Facebook pages aren’t just for social networking.

They can promote social justice, too, according to Axel Caballero and Ofelia Yañez of Los Angeles. They’re battling anti-Latino “Tea Party racism and violence” on Cuéntame, their Facebook page.

“Both Ofelia and I have seen with great sadness and frustration how Tea Partiers have unjustly and unfairly targeted the Latino community to further their political agenda,” Caballero wrote in an email from the Culver City, Calif.-based Brave New Foundation.

Cuéntame is a project of the foundation, which uses media to promote “an open democratic society that encourages rigorous debate, opportunity and justice for all.”

Cuéntame’s “latest campaign exposing Tea Party racism has hit a nerve, not only within the Latino community but also with many folks across the country who “are also sick of “…all the hatred, the violence and the bigotry peddled by Teabaggers,” Caballero added.

The campaign features videos that can be viewed online here.

Caballero’s email also explained that Cuéntame is a Facebook community of “users where Latinos and the general public can connect and interact with fellow Facebook fans, activists, artists, bloggers, public figures, musicians, journalists and other community members.”

“Cuéntame” has a double meaning in Spanish, according to Caballero: “‘Count me in,’ and ‘Tell me your story.’”

The email from Caballero also said that “From calling Mexicans ‘filthy, stinking animals,’ to listening the likes of Tom Tancredo and Sarah Palin deliver hateful speech after hateful speech, to the increased use of violence in their words and actions, Teabaggers have come out in full force against our community.”

The union-haters must still be in hog heaven over an AFL-CIO-sponsored poll that showed most Massachusetts union households supported Republican Scott Brown over union-endorsed Democrat Martha Coakley in the special election to succeed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

The margin was 49 to 46 percent. The numbers remind me again of Pogo’s apt observation: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The Massachusetts AFL-CIO unanimously endorsed Coakley. She was clearly the pro-union candidate, according to Robert Haynes, president of the Bay State labor federation.

Nonetheless, Karen Ackerman, the national AFL-CIO’s political director, admitted to the Wall Street Journal that “What happened in Massachusetts is that working families did not see the Democratic candidate as being on their side.”

Apparently, more than a few union members blame the still sluggish economy on President Barack Obama and the Democrats. Jeff Wiggins and Mike Hall don’t get it.

“Bush and Cheney’s warmed over Reagan era ‘trickle-down’ economics caused the economic mess we’re in, and yet people want to punish Obama and the Democrats?” asked Wiggins, a Kentucky labor leader. “That’s crazy.”

Brown is “a Bush-Cheney clone” on the economy, wrote Hall on the AFL-CIO Now Blog. “Not only does [Brown]…believe the answer to the economic crisis is more tax cuts for the wealthy; he opposes a proposed fee on Wall Street firms that received taxpayer bailouts and then gave extravagant bonuses to executives,” he added.

In another posting, Hall quoted Haynes who said Brown snubbed Massachusetts unions. Haynes said Brown “refused to fill out the AFL-CIO questionnaire or appear at the AFL-CIO candidates’ forum to tell workers directly what he stands for. As a candidate, Martha Coakley filled out our questionnaire and appeared at our candidates’ forum to speak directly to us about where she stands.”

Coakley is for the Employee Free Choice Act, which the AFL-CIO says “would allow workers, not corporations, to choose whether and how they want to form a union.” (For the record, the proposed legislation does not outlaw the secret ballot.)

Brown, according to Hall, is against the Employee Free Choice Act.

Anyway, Brad Woodhouse, communications director for the Democratic National Committee, told the WSJ that “the election in Massachusetts involved the same type of frustration and anger at Washington and the current state of the economy that swept President Obama into office in 2008.”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told AFL-CIO Now Blog writer Tula Connell that “the American people are justifiably uncertain and fearful in these tough economic times.” He said the outcome in Massachusetts “…should be a sobering reminder to candidates running in 2010.”

Trumka backed Obama in 2008. I did, too.

But he warned, “The American people are urgently expecting results from Washington. If elected officials want the support of working families, they need to fight to win legislation on jobs, health care and financial regulation. Americans need a champion who will fight for their cause.”

Brown isn’t the champion Trumka has in mind. He called the Republican’s win “…a giant step backward for working families. Brown has already promised to be the 41st vote for the Republican party of NO on crucial improvements for working men and women.”

I’ll add a Presbyterian “amen” to brother Trumka’s remarks.

Brown, who favored the McCain-Palin ticket, wants a “trickle down” encore. So will whoever wins the GOP nomination in 2012.

That’s why this union card-carrying Hubert Humphrey Democrat expects to be in Obama’s corner again in 2012.

I’ve been here before. So have some of my union brothers and sisters, including many in Massachusetts.

Back in 1980, we weren’t exactly wild about President Jimmy Carter. We voted for him four years before. But we were pulling for Kennedy, who was more to our liking, to get the Democratic presidential nomination.

When Carter was re-nominated, we got behind him. The other guy was Ronald Reagan, the most anti-union president since Herbert Hoover.

“A union member voting for Reagan would be like a chicken voting for Col. Sanders” said a sign in a union hall in 1980 in Paducah, Ky., where I teach. “A union member voting Republican would be like a rabbit voting for hunting season to open,” suggested Kentucky Labor Secretary J.R Gray, a former Democratic state legislator and an ex-Machinists union official.

Admittedly, the whole Democratic Party hasn’t always been with us.

In the 1930s, segregationist Southern Democrats in Congress joined their anti-labor Yankee Republican brethren in battling unions, FDR and the New Deal, all of which they slammed as “socialist.” Sound familiar? Some of today’s “Blue Dog Democrats” are allied with the GOP in opposing the Employee Free Choice Act.

Yet by and large, the Democrats have done much more for unions than Republicans have. (The few liberal, pro-union Republicans, including Sen. Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, are long gone from Congress.)

Ted Kennedy earned a 93-percent pro-labor lifetime score from the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education. As a senator, Obama notched a 98 percent COPE rating.

I’d bet big money Coakley would have scored in the 90s. I’d also wager a tidy sum that Brown’s COPE tally will be a whole lot lower.

Eighty-two percent of them said they want a public option as part of the Democrats’ health care reform.

Yet they just helped elect a guy who opposes the public option and the Democrats’ health care reform.

They’re Obama voters who cast ballots for Massachusetts’s new Republican senator, Scott Brown. He promised to be “the 41st vote” against what the GOP slams as “Obamacare.”

The 82 percent number is from a Research 2000 survey taken right after the polls closed in the special election to fill the unexpired term of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. He championed health care reform, including a robust public option.

The poll was conducted for three liberal groups who favor a public option – the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America and MoveOn.org.

Progressive Change says the poll number means “even Scott Brown voters want the public option, want Democrats to be bolder.” Thus, the Democrats should get busy and pass health care reform with the public option, Progressive Change says.

The poll number hit me differently. It reminded me anew of Pogo’s immortal words: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I’m a union-card carrying Hubert Humphrey Democrat. I support a public option. But you can bet your snow boots if I were a Bay State voter, I’d have trudged through a blizzard to cast my ballot for Martha Coakley, Brown’s Democratic opponent.

Don’t get me wrong. The House and Senate Democratic health care plans don’t go far enough for me either. But I don’t see the wisdom of showing my displeasure with the president I voted for (and plan to vote for again in 2012) by helping elect a Republican who says he and the Democrats have gone too far on health care.

I suppose the pro-public option Obama voters who backed Brown figured they were casting a “protest vote.” I read where one woman said she was a “Brown Democrat.”

Motives for voting don’t matter when ballots are tallied. “Protest votes” count the same as the votes of true believers.

Other Obama voters helped sink Coakley by not voting. Both she and Brown said turnout would be the key in the election.

The Democrats hold a big-time voter registration edge over the Republicans in Blue State Massachusetts, though most voters are signed up as independents. Brown’s only chance was to turn out the GOP base and pick off a big chunk of independents – most of whom vote Democratic — and Democrats who feel disaffected for one reason or another.

A lot of Obama voters evidently did stay at home. The Research 2000 folks also polled some of them. Eighty-six percent said they favor the public option. I guess like the “Brown Democrats,” the no-shows wanted to “send a message.” No doubt Brown is thankful for their service to him, too.

I don’t know if Sen. Brown or his campaign staffers are planning to pass out Most Valuable Player awards. But if they are, I’d like to nominate the Obama voters who “want a public option, want the Democrats to be bolder” but who didn’t vote or voted for a candidate who is anti-public option and is the new hero at Fox News.

I wish the media would quit saying “populist anger” is fueling the Tea Bagger movement. It’s giving the real Populists a bad name.

The Tea Baggers are on the side of millionaires. The Populists of the 1890s weren’t.

I teach history, but I used to be a reporter. Good reporters dig deep when they write stories. They even read history books.

Granted, there are some similarities between Tea Baggers and Populists. Tea Baggers are anti-government. So were Populists. Most Tea Baggers aren’t rich. Neither were most Populists.

But the Tea Bagger movement and Populism are fundamentally different.
Tea Baggers want government to step aside and let the “free market” prevail. Millionaires love it.

Most Populists were poor farmers and laborers victimized by America’s new industrial order. They wanted government to step in and safeguard ordinary citizens against the union-busting millionaires who, thanks to the “free market,” had gotten rich by impoverishing those who toiled in mines and mills or tilled the soil. 

The Populists called millionaires “Robber Barons.” Tea Baggers would probably call Populists “socialists.” “Socialist” is, of course, the Tea Baggers’ big-time slam.

A lot of Populists didn’t consider “socialist” a slur. Many of them became socialists after their movement died.

Populists roundly denounced millionaires like John D. Rockefeller and the politicians – Republicans and Democrats – they paid handsomely to keep unions and government regulations off the back of big business.

In 1892, the Populists got so mad that they started their own party, officially the People’s Party. They didn’t pull punches in the preamble to their party constitution: “The fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”

The Tea Baggers, like millionaires, rail against “big government.” At their rallies Tea Baggers wave signs urging the “SOCIALIST OBAMA” to “LET THE FREE MARKET WORK,” demanding that “LEFTIST PARASITES” carry their “OWN WEIGHT!!!” and mourning the death of “CAPITOLISM [sic].”

A lot of Republicans love the Tea Baggers, too. The GOP, many millionaires, and Tea Baggers have made common cause against health care reform.

The Tea Baggers have bought into Social Darwinism, the 19th century gospel of the rich and powerful that extolled the “free market” as almost divinely inspired. “God gave me my money,” Rockefeller said.

Social Darwinists said if you’re poor and powerless, it’s your own fault. Some Tea Baggers feel that way about health care. “YOUR HEALTH YOUR PROBLEM,” said another sign at a Tea Bagger rally.

Rockefeller hated the Populists. So would the Tea Baggers.

“We believe that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teaching of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land,” the Populist platform also said.

“We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them.”

No doubt, Rockefeller and the other high rollers of the 1890s would have helped bankroll the Tea Bagger movement as some millionaires are doing today.

Of course, the Robber Barons wouldn’t have invited the “impeach Obama and his socialist comrades in Congress” crowd to dinner or a round of golf at the country club. I doubt many big bucks backers of the Tea Bagger movement hobnob with actual Tea Baggers.

Anyway, the Robber Barons would have found the Tea Baggers useful working-class foils for the Populists. The millionaires and well-heeled Democratic and Republican pols were scared the Populists, who were strongest in the Southern and Western farm states, would somehow unite all poor people of all races at the ballot box.

The Populist Party collapsed about the time of the Spanish-American War of 1898. “…Where a threatening mass movement developed, the two-party system stood ready to send out one of its columns to surround that movement and drain it of vitality,” Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States. “And always, as a way of drowning class resentment in a flood of slogans for national unity, there was patriotism.”

At the same time, white supremacist Dixie Democrats split the Populist’s powerful Southern wing by playing the race card. Democratic legislatures in the old Confederate states passed laws making African Americans second class citizens by denying them the vote and segregating them from whites.

Not coincidentally, not to me anyway, almost every Tea Bagger is white. Pointedly racist signs are not uncommon at their rallies.

But the powers-that-be have always been good at dividing working folks against each other. When Yankee railroad tycoon Jay Gould employed strikebreakers – unions call them “scabs” — he boasted, “I can hire half of the working class to kill the other half.” (I read that one blogger called the Tea Baggers “corporate scabs and the enemy of the working class.”)

Anyway, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka knows history. “For corporate America, dividing workers wasn’t simply a tactic; it was fundamental to its success,” he said.

Meanwhile, some people – “liberal elitists” to the Tea Baggers and their Republican friends — see a ton of irony in the Tea Bagger movement. Joseph Palermo does.

He teaches history at California State University-Sacramento. Last spring, the prof turned Huffington Post reporter at a Tea Bagger rally in Sacramento.

Palermo wrote that he heard speakers bash unions and the Employee Free Choice Act, even though “most of the people in the crowd were clearly working class.”

His post on the Internet newspaper concluded: “…Therein lies the beauty of the whole Tea Bag movement. Affluent people like [ultra-conservative commentator, blogger and writer] Michelle Malkin and [far-right-wing  economist] Grover Norquist and the army of radio ‘personalities’ convince working people, most of whom have a relative or are themselves on Medicare or Social Security, to denounce taxes on affluent people. Many of the people at the rally were from the eastern foothill communities that are pretty impoverished and would benefit from Obama’s health care, economic, and education policies. The foreclosure rate alone east of Sacramento would lead one to think that far more people in this region could use some government help.”

Anyway, John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould would have been crazy about the Tea Baggers, too.

The “Tea Baggers” made LEO’s “list of the 50 grandest, most brain-bending and spirit-crushing gaffes, foibles and malicious undertakings” of 2009.

LEO is short for Louisville Eccentric Observer, an alternative newsweekly — print and online — in Kentucky’s largest city. “…Folks and organizations qualify for our infamous awards because, generally speaking, they’ve betrayed the public trust,” Leo explains. “Our message is simple: Do better.”

LEO doesn’t pull punches. It defines Tea Baggers as “an embodiment of all that is loud, frightened and stupid in this country.” Their “anti-government…movement,” according to Leo, “…has provided conservative middle America a perfect medium through which their fear of an illegally elected black president and his socialist utopia of spending, taxing and drinking the blood of innocent children can be mitigated, live, on Fox News. Greatest hits include: racist signage, co-opting the mechanisms of legitimate protest for corporate gain, substituting decibels for facts, and generally sustaining the political abomination that is Sarah Palin well beyond her expiration date.”

For “penance,” LEO suggests to the Tea Baggers: “Go ahead and keep voting against your own self-interest.”

This Kentucky history teacher suspects the Tea Baggers, among the noisiest opponents of health care reform, will do just that. At the same time they will likely keep standing history on its head in how they characterize their movement.

Old Sam Adams, who threw the Boston Tea Party in 1773, must be spinning in his grave in Beantown’s Granary Burying Ground. Adams’ rambunctious Sons of Liberty (King George III’s Redcoats called them sons of something else) tossed all that tea into Boston harbor in the name of “no taxation without representation.” In other words, Adams, the Sons – and like-minded Americans – argued that the British Parliament in London had no right to tax us because we weren’t represented in Parliament.

“No taxation without representation” became the rallying cry of our revolution. The Tea Baggers have co-opted the slogan, plastering it on their buttons, bumper stickers and signs.

To be sure, “No taxation without representation” is a fundamental principle of our representative democracy. Only our elected representatives can tax us.

Like all qualified voters, Tea Baggers had their chance to elect their candidates in 2008. My guess is they cast ballots for a lot of losers from McCain-Palin down.

So the Tea Baggers got mad and hit the streets, which is their constitutional right to do. But if they feel “unrepresented” it’s because the other side won.
Hence, comparing the Tea Party movement to the aims of the Boston Tea Party just doesn’t add up history-wise.

No matter, the Tea Baggers see themselves as “patriots” and revolutionaries, like Sam Adams, who was dubbed “the Father of the American Revolution.” But strictly speaking the Tea Baggers are counter-revolutionaries, notably in the health care debate. Whatever their motives for protesting health care reform, the Tea Baggers are on the side of the status quo: a private, for-profit health care system.

Tories, Americans who opposed independence from Mother Britain, were also counter-revolutionaries. Like the Tea Baggers, they favored the status quo – in their case, royal rule from Britain.

Anyway, from what I’ve seen on TV, most Tea Baggers don’t appear to be rich. But rich people, including millionaire and former Republican U.S. Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, are egging them on.

Armey recently teamed up with GOP Chairman Michael Steele, who is also well-heeled, to woo the Tea Baggers to the Republicans. The GOP apparently isn’t far right wing enough for some Tea Baggers, maybe those who sport signs comparing Obama to Hitler or to monkeys. (It’s not a coincidence that almost all Tea Baggers are white folks.)

Of course, throughout history, some working stiffs have been quite willing to take the side of the rich and powerful. While many Tories were wealthy men who figured to stay in the chips with George III, a number of their fellow British sympathizers were at or near the bottom of colonial society.

Anyway, for my money, the best book on how rich Republicans have suckered working stiffs like Tea Baggers into voting against their own self-interest is What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives won the Heart of America  by journalist Thomas Frank.

Naturally, the Republicans despise Frank. They lambaste him as a “liberal elitist,” their stock smear word for anybody who exposes the con job they’ve been pulling on working people since the post-Civil War era. That’s when the GOP switched from the party of “Lincoln and Liberty” to the party of what FDR called “economic royalists.” (The Great Emancipator must be spinning in his Springfield tomb over his party’s cozying with the Tea Baggers.)

Frank wrote his book before the Tea Baggers. Even so, it is as timely as ever. You can substitute any state, including my native Kentucky, for “Kansas.”

Frank wrote: “Not long ago, Kansas would have responded to the current situation by making the bastards pay. This would have been a political certainty, as predictable as what happens when you touch a match to a puddle of gasoline. When business screwed the farmers and the workers – when it implemented monopoly strategies invasive beyond the Populists’ furthest imaginings — when it ripped off shareholders and casually tossed thousands out of work — you could be damned sure about what would follow.

“Not these days. Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the right. Strip today’s Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they’re protesting in front of abortion clinics [or shouting down Democratic lawmakers at town hall forums on health care]. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there’s a good chance they’ll join the John Birch Society [and yell some more at a Tea Party rally]. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.”

I’ll add a working-class Presbyterian “amen” to what Frank wrote.

It is the great unmentionable in the health care debate.

It is an attitude apparently shared by many voters.  The Democrats keep quiet about it because they don’t want to make voters mad.

The same attitude is helping the Republicans thwart reform. But they won’t acknowledge it publicly for fear of looking bad.

B. Smith isn’t scared to talk about it on his Internet blogsite, Radical Love. It is greed and selfishness, which he says are “hateful” aspects “of humanity that this debate has brought out” in much of the body politic.

Smith identifies himself as a Methodist pastor from Pulaski, Tenn. He doesn’t pull punches.

Smith says, flat out, that some folks oppose reform because they think it will diminish the quality of their health care in favor of “undeserving” poor people and immigrants. “It is in times of economic downturn when people recede into their shells like a scared turtle and refuse to help anyone but themselves and their immediate families,” the parson added.

This union-card carrying Hubert Humphrey Democrat and Bluegrass State Presbyterian will add an “amen” to Rev. Smith’s cyber-sermonette.

Tennessee and my native Kentucky are two of the church-goingest states in the church-goingest nation in Christendom. But when it comes to backing government help for people who need help — people without health insurance, for instance – a lot of Tennesseans, Kentuckians and other Americans have never been all that big on the biblical brother’s keeper thing.

Per capita, the U.S. trails all of its NATO allies in social welfare spending, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
We’re the only NATO country without some form of comprehensive national health insurance. Whatever health reform Congress approves – if anything — will be small potatoes compared to government health care programs in other countries.

True, Americans are bigger on charitable giving than anybody else. But most of the money they donate goes to their churches and to educational institutions, including their alma maters, not to charities that directly aid the poor.

Anyway, many Americans probably would agree with a Georgia woman who told the Associated Press why she’s not a fan of government health care. “Well, for one, I know nobody wants to pay taxes for anybody else to go to the doctor — I don’t,” she was quoted in an AP wire story about an AP health care poll. “I don’t want to pay for somebody to use my money that I could be using for myself.”

The story said the woman is 20. I wonder if she has grandparents on Medicare.

No matter, Republicans love people like the Georgian. Though they might not be so candid with a reporter,  more than a few Americans agree with her. 

Democrats are hesitant to call them out for their I’ve-got-mine-and-to-heck-with-you outlook. Republicans welcome them as allies in their holy war against health care form.  

The Republicans are battling reform with their stock “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem” con job. It’s Social Darwinism, straight from the Gilded Age: If you’re poor (and don’t have health insurance), it’s your fault and not my responsibility.

Governments in other Western democracies believe good health care is a fundamental human right, not a privilege for those who can afford it. Some of us stateside do, too. (Go ahead and call us “socialists.”)

I’m blessed. I have a steady job and good health insurance. But growing up Presbyterian, I learned we were supposed to be our brothers’ – and sisters’ – keepers. The same principle guides our union movement.

So count me in with my union brothers and sisters who support a single-payer health care system that covers all Americans. And I’m somebody who wouldn’t mind Uncle Sam raising my taxes to help pay for it.

I just saw another Rebel-flag emblazoned “Heritage not Hate” bumper sticker. I suspect I’ll see more during the sesquicentennial observances of the Civil War. 

The “Heritage not Hate” folks claim slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War. Neo-Confederates – and there are more than a few in my native Kentucky – claim that 11 slave states – the Bluegrass State not among them — seceded over “states’ rights.”

I teach history. Slavery had everything to do with the Civil War. “To put it quite simply, slavery and race were absolutely critical elements in the coming of the war,” wrote Charles B. Dew in Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War.

For my money, Dew’s little book is one of the best Civil War reads to come along in years. Published in 2001, it is especially timely as we get ready to mark the 150th anniversary of America’s bloodiest conflict.

Dew is a Southern-born historian with a family tree full of Rebel ancestors. No doubt, his book has made him an apostate to the neo-Confederates. Die-hard Rebels would have scorned him as a “scalawag,” meaning a fellow white Southerner who “betrayed” his race and region during the post-war Reconstruction period.

Dew uses the words of real Confederates to rebut the neo-Confederates.

He quotes a raft of Rebels from Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander Stephens to representatives of Confederate states who went to other slave states – including Kentucky – to try to talk their political leaders into secession.

“I believe deeply that the story these documents tell is one that all of us, northerners and southerners, black and white, need to confront as we try to understand our past and move toward a future in which a fuller commitment to decency and racial justice will be part of our shared experience.”

 Dew explained that after the Rebels lost the Civil War, Davis, Stephens and other Confederate civil and military leaders wrote their memoirs, claiming “that slavery had absolutely nothing to do with the South’s drive for independence.” He added that their claim has been “picked up and advocated by neo-Confederate writers and partisans of the present day.”

 Some of them plaster it on the bumpers of their cars and trucks.

In his book, Dew cited a multitude of primary sources: newspapers, letters, official publications and other documents. He carefully footnoted his research.

Davis praised human bondage as a worthy institution by which “a superior race” had transformed “brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers.”

Stephens was thankful the Confederacy was based “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” He added, “the Confederate States of America was “the first Government ever instituted upon principles in strict conformity to nature and the ordination of Providence…”

Dew also quotes from secession ordinances Southern states wrote as they exited the Union. When Texans pulled out, they denounced “the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race and color — a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law.”

Mississippi disunionists announced that “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery….We must either submit to degradation and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union.”

Dew ‘fesses up that he teaches history at a Yankee school – Williams College in Massachusetts. But he was born in Dixie. He said he went to a boarding high school in Virginia and had a Rebel flag in his dorm room.

Dew’s pedigree easily qualifies him for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, though they might not let him in. “My ancestors on both sides fought for the Confederacy, and my father was named Jack, not John, because of his father’s reverence for Stonewall Jackson,” the author wrote.

Dew said as a boy, he had a ready answer for anybody who asked him why the South seceded: states’ rights. “Anyone who thought differently was either deranged or a Yankee, and neither class deserved to be taken seriously on this subject,” he explained.

But studying history in college mugged Charles B. Dew. In honestly examining his region’s past, he discovered that by using the term “states’ rights,” white Southerners of the 1860s meant the right of a state to have slaves (just as white Southerners of the 1960s defended segregation in the name of “states’ rights”). Apostles of Disunion ultimately resulted.

Dew focused his book on a group of state-appointed commissioners who traveled throughout the slave states in 1860 and early 1861. They were supposed to drum up support for secession in all 15 slave states, including Kentucky.

The commissioners preached the same racist line: the only way to keep the Yankees from destroying slavery and white supremacy was to start a new Southern nation.

“Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro, as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality,” a Mississippi commissioner said.

Declared another Magnolia State emissary: “Slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity.”

Likewise, a Kentucky-born Alabama commissioner to Kentucky pleaded that secession was the only way the South could maintain “the heaven-ordained superiority of the white over the black race.” Another Alabama representative said ideas that slavery was immoral and that God created all people the same were rooted in “an infidel theory [that] has corrupted the Northern heart.”

Dew concluded, “By illuminating so clearly the racial content of the secession persuasion, the commissioners would seem to have laid to rest, once and for all, any notion that slavery had nothing to do with the coming of the Civil War.”

This history teacher hopes Dew is right.

Berry Craig is the author of True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast,  Bourbon and Burgoo.

The Republicans and Al Qaeda say President Barack Obama doesn’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. A former Peace Prize winner says he does.

“In less than a year, with his inspiring messages of humility, dialogue and peace, President Obama has significantly lessened the tensions in the world, in the Middle East (University of Cairo speech), in relations with Russia, Iran, Venezuela,” Jose Ramos-Horta recently wrote on the Huffington PostInternet website. “President Obama’s conciliatory approach, the depth of his intellect and vision of peace, have won over many millions of people.”

Ramos-Horta is president of East Timor. He received his peace prize in 1996.

“By giving hope to the millions of disfranchised, the poor and the angry in Middle East, Asia and Africa, President Obama has begun to drain the swamp in which Al Qaeda and other extremist groups operate and recruit,” he added. “One should not underestimate the power of President Obama’s oratory and conciliatory approach; it has had the effect of, at least, rescuing many young and angry from sliding further into extremism.”

Maybe that’s why Al Qaeda denounced the awarding of this year’s Peace Prize to Obama. The Republicans and Rush Limbaugh, the de facto GOP head, piled on, claiming the honor is a fraud and an embarrassment.

The Democrats shot back, pointing out that the Taliban and Hamas also were in high dudgeon over the prize going to Obama. “The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists…,” said a statement from Brad Woodhouse, Democratic National Committee communications director. “Republicans cheered when America failed to land the Olympics and now they are criticizing the President of the United States for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize — an award he did not seek but that is nonetheless an honor in which every American can take great pride — unless of course you are the Republican Party.”

Woodhousereloaded and fired again: “The 2009 version of the Republican Party has no boundaries, has no shame and has proved that they will put politics above patriotism at every turn. It’s no wonder only 20 percent of Americans admit to being Republicans anymore – it’s an embarrassing label to claim.”

It’s not embarrassing to Limbaugh and his soul-mates who rule the Republican roost. You can’t shame them.

They operate by two simple rules. First, if Obama’s for it, they’re against it, and vice versa. Second, never, ever, give the president credit for anything, even if it means agreeing with America’s mortal enemies.

Remember Sen. Jim Demint’s perhaps too candid comment on health care reform? “If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo,” the South Carolina Republican gleefully predicted. “It will break him.”

Handing Obama a world of Waterloos is the Limbaughite Republican M.O.

But the Limbaughites are scared stiff they met their Waterloo last November. They worry Obama is the future and they are the past.

Limbaugh bloviates. His “tea bagger” buddies whoop and holler. It’s just bluster.

The tea parties are more than Obama trash fests. They are group hug sessions for angst-ridden “birthers,” “deathers,” gun nuts, neo-Confederates, homophobes, religious bigots, union-bashers, loopy libertarians and assorted other right-wing crazies that make up much of the GOP’s base these days.

Of course, consequential presidents are always controversial. They excite strong passions. It was hard for the body politic to get too worked up over, say, Millard Fillmore or Chester A. Arthur.

It’s the great presidents who generate great fervor. Most Americans loved two of our greatest: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But those who hated them hated them viscerally. “I should relish his groans and agonies if I could see him put to torture in hell or anywhere else,” a pro-slavery Kentuckian said of Lincoln. “He has chosen to become the representative of the Republican Party and as such I should like to hang him.”

Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi father of hate radio and Limbaugh’s spiritual forebear, loathed FDR. Coughlin accused the president of “leaning toward international socialism or sovietism.” I could retire if I had a dime for every time I’ve heard Limbaugh and his sidekicks call Obama a “socialist.”

It’s way too early to say Obama’s another Lincoln or a Roosevelt. But his election was consequential.

Meanwhile, I’m going to keep saying it as long as the Limbaughites – almost all of them white folks — keep denying it: they hate this president mainly because he’s not a white guy.

Nearly every one of the tea party goers is white. That’s not a coincidence.

The Limbaughites just can’t accept the fact that America elected an African American president. In desperation, they have tried to de-legitimize his presidency by claiming he’s not really an American. It’s a convenient way to slam him without overtly playing the race card. Of course, they say he was born in Africa.

Anyway, we history teachers are prone to use the past to help explain the present. The Limbaughites remind me of slave state whites in 1860. The election of President Abraham Lincoln that year signaled a big change was coming, a change the white supremacists despised: slavery was on the way out.

The white folks in 11 slave states seceded from the Union because they were sure that Lincoln and the “Black Republicans” were about to free the slaves. They lost the Civil War.

The Obama haters fear they are losing, too. They wait in mortal dread for other shoes to drop: Obama gets a health care bill. The economy perks up. The Democrats win big next November. Obama wins another term in 2012.

Berry Craig is the author of True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo.

I’m a union-card carrying, Hubert Humphrey Democrat. So Ronald Reagan is not one of my favorite presidents, not by a long shot.

But I’ve got to hand it to the Gipper for coming up with what was called the 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”

I’d like to see our party modify it to read, “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Democrat.”

Of course, Republicans trash each other. But in my native Kentucky, Democrats seem more inclined toward internecine strife than Republicans do. So far, that’s mainly been the case in the race for Jim Bunning’s senate seat.

Bunning is retiring. Polls and pundits suggest a Democratic pickup is possible.

Hence, Secretary of State Trey Grayson and Dr. Rand Paul – the top 2010 GOP primary contenders – are mostly practicing what Reagan preached. They are focusing their fire on one or the other of the two Democratic primary heavy hitters: Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo – a physician dubbed “Dr. Dan” — and Attorney Gen. Jack Conway.   

But Mongiardo came out swinging at Conway, who has had to hit back.

Dr. Dan’s campaign is spinning Conway, who is from Louisville, as a “a silver spoon Democrat” and a fancy-pants elitist because his family is well-heeled and because he went to Duke instead of the University of Kentucky as Dr. Dan did.

Pandering to pseudo-populism is nothing new in Kentucky politics. Fifty years ago, Gov. Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler gave us “Old Ankle Blankets.”

Kentucky governors couldn’t succeed themselves in 1959. Chandler, a Democrat, was backing a rival ticket against the Bert Combs-Wilson Wyatt team in the party’s gubernatorial primary.

Chandler found a 1920s-vintage photo of Wyatt, also a Louisvillian, sporting spats, supposedly footgear favored by rich city slickers. He dissed Wyatt as “Old Ankle Blankets.”

Combs and Wyatt swept the primary and the general election anyway. (Chandler’s grandson, U.S. Rep. Albert Benjamin Chandler III, a Lexington Democrat, is for Conway.)

In the old days, the Democrats were so strong in Kentucky that they won most elections even when they were feuding. But the era of almost total Democratic dominance is gone, maybe forever.

Kentucky is one of the reddest of the Republican Red States.

True, the Democrats have the governorship and the state House. The Republicans have just about everything else – the state Senate, both U.S. senators and four of our six members of Congress.

While President Barack Obama won big last year, Sen. John McCain, his Republican foe, claimed more than 57 percent of the Kentucky vote. He  carried all but 8 of the state’s 120 counties.

Thus, it would seem that party unity could hardly be more critical for the Democrats going into 2010. Yet Mongiardo is pounding Conway as if it’s the 1950s when the winner of a Democratic primary almost always triumphed in a general election.

Mongiardo is a genuine American success story. He was born over his Italian immigrant family’s little store in Hazard, deep in hardscrabble eastern Kentucky coal country.

But history – the subject I teach – shows that the circumstances of a politician’s birth don’t necessarily shape his or her politics. That’s likewise for where one earned a college degree.

No president did more for working stiffs like Susie and Diehl Vest, my Kentucky grandparents, than Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Bobo was in the old Amalgamated Clothing Workers; Granddadden belonged to the Painters union.)

The Roosevelts were New York patricians. FDR was a millionaire, a prep school grad and a Harvard alum. Yet it was on his watch that Congress passed the Wagner Act, which guaranteed workers like the Vests — devout Democrats who voted for Roosevelt four times — the fundamental right to unionize.

Like her husband, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was to the manor born. She went to a posh girls’ school in England. Even more than the president, she championed the poor and powerless.

Like FDR, too, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was a prep schooler, a Harvard man and a Democrat from a rich family. But like Sen. Humphrey, Sen. Kennedy always fought the good fight for working people – especially for those of us in unions.

Organized labor also endorsed Kennedy’s fellow Bay State senator for president in 2004 – John Kerry, yet another pro-union and pro-working class Democrat and a son of a wealthy family. Kerry is a Yalie.

On the other hand, few presidents were more anti-union than Reagan, whose birth could hardly have been more humble. He came into the world in his parents’ apartment above the local bank in Tampico, Ill. Jack Reagan sold shoes. His kid sold out the working class.

Anyway, I live in the same working class neighborhood where I grew up. I went to a public high school and to a public regional university. I teach at a public community college. My wife teaches at my old high school.

Calling Conway “a silver spoon Democrat,” doesn’t cut it with me (or my spouse of going on 31 years). When I size up candidates, I don’t look at their bank accounts or their family pedigrees. I don’t care where – or if – they went to college.

I look at how candidates stand on issues important to me as a trade unionist, a teacher and a member of the working class.

Conway and Mongiardo are good on my issues. Grayson and Paul are not.

I like Mongiardo, but I like Conway better. Some of my union brothers and sisters are Conway fans. Others are behind Mongiardo, and that’s fine with me.

But if Dr. Dan wins, we union members in Conway’s corner will be quick to plaster Mongiardo-for-Senate bumper stickers on our vehicles. Likewise, if Conway triumphs, organized labor will close ranks behind him.

We know what’s at stake. With Grayson or Paul — the son of U.S. Rep Ron Paul, R-Tex. – we’d get more Bunning and Sen. Mitch McConnell-style union-busting.  Grayson and Dr. Rand are disciples of the GOP gospel of greed.

Meanwhile, I hope Mongiardo – who is basically a nice guy – will lay off the  the Richie Rich and la-de-dah private college stuff with Conway. (If my kid has the grades, the ACT scores – and the scholarship money — to go to hoity toity Duke, I’ll be shouting the good news from the top of our nearly 60-year-old, two-bedroom wooden-siding-clad house.)

“Dan Mongiardo and Jack Conway are bright, intelligent, outstanding candidates,” says a Democratic Party activist from Paducah, where I teach. “They are the future of our party. They are going to need each other in future races.”

I’ll add a Presbyterian “amen” to that.

– Berry Craig is the author of True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo, a strictly non-partisan and mostly funny look at Bluegrass State hustings from Gov. Isaac Shelby to Gov. Ruby Laffoon.

Some abolitionist Republicans dissed President Abraham Lincoln for not getting rid of slavery fast enough.

Some Socialists panned President Franklin D. Roosevelt for not taking the New Deal far enough.

Some liberals are all but accusing President Obama of selling out to the Republicans because he’s not calling for a single payer health care plan.

I’m a union-card carrying Hubert Humphrey Democrat. But I’m not with my liberal friends on the sell out charge.

I want single payer just as much as they do. Like many of my union brothers and sisters, I’m for HR 676. But I’m sorry to say I don’t see much evidence that Congress will pass it. 

Even so, I’m glad groups like the All Unions Committee For Single Payer Health Care are keeping the heat on Obama. The president  knows we in organized labor worked hard for his election last November. 

Likewise, it was important for abolitionists to press Lincoln and for Socialists to dog FDR.

The abolitionists and the Socialists were ”gadflies” in the mold of Socrates, the great Greek thinker. So is the All Unions Committee.  (Socrates likened himself to a ”gadfly” — horse fly — stinging people into action.)

On the other hand, “politics is the art of the possible,” Otto von Bismarck observed. I’m not a fan of Germany’s Iron Chancellor, not by a long shot. But he was right about the politics of possibility.

Lincoln and FDR practiced politics of the possible. Obama — who admires Lincoln and FDR – is doing as they did.

Anyway, the “single payer or nothing” argument doesn’t cut it with me. Nothing is what the Republicans want.

Maybe it’s my Kentucky roots. But compromise was the byword of   “The Great Pacificator,” Henry Clay of Lexington, our greatest statesman. (Lincoln is our greatest native son. But he left us when he was a child.)

Right now, it seems our best change for genuine health care reform is some kind of public option. I see that as a reasonable compromise.

Lincoln and FDR compromised and got most of what they wanted. They had to. They were liberal leaders of a fundamentally conservative land.

Obama’s in the same boat. (America is the most conservative and capitalist of Western industrial democracies.)

Not even all Northerners shared Lincoln’s deep disdain for slavery. So he chose to destroy the South’s peculiar institution by degrees.

By doing so, historians say, he kept the strategic border slave states — including Kentucky — in the Union. Their loss doubtless would have prolonged the Civil War, which, after all, ended slavery.

In the end, Lincoln led us to victory. He went down in history as the Savior of the Union and the Great Emancipator.

FDR was president during the Great Depression. He believed the federal government should help citizens who needed help. That was a radical idea in a nation heretofore wedded to the conservative notion of “rugged individualism.”

So FDR’s New Deal fell short of some liberals’ hopes. But many, if not most, historians believe Roosevelt did as much as he could.

In the end, the New Deal reforms, which included the government-guaranteed right of workers to join unions, helped greatly expand America’s middle class.

To be sure, Lincoln and FDR were cautious reformers. But few historians call them “sell outs.” Most historians rate them as two of our three greatest presidents. (Washington is still number one for successfully getting our ship of state underway.)

Lincoln and FDR paved the way for more reform, though that reform was far too long in coming. The spirit of Lincoln is in the landmark federal civil rights acts of the 1960s. The spirit of FDR is in Medicare and Medicaid, which Congress also approved during the ’60s.

Of course, the abolitionists were right about slavery. We should have outlawed it when we declared our independence from the Mother Country in 1776.

But Lincoln got the job done.

Likewise, it is disgraceful that Jim Crow segregation lasted from the end of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period to the Johnson presidency.

But LBJ and the Democrats got the job done.

Social Security should have provided us some kind of comprehensive national health insurance program. But it gave Johnson and the Democrats something to build Medicare and Medicaid on.

Now I’m not prepared to give the president a blank check on health care reform. I agree with Rich Trumka, the new president of the AFL-CIO.

In a recent press conference, Trumka listed “three absolute musts” for health care – a public option, an employer mandate, and no taxes on employer-provided health care. “That means we won’t support the bill if it doesn’t have the public option in it,” he told reporters.

I hope the bill that ends up on Obama’s desk will have all three. That would be a good start toward single payer health care.

Meanwhile, I understand the frustration of the Obama’s-selling-us-out liberals. But they’d do well to heed the words of Leslie McColgin, an unabashed liberal in Kentucky, where liberals are about as common as July blizzards. 

The success of progressivism, McColgin says, is linked to the success of Obama. “United we stand, but divided we will fail,” she warned.

At the same time, it’s also good for progressives — when they’re griping at the president about single payer — to stop and ponder the alternative to Obama-Biden. That would be McCain-Palin. That would mean the status quo on health care, more union-busting and more of the greed-is-good gospel of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes.