Bragging on Themselves

 

In NC tonight, Ron Desantis pledges to rename Ft. Liberty back to Ft. Bragg in honor of the incompetent, failed, fired Confederate General who rose up to help lead an insurrection and civil war against the United States. pic.twitter.com/62bVF0TZ8b

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 9, 2023

So, I really had to ask myself, "What in the world does the governor of the Free State of Florida have against the name 'Liberty'?" Because the name went from Ft. Bragg, named after a General whose one notable win was against this nation in a conflict best described as treason in defense of slavery, to "Liberty", a cause I think we all should admire.

Ron DeSantis doesn't hate liberty, does he?

(Well, he's questionable on the First Amendment and it just goes to show, you can lead a person to law school, but you can't make them think the law's a good idea. I mean, he tries. And he tries.)

Maybe he does have a problem with liberty, for some people. It really does feel like a certain kind of signifying for a Florida Governor to back naming a US military base for a Confederate general. The base itself, of course, stays the same, and only the name changes--so why does he care?

It's grievance. Pretending something is lost because it's been re-named is as silly as claiming one's nose has literally been got or that one's face has gone away in a game of Peek-a-Boo.  Trump did the same kind of grievance and still does. If we change anything, we won't even have a country. 

Mike Pence is doing it, too.  It feels like they are trying to support the Confederate cause of states defying federal law, or even seceding, a very strange position for presidential candidates to take. And I could be wrong--they might just be catering to the assumed historical imaginations of Confederate flag-carrying racist whites. For some reason. And it doesn't even really feel like a thing that should be an actual issue--it's a wedge issue.  It's actually kind of a push-poll-like wedge issue, where they are trying to capture and create that audience at the same time.

I don't know why they think they are going to be better at doing this than Trump ever was. He's the Mozart of Malice, the Beethoven of bigotry. And he's liable to actually start a second Civil War--and those posers just wish.