The Constitution Murders

Conover Hunt at the Hampton Yacht Club

Having majored in history in college, I love a good history book.  I also love a good mystery/suspense book, especially one with foreign intrigue.  In the Constitution Murders, available on Amazon, our dear friend, Conover Hunt has created a combination of the two.  Yes, many characters are fictional, but woven throughout are real nuggets of history - something Conover knows well given that she has written 7 or 8 history works and was the creator of the Book Depository museum in Dallas, Texas (she's an expert on the Madison administration and the JFK assassination).  She even works in a thread involving the Romanov dynasty - something of interest to me since Anna Anderson (who said she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia) was one of my neighbors in Charlottesville many years ago.  Also in the book are insider glimpses of Hampton and Richmond.

Documentarian Ken Burns to Evangelical Voters: 'What Part of Donald Trump Reminds You of Jesus Christ?'

With evangelical Christians flocking to support Donald Trump - a man who is the antithesis of Christ and the Gospel message - the rank hypocrisy and sheer nastiness of these modern day Pharisees is on display perhaps more than ever.  And deservedly so.  The irony, of course is that the Christofascist view themselves as saving Christianity when in fact their horrid and hypocrisy filled example is driving younger generations away form religion all together, but Christianity in particular.  Historian and documentary expert Ken Burns is hence asking an all to valid question of Trump's evangelical supporters:  '"what part of Donald Trump reminds you of Jesus Christ?' A truthful answer would be that NOTHING about Trump is reminiscent of Christ.  Absolutely nothing.  Esquire looks at Burns' all to appropriate question.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump's appeal to Evangelical voters is perplexing and bizarre, and it has earned the attention of more than one political observer. Samantha Bee dug into the phenomenon and came to the conclusion that it boiled down to a kind of identity politics, and now legendary documentarian Ken Burns has weighed in. He sat down with The Daily Beast to discuss a retrospective of his films just released online, but the conversation quickly drifted to the 2016 election.

Burns did not mince words when it came to Donald Trump and the religious right, the culmination of what he sees as a long con:
 "The Republican Party has been extraordinarily successful at getting many groups of people to vote against their self-interest. Evangelicals are voting for Donald Trump. What part of Donald Trump reminds you of Jesus Christ? Trump lusts after his own daughter on national radio, talks about women's bodies and breasts in such a disparaging way, and mocks them. How is this in any way Christian? When you make the "other" the enemy, how is that Christian?" Much of Burns' work deals with "race as a central subtheme of American life," and that extends toThe Central Park Five, a documentary about five black teenagers wrongfully convicted of raping a white female jogger in New York's famed green space. Burns believes that Trump's role in that fiasco is telling:
 "He shamefully took out a full-page ad in all of the New York dailies asking for a restoration of the death penalty for two 14-year-old, two 15-year-old, and one 16-year-old innocent children. While New York State laws would not have permitted their execution, just the fact that there was a rush to judgment ought to be complete evidence of how temperamentally unsuited he is for the office he now seeks." And when asked if his involvement was racially motivated:
 "Of course it was [racially motivated]. I found no outrage at the "preppie killer." The problem was that the initial idea of the crime was that there were these "wilding" black youths—a wolf pack—that attacked this innocent blond woman, and that's always been the primal fear of Americans as they tolerated slavery and then tolerated Jim Crow. You had newspapers in a progressive northern city sounding like a southern racist newspaper from the 1880s gleefully reporting on a lynching."

Burns' full interview can be seen here. One thing that I hope this election cycle will result in is that the larger society will finally realize that evangelical Christians and the Christofascists are not nice and decent people.  Rather, they are a foul infected boil on society that needs to be lanced and removed and certainly afforded no respect or deference whatsoever.  They are a cancer festering in America.  

98% of Historians Vote Bush Presidency a Failure

It's always nice to know that professionals share in your evaluation. A new poll of professional historians has shown that 98% of those polled deem the Chimperator's presidency a failure. Equally revealing is the fact that 61% see him as the worse president in the nation's history. That's right - dead last. I have to agree with both evaluations. Tarzan’s side kick, Cheetah, would probably have out performed Bush. Here's more from U. S. News & World Reports:
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President Bush often argues that history will vindicate him. So he can't be pleased with an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted by the History News Network. It found that 98 percent of them believe that Bush's presidency has been a failure, while only about 2 percent see it as a success. Not only that, more than 61 percent of the historians say the current presidency is the worst in American history.

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Among the reasons given for his low ratings: invading Iraq, "tax breaks for the rich," and alienating many nations around the world. Bush supporters counter that professional historians today tend to be liberal and that it's too early to assess how his policies will turn out.