It’s interesting that we’ve not heard the usual incendiary rhetoric from racist Al $harpton over the Charleston church massacre. Could be because the AME church folks are not his kind of people—better educated and wealthier than the rabble Mr. Conked Hairdo usually chooses to arouse.
Al’s White House pal Our Little Barry Hussein also has been unusually subdued in the face of the AME congregation’s tendency to Christian forgiveness, even for the depraved Mr. Roof who surely deserves the death penalty if anyone ever did.
Maybe being denied the usual racial response has helped the forces of indignation to coalesce around the Rebel battle flag, long a symbol of defiance of everything from federal interference to imposition of integration on those who prefer to be segregated. Retailers Amazon and eBAY have now jumped into the old argument, joining Sears and, ahem, Walmart, in banning merchandise bearing the flag. While Amazon, for one, still sells items with Nazi swastikas. Like a little hypocrisy with your morning coffee, Mr. Bezos?
I bought little Rebel flags to put on the Southern monuments at Gettysburg back in 1988 when I attended the 125th anniversary of the battle. They’re still sold there for that purpose and I hope always will be. I also bought one to fly from the rigging of the family sloop. It stayed in its wrapper as I never had the nerve to hoist it. Or maybe the bad taste. I finally threw it away.
I can sympathize with the battle flag’s backers while also agreeing with the detractors. But I think that flying it for other reason than hot war only demeans the memory of the soldiers who carried into a fight. If you want a real Confederate flag, try the First National, the original stars and bars, which Texas flies in its six flags commemorations at events such as the inauguration of governors. The racists never adopted it. Most of them probably don’t even know what it is. It’s the one the Sons of Confederate Veterans would fly if they were sincere in their ancestor worship, instead of using the battle flag to show their defiance of integration.
But defacing Confederate monuments, including those of Jeff Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston of Texas (who was slain at Shiloh) particularly on the University of Texas campus, is historical ignorance as well as criminal behavior. Even if removing the spray paint does keep building maintenance crews employed. Hopefully a few of the vandals will be caught and prosecuted to the law’s fullest extent.
UPDATE: When does the Left’s crackdown on the murderer Che’s T-shirts begin? Likely never.
MORE: Ann Coulter, as usual, applies hammer to nail: “If we want to do something nice for black people, how about ending immigration, which is dumping millions of low-wage workers on the country, taking jobs from African-Americans?”
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 