I really liked the fine British actor who plays out the role of Reverdy Johnson! Its easy to feel sorry for Mary Surratt, or even ask, if Andrew Johnson was to later on in that year by X~mas or New Years hand out a partial or full presidential pardon to so many Confederates, why did he hold back in terms of Doctor Samuel Mudd, Mary Surratt and George Adzerodt? Answer --- Andrew Johnson was a very contrary Tennessee Scalawag of a politician, loyal to a fault to Honest Abe but often delighting in the way we could get his opponents PO'ed. He often quarreled with Senator Jefferson Davis and was never known to have worshipped the ground he walked on. Andrew Johnson did his darndest to keep Tennessee in the Union. If one is vaguely familar with both the Presidential Reconstruction and then the Congressional Reconstruction that follows on the heels of the election of 1866 one has seen the adjective RADICAL modifying the word Republican, and one can get confused. The political stances taken by today's LIBERAL REPUBLICANs are very similar to the stances taken by Senator Charles Sumner, who by definition IS a Radical Republican. Not many GOP people after the time of William McKinley are being described as a being a Radical Republican. Senator Ed Brooke is a Liberal Republican. Mitt Romney is a Centrist Republican. His tweet does not change this. Clearly John Hunter is being less the politician and more like the great Irish statesman Edmund Burke who was aghast at what the French Revolution did to France and then defined Toryism in a good way as well as Conservatism here and in the U.K! Sometimes in a manner like Edmund Burke one finds oneself ceasing to be as Whig as one becomes more Tory. Sometimes one has to say when things are becoming sadly violent, whether on a small scale or a much greater scale. I am not trying to lump this recent tragedy in with Columbine or the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut a few years back and simply say guns are to blame. Its more than this. There is a climate of hatred that some people are more open to, hense why our POTUS suggested the other day that the flag belongs in a museum. Over the last few weeks and months I've been following events in the U.K and was delightfully fascinated by the pomp and ceremony that reburied the mortal remains of RICHARD III. Between 2o12 and 2o15 I've been looking at online episodes of America Unearthed and the controversy about the Kensington Rune Stone. Normally our great Civil War is remembered in great detail by all re-enactors, they take great pride in getting their equipment and uniforms correct. Small details are important. Just the other day the U.K celebrated the 800th anniversary of the very reluctant signing of the Magna Carta by King John at Runnymede. In 1485 the wrong king may have won the battle of Bosworth Field, and the same can be said about 1066 and Harold Godwinson, who Edward the Confessor wanted as his sworn heir! I'm bringing up 1492 also, and how often Scott Wolter thinks a European got to our Western Hemisphere shores well long before Christopher Columbus. In my minds eye I was comparing 1485 to 1066, and as I was going into Riii related Facebook sites and webpages, i encountered a geneology. In Spain, prior to the union of Aragon and Castile, at least ten kings with the name Alfonso ruled Castile. Richard III has Alfonso X of Spain as an ancestor. I had thought of him as being French or Norman French but not as being part Castilian! Freshly from this ancient lore i was when i looked at the two photos online that show Dylann Roof next to the date 1488 in the sand. Well I knew that Francis Lovell tries to organize a revolt against HENRY TUDOR but it is in 1487, and is put down. Henry VII when on the English throne tends to act like King John, his ancient ancestor. He likes to have heavy taxes placed on England's peasants and yeoman farmers. Any positive social reforms that happened under either Edward IV or Richard III run the risk of being rolled back under Henry Tudor. He can be said to be England's last truly Catholic king, which if we discuss kings who both reign and rule, we start to articulate out the thought that poor Richard the Third was the second to last Catholic monarch of any significance before the Reformation and Henry the Eighth! I view Dylann Roof as a classic example of the way our public school can fail the people who go through it. I know why Mitt Romney expressed himself on Twitter in the manner he did, please keep in mind he could run in 2o2o if Senator Rand Paul sits that one out. He'd get 60% of the vote in 2o2o because he, Governor Haley and Barack Obama are in an agreement on this. I'm backing Jack Hunter to every ounce of my being, he is very correct on this! Yes, lets honour the fallen dead with their appropriate flags who fight and fell for the South, but let us also humour the idea if we do not understand the reasons why we fought our great Civil War we may doom our descendents to fight things out in a repeat performance of the events of 1861 to 1865 if we ever become as polarized again on an issue of the day. As i said before, I have my reasons as to why the better king dies on Bosworth Field, even if we skim over the House of Tudor, we find that the mid-1600s saw a very polarizing Civil War in the U.K and it is no coincidence many of dscendents of the people who backed York or Lancaster either went very Royalist or very Roundhead when trying to see where England was going. In time, as the Puritans lost out, their supporters tended to emigrate here NORTH of the Mason-Dixon line, even if their Royalist and very Cavalier cousins and kin would emigrate SOUTH of the Mason-Dixon line. The power we hand to our POTUS at the federal level is akin to the legitimate degree and level of authority handed to England's kings from the time of Emperor Constantine the Great and King Arthur onwards. If we are ethnically English or British, we have ancestors who grumbled about, protested or hated heavy, unjust and high handed taxes. This sums up everything from the Doomsday book to now. I am more focused on 1066, 1485 and even 1688 if i try to ignore 1775 or 1776. The two photos of Dylann Roof scrawling out his version of 1488 in beach sand is part of our national tragedy. Lets break apart and fragment away this polarizing political cycle of more than a thousand years duration, that in time did evolve the Whig and Tory parties of Edmund Burke's day in a good way. If we cannot break what is an ancestral pattern, we may be dooming everyone's descendants to something worse than what has gone before. I admire Jack Hunter for his logic and his honesty. He understands John Locke much better than most of us here...
http://drmudd.org/
