These guys want to run around playing their little keyboard warrior games, but rest assured, the very last thing they want is the public to feel the pinch of war. Because when they do, little Steve’s war games would end right quick. Does anyone think we would have been in Afghanistan for the last decade if our taxes had been increased to actually pay for that war?

The mantra of entrepreneurialism is: other people’s time, other people’s money, other people’s ideas.  The Bush war crowd are two for three, but perhaps it should be modified to include “other people’s blood.”

In recent days, several elected officials in Southern states have been pricks about slavery and the Civil War.  Eugene Robinson has a better response than me.

It was bad enough when Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell proclaimed “Confederate History Month” without mentioning slavery, but at least he came to his senses and apologized. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s contention that the whole controversy “doesn’t amount to diddly” is much worse.

“I don’t know what you would say about slavery,” Barbour told CNN, “but anybody that thinks that you have to explain to people that slavery is a bad thing, I think that goes without saying.”

And that’s the problem — Barbour thinks it “goes without saying.” The governor of the state whose population includes the nation’s highest percentage of African Americans believes it is appropriate to “honor” those who fought for the Confederacy. Clearly, he has no problem revisiting the distant past. Yet he sees no reason to mention the vile, unthinkable practices — state-sanctioned kidnapping, torture and rape — that those Confederate soldiers were fighting to protect.

It amounts to much more than “diddly” that so many Americans try hard to avoid coming to terms with the reality of slavery. It wasn’t just “a bad thing.” Littering is a bad thing. Slavery was this nation’s Original Sin, and yet many people will not look at it except through a gauze of Spanish moss.

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the last millennium’s greatest horrors. An estimated 17 million Africans, most of them teenagers, were snatched from their families, stuffed into the holds of ships and brought to the New World. As many as 7 million of them died en route, either on the high seas or at “seasoning” camps in the Caribbean where they were “broken” to the will of their masters.

If he has never done so, Barbour should hold in his hands some of the leg irons, manacles and other restraints that were used to subdue the Africans. He should visit some of the plantations where slave cabins still stand — there are plenty in his state — to get a sense of how the Africans lived. He should spend a long, hot day picking cotton. He should read the accounts of plantation life written by former slaves, and then he should explain why there is any reason to “honor” soldiers who fought to perpetuate a system that could never have functioned without constant, deliberate, unflinching cruelty.

The Tea Party movement has a lot of racist dog whistlers in it.  These are people who use words and images that will appeal to other racists, but somehow not be heard by people who are not racists, much like only a dog can hear a dog whistle.  I’m tired of it.

As most readers have probably heard, Virginia’s Republican Governor Bob McDonnell got himself into hot water by declaring April “Confederate History Month,” in a proclamation that did not mention the rather pertinent fact that the Confederacy was a revolutionary (and by definition, treasonous) effort to maintain slavery against even the possibility of abolition.

After the predictable firestorm of criticism, McDonnell allowed that it must have been a mistake not to mention slavery in his proclamation. And then he repeated his rationale for the whole idea, which was, he claimed, simply a matter of promoting tourism in anticipation of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s outbreak. Tourism!

I’m sure most conservatives will consider McDonnell’s act of contrition sufficient, while many liberals will cynically conclude the whole thing was a dog whistle to the far Right, much like his earlier and less notorious commemoration of March 7-13 as Christian Heritage Week, in honor of the Christian Right’s revisionist theory that the Founders were theocrats at heart.

But as a white southerner old enough to remember the final years of Jim Crow, when every month was Confederate History Month, I have a better idea for McDonnell: Let’s have a Neo-Confederate History Month that draws attention to the endless commemorations of the Lost Cause that have wrought nearly as much damage as the Confederacy itself.

It would be immensely useful for Virginians and southerners generally to spend some time reflecting on the century or so of grinding poverty and cultural isolation that fidelity to the Romance in Gray earned for the entire region, regardless of race. Few Americans from any region know much about the actual history of Reconstruction, capped by the shameful consignment of African Americans to the tender mercies of their former masters, or about the systematic disenfranchisement of black citizens (and in some places, particularly McDonnell’s Virginia, of poor whites) that immediately followed.

A Neo-Confederate History Month could be thoroughly bipartisan. Republicans could enjoy greater exposure to the racism of such progressive icons as William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, not to mention Democratic New Deal crusaders in the South like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo. The capture of the political machinery of Republican and Democratic parties in a number of states, inside and beyond the South, by the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, would be an interesting subject for further study as well.

Most of all, a Neo-Confederate History Month could remind us of the last great effusion of enthusiasm for Davis and Lee and Jackson and all the other avatars of the Confederacy: the white southern fight to maintain racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s when “Dixie” was played as often as the national anthem at most white high school football games in the South; when Confederate regalia were attached to state flags across the region; and when the vast constitutional and political edifice of pre-secession agitprop was brought back to life in the last-ditch effort to make the Second Reconstruction fail like the first.

Bob McDonnell should be particularly responsible, as a former Attorney General of his state, for reminding us all of the “massive resistance” doctrine preached by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd in response to federal judicial rulings and pending civil rights laws, and of the “interposition” theory of nullification spread most notably by Richmond News Leader editor James Jackson Kilpatrick.

Any Neo-Confederate History Month would be incomplete, of course, without reference to the contemporary conservative revival of states’ rights and nullification theories redolent of proto-Confederates, Confederates, and neo-Confederates.

Having flirted with such theories himself, Bob McDonnell probably wouldn’t be interested in discussing them in the context of Civil War history. But that’s okay: A greater public understanding of the exceptionally unsavory tradition that conservative Republicans are following in claiming that states can refuse to accept health care reform would be valuable without an explicit discussion of current politics.

So give it up, governor: If you are going to have a Confederate History Month, at least be honest enough to acknowledge that the legacy of the Confederacy didn’t die at Appomattox.

Update #2: At 5:00pm, Fox’s Greta van Susteren tells us that the vote is still “too close to call.” I’m expecting next to hear from Baghdad Bob.

He fancied himself one of the big thinkers, and most of his ideas were not only bad but appalling; for he lived largely for the body’s pleasures, actual and vicarious, and adopted ideas that serviced those pleasures. T.S. -Eliot remarked that a great writer creates the taste by which he is appreciated; Mailer helped create the moral confusion amid which he was glorified—not quite what Eliot had in mind.

Until he is forgotten, Mailer should be remembered not only in a fool’s cap and bells but also in a scoundrel’s midnight black. For in an age crawling with intellectual folly, he was one of the reigning dunces, even his best works were shot through with adolescent fatuities, while the worst of his words and deeds were stupid and vicious without bottom.

Yeah, what he said.  Although this ran a close second:

By this point, Mailer had jettisoned his first wife, college sweetheart Beatrice Silverman, and clearly traded up in the sexual-allure department by marrying the painter Adele Morales in 1954. With Adele’s all-too-willing complicity, he cultivated the ugliest part of his nature and called it high moral adventure.

High moral adventure.  That’s what you call it when you live a life that is without basis or constraint.  Just ask any sociopath.

There have been riffs on the name of the new Apple device, iPad.  I think this is the funniest I’ve seen.

Apple Launches Text-sharing Device, the CoTex

Absorbs Heavy Flow of Data, Says Jobs

See the link for the rest.

It was the movie “Hotel for Dogs” that sealed the deal. My kids had been asking for a dog for years, promising to take care of it, arguing how our family wouldn’t be complete until we had one. But after we rented that movie, in which humans can’t really find happiness without a canine pal, our kids became inconsolable in their dogless sorrow. Moaning, wailing — you’d have thought they severed an artery. Fine, we’ll get a dog. Yay, Dad!

Truth be told, I was almost as excited as they were. Dogs are a lot of work, but they can be delightful little balls of joy and fun as well, and who wouldn’t want more of that in the house? After some not very careful screening, we came across a dog online that needed a home: a little Yorkshire terrier that had bounced around a bit. We met with the latest owners at a Petco in the Minneapolis suburbs. Officially, we were there just to meet the dog and see if he was a good fit, but once the kids saw the thing, there was little doubt he was getting in our minivan.

As we drove, I successfully lobbied to name the dog Dave, since I’ve gotten along really well with every human I’ve known by that name. We brought him home, and the kids were over the moon with joy. Dave put up with all the handling, even the ham-fisted affections of the 1-year-old. He slept on my 8-year-old-son’s bed, just the way my boy had always dreamed. All was right.

Until the next day, when I came home from work, at which point the dog started barking his head off. He cowered; he growled. Same thing happened when I wrestled with the kids or chased them or even danced with them. (He may have had a point with my dancing.) I tried yelling at him to hush. I tried slipping him some bacon as I came in, and he barely accepted it, even though it’s bacon, and he’s a dog. He ate it, and then he barked at me some more.

On the one hand, it was kind of funny. But the dog’s hate/fear actually did kind of hurt my feelings. The one thing you expect from your dog is unconditional love and tail wags at the end of the day. There’s something kind of heartbreaking about coming home from work, from providing the income to make the house function, and being hated and feared when you walk in the door.

So I thought maybe he was beaten up by a man at some point, right? But male friends would come over, friends who look like me, and Dave would be fine. It was just me. My dog hated me.

Fortunately, I had one last card to play. There were health and safety reasons, concerns about the dog population, and I didn’t want to have to do it. And yet, there was one move that I could use on him that I didn’t think he could use on me: removal of testicles. Dave was not neutered when we adopted him, and I was confident that if this behavior was an alpha-male thing, well, a little scalpel work ought to take care of that nicely. The procedure took place on a Friday morning, and he was already home by the time I returned from work that afternoon. I parked out front and warily approached the front door. Holding my breath a bit, I turned the key.

I expected a certain amount of calmness to have set in after Dave’s procedure. I thought he’d be docile, a sort of cat-dog. Once inside the door, I paused to allow the realization of my arrival to spread through the house. Then the barking started. Loud, shrill, frightened, it came in the same familiar staccato bursts, even though Dave was still somewhat sedated and disoriented. It was like being verbally assaulted by some sort of sleepy incoherent hippie eunuch.

It has been a few weeks now since that procedure, and Dave has become a tad nicer to me in moments of calm, even seeking me out for belly rubs. But my dream of having a dog happy to see me at the end of the day — which is perhaps the single biggest responsibility in a dog’s job description — is destined to be unfulfilled. I think dog ownership, or cohabitation, really, teaches you a lesson no matter what. For most people that lesson is about the way love and simplicity and togetherness can provide respite from the slings and arrows of our human days. For me, it’s about accepting Dave for who he is. I’m sure he’d rather not fly into a dizzying rage whenever he sees me. Can’t be any fun for him. But he is who he is, just like all of us. I picked Dave’s name because it sounded human. I had no idea how prescient I was.

It’s a loving relationship, Dave’s and mine, but one in which one partner, without testicles, will always scream at the other, who has them, for no apparent reason.

Maybe Dave is worried about what was being cut off next.

The CNN tenure was most notable for a segment in which he told Rep. Keith Ellison to prove that he was not, in his Mohammedanism, a traitor to his country, “no offense.” A logician would call that a fallacious argumentum ad ignorantiam.

Money line:

With Beck, there’s always a lot of ignorantiam to go circum.

Party leader Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina says that accepting federal money for schools is a form of child abuse. And party leader Bill O’Reilly says people who use the internet are child molesters. Just a hunch, but I bet the dedicated medical and mental health professionals who deal with actual child abuse and molestation cases every day might beg to differ. Probably with their middle finger.