Tag: George Washington

The Portly Politico Presidents’ Day Extravaganza

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Welcome, folks, to The Portly Politico Presidents’ Day Extravaganza!  I hope you all put out milk and cookies for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln so you can get 0% APR financing until 2026 on your next vehicle!

In all seriousness, today is just a quick filler post.  As readers know, this weekend was a bit of a whirlwind on Saturday, followed by a relaxing Sunday with Dr. Girlfriend.  Yours portly is back in Lamar and Murphy is getting a much-needed bath and nail trim at the veterinarian.  I’m taking advantage of the quiet to knock out several tasks around the house and for work.

I’ll be back to regular programming tomorrow (God Willing).  February always seems to be an unusually busy time.  Work hasn’t been too crazy, which is blessing, because I’ve had quite a few other things to attend to at home and in my personal life.  Everything is good—it’s nothing bad or difficult—just a lot of getting my proverbial ducks in a row so I can feast on metaphorical mallard in the future.

I’m thankful for another day off—we’re in the midst of our “Winter Break.”  Teachers return tomorrow for a professional development day.  We’re going through the lengthy reaccreditation process, and we’re working on our curriculum guides.  Mine have been done since our teacher workday back in January (the one on my birthday—ha!), so I’m anticipating a pretty easy day.

Famous last words?  We’ll see.  Here’s wishing one and all and Happy Presidents’ Day!

SubscribeStar Saturday: Washington, D.C. Trip Part III: Mount Vernon

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After the debacle of children sliding down the Lincoln Memorial came much-needed rest.  The long day of traveling was, in many ways, the easiest of our days in D.C.  Thursday promised to be full of walking, but all those steps would be worth it.

Following our food service hotel breakfast—I’m a sucker for those hyper-yellow egg product scrambled “eggs” they serve at hotel continental breakfasts—we loaded the bus and headed for Mount Vernon, the home of our first President, George Washington.

The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association maintains and preserves Mount Vernon.  The Association is the nation’s first national historic preservation organization, and the oldest active patriotic society.  Founded in 1853 after the founder’s mother witnessed the poor state of the home, the Association had raised $200,000 by 1858, with which it purchased the home and two hundred acres surrounding it.  Following the ructions of the American Civil War, restoration work began, and continues to this day.

It is a gift to the American people to walk the grounds where George and Martha Washington resided.  There’s something appealing, too, about the home and grounds being under the auspices of a private non-profit organization, rather than the National Park Service.  It’s proof that private individuals sharing a common goal can often achieve more, and do it better and more efficiently, than the government can.

It was a crisp, sunny morning when we visited Mount Vernon, and it was easily the highlight of the trip, at least for me.

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Lazy Sunday CXXI: MAGAWeek2021 Posts

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Last week was MAGAWeek2021, a week dedicated to the men, women, ideas, events, and things that, in their own way, MADE AMERICA GREAT.  MAGAWeek2021 posts were SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.

In case you missed any of these posts, no worries!  You can catch up on them now with this edition of Lazy Sunday.  Here’s all the greatness in one convenient post:

So, with all that goodness, why haven’t you subscribed yet?  Hmmmmm?

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

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MAGAWeek2021: Washington’s Miraculous Escape from New York City

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This week is MAGAWeek2021, my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, 5 July 2021 and running through today (Friday, 9 July 2021), this year’s MAGAWeek2021 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

On Wednesday of this MAGAWeek2021 I wrote about the Battle of Sullivan’s Island, a key early victory for the Americans in our Revolution that protected coastal South Carolina from British occupation for four years, diverting the Redcoats to the North.  An unfortunate side effect of that victory was the increased concentration of British troops in and ships off the coast of New York.

Soon, General George Washington and the Continental Army found themselves besieged in Brooklyn Heights, New York.  The British General Howe had Washington’s forces surrounded and outgunned.  Facing total annihilation—or, even worse, surrender of the Continental Army just six weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Washington made the decision to evacuate his men across the East River onto Manhattan Island on the night of 28 August 1776.

At daybreak, only about half of the Continental Army had made it across.  Defeat seemed imminent, even after the daring river crossings in the dead of night.

But then, something miraculous happened.

To read the rest of today’s MAGAWeek2021 post, head to my SubscribeStar page and subscribe for $1 a month or more!

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Supreme Court and Power

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg eight days ago has opened up another power struggle in D.C.  Democrats have spent decades perverting the function of the courts from that of constitutional referee into that of constitution interpreter, a role that places the Supreme Court above Congress and the presidency.

The result is rule by nine unelected officials who serve for life.  Congress has gleefully passed the difficulty of legislative activity and the push and pull of debate onto the Supreme Court, trusting it to clarify anything Congress may have forgotten to write into law.  Presidents have passively executed Supreme Court verdicts, and even signed legislation they believed to be unconstitutional, on the premise that the Supreme Court would make the ultimate decision.

Thus, the Court has emerged as the dominant force in American politics—and morality.  Not only does the Court tell us what the Constitution really says—even if the Constitution doesn’t say it at all—it also tells us the moral judgments of the Constitution (thanks to Z Man for that insight).  Thus, every cat lady and box wine auntie in America bemoans the death of RBG, their symbolic stand-in, who endorsed free and easy abortions and gay rights.

Now President Trump has the opportunity to shift the balance of the Supreme Court for a generation.  But will it be enough to reverse judicial supremacy and restore constitutional order?

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Law and Order?

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It’s an election year, in case you’d missed that point, and our man Trump is up for reelection.  Trump is not doing well in the polls at the moment, but George H. W. Bush was similarly down against Michael Dukakis at this point in 1988, and won in a blowout victory.  Of course, Dukakis was an exceptionally feeble and excessively nerdy politician, and Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton ad was a gutsy, effective attack on Dukakis’s program of weekend release for prisoners.

1988 was also a very different America.  Even 2016 seems like another world.  Trump’s election was the paradigm shift of our age, spawning four years of constant resistance from progressives and neocons alike.  Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton before him, enjoys the full support of the media and the institutions; even in his advancing senility, they are determined to drag him into the White House, where he will serve as a dull-witted, mentally-diminished puppet for every crazy Left-wing policy ever concocted in the faculty lounge of a women’s studies department.

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TBT: The Influence of Christianity on America’s Founding

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My high school American history classes are getting into the American Civil War—or the War of Northern Aggression, or the War for Southern Independence, or whatever you’d like to call it—this week, so we’ve been talking about beginnings a good bit.  The Civil War had deep roots that go back not just to the 1840s or 1850s, and not even to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Indeed, the fundamental division dates back to the English Civil War in the 1648, when the Puritan Roundheads under Oliver Cromwell ousted and beheaded Charles I, and established the English Republic (which—the English having little taste for radicalism or dictatorships, fortunately collapses in 1660 with the restoration of the Stuart monarchs).  Loyalists to the king and the monarchical order were the aristocratic Cavaliers.  Those same Puritans of East Anglia settled heavily in Massachusetts following the Pilgrims’ famous landing at Plymouth Rock, and the Cavaliers—in body and spirit—dominated the tidewater plantations of the South.

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America’s Roman Roots

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The Portly Politico is striving towards self-sufficiency.  If you would like to support my work, consider subscribing to my SubscribeStar page.  Your subscription of $1/month or more gains you access to exclusive content every Saturday, including annual #MAGAWeek posts.  If you’ve received any value from my scribblings, I would very much appreciate your support.

Armchair historians and dime-a-dozen political pundits (like yours portly) love to compare the United States to the Roman Empire, usually during its decadent latter-day decline.  The comparison is an easy one to make; just like Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries, the United States possesses an underclass of wage slaves; an obsession with mystery religions and spiritualistic fads; an immigration crisis; a decadent, self-indulgent quasi-morality; declining birth rates; and a sense the precious liberty of the old Republic has been lost.

Yet for all those declinist comparisons—apt though they may be—Americans should extend their historical gaze back further, to the Roman Republic.  That is what Dr. Steele Brand, Assistant Professor of History at The King’s College, urges Americans to do in an op-ed entitled “Why knowing Roman history is key to preserving America’s future” (thanks to a dear former of colleague of mine—and a regular reader of this blog—for sharing this piece).

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Lazy Sunday XVI: #MAGAWeek2018

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This week marks the beginning of , my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, July 1 and running through Friday, July 5, this year’s posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

To celebrate , this edition of Lazy Sunday features the four essays from #MAGAWeek2018.  They pull from my years of teaching and reading American history, and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

1.) “George Washington” – The Father of Our Country!  Social justice bleeding hearts and historical revisionists have striven for years to cast Washington and the other Founders as greedy slave owners who wrote a wicked, capitalistic Constitution to preserve their own power.  What a cartoonishly stupid view of American history!  George Washington was an able leader, and demonstrated a trait that the modern Left would do well to learn:  mercy.

2.) “John Quincy Adams” – John Quincy Adams was a terrible president, and suffered from the aloof elitism of our modern coastal elites (he was even staged against the Trump of his time, the populist hero Andrew Jackson).  That said, he was the best Secretary of State this nation ever had (so don’t be too hasty in drawing comparisons between him and Secretary Hillary Clinton).  JQA crafted America’s expansion across the continent with adept skill.  Read all about it in my lengthy biography.

3.) “Thomas Jefferson & The Declaration of Independence” – Jefferson is, other Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and a handful of other Founders, our most important Founding Father.  He wrote the Declaration of Independence, with its lofty ideals of God-given rights and liberty.  He was a Renaissance Man, talented in many areas, and while he harbored a naive support for the French Revolution (and revolutions generally), his philosophic mind bequeathed to the world a document that is a thunderclap for liberty here and abroad.

4.) “Limited Government” – This post largely focused on the Madisonian system of the Constitution.  I fear that we no longer truly live under the constitutional order that Madison and the fifty-four other Framers created, as our insidious Deep State and bureaucratic elite resist the results of elections and despise the very citizens they are charged to serve.  Let us hope the spirit of 1787 will move Americans again to insist upon the restoration of limited government.

Enjoy this look back at our nation’s history, and stay tuned for more entries this week!

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Washington’s Hardball Model

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History blogger SheafferHistorianAZ at Practically Historical shares a piece from American history blog Almost Chosen People containing letters exchanged between General George Washington and British General Thomas Gage regarding the mistreatment of American POWs in British camps.  In the exchange, Washington warns Gage that British prisoners will be treated the same way American prisoners are, so that if the abuse of Americans continued, British POWs would endure the same mistreatment.

Washington made good on his promise for a short period, then resumed normal, humane treatment of POWs under his care.  Washington was known for his magnanimity, but “had his limits,” as Almost Chosen writes.

This bit of American history caught my eye because it seemed germane to yesterday’s post about Attorney General William Barr and the threat of the Deep State.  Such serendipitous connections are almost routine, I’ve learned, the more I read and blog.

What does one have to do with the other?  Washington here gave us an excellent example of how President Trump and AG Barr can approach the difficult task of holding Deep State traitors accountable, while avoiding a total breakdown into institutional civil war.

In essence:  treat your foes mercifully—until and unless they violate the rules of gentlemanly engagement.  The Left long ago ceased to follow any such restraint, and the Right’s major mistake is that, rather than combating it, we’ve attempted to operate within the Left’s increasingly narrow, insanity-driven frame.

Instead, the Right should hit back—and hard—against the Deep State.  Make a quick, decisive, coordinated strike and bring criminal charges against Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok.  Prosecute them and their ilk swiftly, and make noise about investigating the Clinton Foundation under RICO jurisdiction.  President Trump could imply that such investigations and probes will cease once the Left decides to treat conservatives fairly again.

Such a “Washington Model” of measured-but-decisive action against the Deep State would send a powerful, unmistakable message to the swamp critters in D.C. and the Democratic Party:  play by the rules of “loyal opposition,” treat your opponents with dignity, or endure a dose of your own medicine.

We’ve depended on empty appeals to “decorum” and “taking the high road” for too long.  We shouldn’t swing wildly like a drunken pugilist, but should strike devastating blows on critical targets.  Drain the Swamp!