Reagan benefited from the increasing conservatism of the country.  He was also a very comfortable candidate, very likable, much like Bush II.  In many ways he was a forerunner of the modern candidate – soft, cushy, kind of like the Pillsbury Dougboy.  No rough edges.  It will get you elected today but it can too easily mean that there is no hard core inside and that is potentially dangerous.  I am convinced that our three greatest Presidents could never be elected in today's television and advertiising driven culture that places most of the emphasis on style rather than substance.  Lincoln was, well, ugly.  He reportedly had a high squeeky voice with a pronounced Midwestern twang.  His wife was a bit of a whack job and there were rumors that his mother may have been less than morally upright.  FDR was a cripple whose wife was uglier than sin, even though she was a great women.  Truman lived with his mother-in-law and was way too blunt spoken – he once threatened to beat the hell out of a newsman who denigrated his daughter's singing ability and his language was salty.  He also refused to play the spin game and very publicly went to the funeral of Tom Pendergast, his mentor and the man who got him started in politics, and who was a notorious political boss.  And he was a failed businessman whose father, unlike our current President, didn't have rich friends to bail him out.  Don't believe me that non-warm-and-fuzzy can't get elected?  Look at how fast Howard Dean crashed and burned after one “excited utterance”.  Listen to any of the so-called presidential “debates” that would never have cut it on my high school debate team.  They are in fact serial spin sessions with their pre-determined questions and their 90 second canned responses and no actual debate between the the candidates.  Read the accounts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and compare them to any of the recent presidential debates – you'll see what I mean.  Oh, and by the way, Mondale had the television charisma of a wet mop while Reagan came across as warm and fuzzy, at least on tv, and that's all that counts nowadays.

The case was Worcester v Georgia and the decision was announced on March 3, 1832 by Chief Justice John Marshall.  It declared that Native American tribes were independent nations capable of making treaties and that only the federal government could make laws governing them.  Jackson refused to enforce the decision with the result that the Georgia state legislature was able to systematically deprive the Cherokee nation of their rights as secured under previous treaties which allowed settlers to encroach on their lands and the state to annex it as they saw fit.  The fact that gold was discovered on Cherokee land in 1829 just MIGHT have had something to do with it, as well as the fact that they they were successful farmers which meant that settlers could avoid the aggravation of having to clear virgin land before settling.  The end result was that the Cherokees were eventually forced to sign away their land because they really had no other option and then came the Trail of Tears, an abomination by any age's standards.  Now, I am not an expert on morality or law, I would assume that one of the givens in our constitutional form of government is that the chief executive is required to abide by the decisions of the supreme judicial body, otherwise we would call him King or Dictator or Fuehrer or maybe even Fearless Leader instead of President.  I am also reasonably sure that the Bible frowns on stealing from your neighbor and this country has always considered itself a Christian country and I'm pretty sure Christ never said that it was okay to steal.  So even conceding that we shouldn't judge past actions by current morality, a position I have maintained for years and why I am adamantly opposed to reparations for slavery while reparations for segregation are an entirely different matter, I feel fairly confident in asserting that Jackson's conduct in relation to the Cherokee nation was both illegal and immoral by then-current standards, as well as just plain reprehensible by anybody's standards.

While our country is no longer legally racist and many of the signs of overt racism have been relegated to history, there are still many vestiges of our past hanging around.  A slightly more than cursory examination of our poverty statistics will demonstrate that.  Look at who controls all the reins of power, both government and business – almost exclusively white males.  Yes, there are a lot of minorities and women in these positions but nowhere near reflective of their actual participation in society.  Look at the recent furor over immigration.  Do you think that it would be feared at anywhere near the level it is if the people coming across our southern border were white English-speaking Christians?  And it wasn't that long ago that racism was rampant and legal.  I remember classified ads that were divided into “white” and “colored” sections, I remember “colored” drinking fountains, and I'm not yet 60 (close but no cigar)..  So the U.S, is a long way away from being the pure example of brotherhood that we like to imagine ourselves.  As for why the hatred between Muslim and Christian has gone on for 1300 years, it just might be related to the fact that the Christian world spent 300 years trying to destroy the Muslim world for religious reasons, took a 300 year hiatus so that it could conquer the Western Hemisphere and the Orient, then occupied most of the Muslim world in the 1800's and stayed there until the middle of the 1900's and has consistently meddled in their internal affairs since then.  Don't forget that the Christian world, after standing by while the Nazis murdered 6,000,000 Jews, then took the survivors and transplanted them – not to the European continent which is where most of the victims of the Holocaust originated – but in former Arab Muslim land that the British had conquered.  And we have continued to meddle in their internal affairs right up to our conquest of Iraq for the sole purpose of regime change. So I think that the Western Christian society and governments bear much of the blame for the current wave of Islamic fundamentalism.  And we're not going to stop it by letting our Israeli surrogates kill Lebanese civilians just because they happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.  In fact, if anything that only makes things worse.  The Christian West has to make a sincere, sustained effort to find diplomatic solutions to our differences with the Arab world.  Yes, we have to defend ourselves against their lunatic element just like we have to defend ourselves against the lunatic elements of both the right and the left at home, but if we don't find a political solution to our problems with the Islamic world we are eventually going to get into a situation of who can kill who the fastest.

You can say I'm pesimistic, but they never will learn to reason with one another. They have had thousands of years and the world has done nothing but get more violent.

They MIGHT learn to get along with each other but I'm not optimistic.  We don't have any kids so my hope is that it all doesn't go up in smoke before my wife and I are dead.  I figure that if the people who HAVE kids are too stupid to figure out that unless they get it together their kids' future is looking fairly grim, then why should I worry.

It is just the latest chapter in a war for domination that has been going on since the First Crusade in the Early Middle Ages.  The principle problem is that the world is shrinking on a daily basis while humanity's ability to kill has increased exponentially.  The secondary problem is that mankind as a species has not evolved enough to replace war and mayhem with rational discussion leading to a compromise that both sides can live with.  Our best hope is that the silent majority on both sides, those people that just want to live their lives in peace and harmony so they can get on with enjoying it, will somehow be able to contain the lunatic fringe.  The problem is that too often it is the lunatic fringe who are in charge.  Sometimes I become convinced that it is a race to see what will wipe out mankind first – nuclear armageddon or irreversible climate change triggered by runaway pollution.  And before you scoff too much, remember that dinosaurs ruled for 65,000,000 years before they were wiped out virtually overnight and that their demise was only one of several instances of virtual global annihalation of much of the world's living creatures.  Mankind is a relative newcomer and we are still, in many ways, in our infancy.  Hopefully we won't committ global suicide due to our collective immaturity.

If there had never been slavery in the South the South would have probably ended up looking much like the North – an area of small farmers and entreprenuers.  The biggest change would have been the lack of a planter aristocracy that made the concept of physical work and making money anathema to most white male Southerners.  The literature about the antebellum South written by outsiders is replete with accounts of the complete unwillingness of the white male population to do anything that could be consider labor because that was something that slaves did.  If you have ever read de Touqueville's “Democracy in America” you should remember his comparison of the two banks of the Ohio River – on the north bank there were neat, well-kept farms where the buildings were solid and well maintained while the south bank was covered with ramshackle hovels, a real “Tobacco Road” scene.  People forget that it was commonly accepted that slavery was not a viable economic system – and it wasn't – until the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 which increased productivity by such a huge amount that it suddenly became not only profitable, but immensely profitable.  But not only did it destroy the motivation of most southern white males to work, it also resulted in the plantation owners being in virtual indentured servitude to the factors who bought their cotton on credit and then used that credit to purchase the luxuries that supported the planters' lavish life style.  Read the letters of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and other large slave owners.  They knew that slavery was not only morally wrong but that it was destroying the South, but at the same time they were afraid to end it because they didn't know any other way and, this is the really scary part, what to do with all the slaves?  They couldn't send them back to Africa – it cost too much.  They couldn't replace them with free labor – the work was too physically demanding.  That was why they resorted to slavery in the first place.  They tried to raise cotton, rice, and indigo with indentured servants – kind of a time-limited slavery – but the climate made the labor-intensive work too man-killing.  They couldn't just free the slaves – slave rebellion was a constant fear that makes the current fear of terrorists seem ridiculously trivial.  There only option was to stay the course and try to force the North to join them by opening up the whole country to slavery.  The end result was the Civil War because, once again, trying to force your social or political structure on somebody else never works.

That's the problem with military action – the results are often not what was intended but they are usually fatal to somebody.  Usually the victims of these unintended consequences are innocent bystanders but sometimes, as at Little Big Horn, its the poor schmucks who were just doing their jobs that get the short end of the stick.  The only thing that distinguishes that particular FUBAR from so many of the others throughout history is that the moron responsible actually joined his victims in suffering the consequences of his particular act of stupidity.  That is why military action should usually be the solution of last resort.  “Woops, sorry, my bad.”  may work when you overcharged for that hamburger but doesn't cut it when you gave the order that resulted in dropping a bomb on the wrong house.  I'm not a pacifist, far from it, but after 50+ years of studying history, much of it military history, I have learned that military solutions too often create more problems than they solve because too often there is no clear-cut right-wrong situation, no discernable moral distinction between the two sides.  World War II, our Civil War,  the intervention in Kosovo are examples of right v. wrong where the “right” side won.  Most other military actions fall more-or-less into the “I'm going to do this because I want to and I can” category with each side convinced that they were on the side of right.  But the winner gets to write the history books and the loser gets the short end and people like us end up having exchanges like this but hey, that's life.