On my "slap down"... and other thoughts:

Sorry, man... I didn't mean to take away from your obscure but accurate reference to Jackson. I especially liked it because I have always had a fascination with that man. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson is as big an enigma as the Civil War has ever produced... nerdy, stuck-up, often confused in peace time, but decisive and completely in control during a fight. My favorite Civil War authority, Shelby Foote, also was particularly fascinated by Jackson, and he repeatedly made reference to how different the last year of the war might have been had Jackson not fallen to friendly fire the way he did.

In fact, your comment made me recall a particularly topic point that I was almost sure you were referencing. During the war, Jackson was faced with the prospect of dealing with an overly-large number of deserters. This was very "uncommon" in his experience, since the "First Brigade" was especially loyal and dedicated to its General and the Southern Cause overall. He seemed especially torn when faced with the prospect of having some (four or five I think) shot in front of the whole Brigade, as an example of what happens to deserters and in the hope of reducing the occurrence of the crime. When he wrote home to his wife about the event, he stated that he looked to George Washington for his example in leadership, because Washington had faced similar problems in 1776 with the high desertion rate among his volunteers from Pennsylvania. These deserters (and would-be deserters) finally rose up in a mutiny that forced Washington to have several of the leaders executed by the very men they commanded in the mutiny. I was always impressed that Jackson had the same awe and reverence for Washington (perhaps even more than most, since both were Virginians first) for Washington as the Union troops and leaders did... even though he was fighting the very country Washington fought to establish.

An excellent example of the dichotomy of views that can and do exist in a nation such as ours. Here's another good example:

As anyone would expect, the numbers associated with an election like the one we just had are rolling in, and bean-counters are making their bread-and-butter crunching those numbers into facts and figures that will help (???) people understand what happened last Tuesday. Amidst all these crunched numbers, I found this article in the Washington Post, and thought I'd point out a glaring one of my own...

If you read down the whole article and get to the last (concluding) paragraph of the editorial, you'll see that the conclusion drawn by the author is that Obama waited too long and didn't spend enough on stimulus efforts or job creation policies, and THAT is why the Dems lost. But the first paragraph of the article shows that the demographic with the highest likelihood of feeling the unemployment bite is the one that voted staunchly in FAVOR of the Democratic agenda.

If I only look at facts and figures provided in the article (and follow nothing else), I'm FORCED to conclude that the reasoning behind the anti-Dem trend in the polls was because the portion of the demographic that actually PAYS FOR things like mortgages, Federal income taxes, small business loans, student loans now due, car payments, fuel bills, and all the other countless things that suck our paychecks dry every week want to see the deductions and withholdings inside their stubs REDUCED... but the "18 to 29" bracket can't have the experience in seeing what LOWER TAXES can do to an economy, because they've never known anything different... they aren't old enough to have a memory of anything further back than 5 to 8 years, and they certainly won't be able to remember the last honest-to-God recession and what it did to a paycheck.

This sort of dichotomy is easily fought, though... rational presentation of the FACTS associated with historical tax rates and rates of inflation can show clearly and with no gray area just what the differences are. The GOP is beginning to learn this, and is reaping the rewards. Let's hope they don't forget the lesson anytime soon, though.