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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Monday, September 2, 2019

Trump and the Cognoscenti

By Rich Kozlovich
 
Over this weekend I've been re-watching Ken Burns Civil War mini-series, and no matter how many times I see it, I get choked up. So much pain, so much misery, so much death, so much destruction and so much suffering is heart breaking.

At any rate, during this presentation they outline the thoughts of Union Civil War hero General William Tecumseh Sherman on politicians, profiteers, sentimentalists. He hated them all! But above all, he hated reporters, whom he considered worse than spies, because they print military secrets just to sell newspapers, saying:
“These dirty newspaper scribblers have the impudence of Satan. They come into camp, poke about among the lazy shirks, and pick up their camp rumors and publish them as facts. They are a pest, and I treat them as spies, which, in truth, they are.”
He was convinced if he killed them all there would be news from hell before breakfast.

Well, nothings changed.  I often hear how the media has lost it's integrity, but let's try and get this right.  Whatever news was available at the founding of this nation, which would have been newspapers and pamphlets, to the vast news resources available now, the media, as a whole, has never had any integrity. In fact, because of the Internet integrity and honesty in reporting is probably better than it's ever been.

Let's understand this.  The New York Times is as corrupt in it's reporting as it's ever been, and the Main Stream Media's corruption has turned them into the Ministry of Information (propaganda department) of the Democrat party, much like Pravda was for the Soviet Union, but now the Internet has forced them out into the open. They're exposed! We now know they've lied to us forever and they can no longer hide behind the curtain telling us to ignore what we're seeing with our own eyes. It's the Dan Rather defence, "we know best", don't question us, and now they're doing little to hide who and what they are.  Well, that vessel just doesn't float.

As for his views on politicians, profiteers and sentimentalists; so who loves politicians? As for sentimentalists, we call them bleeding heart liberals now, and generally speaking, most of us have as little use for them as did Sherman.  Profiteers during the Civil War were stunningly corrupt and not the same as profit makers, so spare me any effort to use his views on profiteering as a condemnation of capitalism. 

The other thing that comes in clear as a bell, is the reaction to Lincoln, Grant, Sherman by the intellectuals, media, and pandering members of the military and political class, is stunningly similar to their reaction to President Trump.  They ridiculed and mocked them right up until the end of the war. 

They said Sherman was insane when he warned everyone that to win this war they were going to need a couple of hundred thousand more men than they had, and it wasn't going to be an easy war.  They mocked him, and kicked him out of a command, and as it turns out his numbers were low, and it was a hard, brutal, long war. 

Grant was considered incompetent and a drunk, and all the cognoscenti, those know it all's that have never been in the battle, were happy to spout off about their contempt of Grant.

They called Lincoln the "great ape", and after the Gettysburg address one of cognoscenti apologized to a foreign visitor telling him that's what passes for the President of the United States. 

Do you see the pattern?  And make no mistake about this, they've always been with us in every arena of human endeavor, not just politics and war, and they always will be. 

Fortunately, great men ignore them!




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