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Action Jackson, Generally Disreputable   

A future President’s lynching of two Britons for aiding slave escapes is the latest defense offered for the ill-starred Guantanamo military tribunals.

  In a since withdrawn legal argument, prosecutors pointed to Bloody Andrew Jackson’s energetic response to Georgia slaves escaping to the Seminole Indians in then Spanish Florida. 

   The Seminole tribe objected to being compared with al Qaeda, and escaped slave descendants might have something to say as well.

   Defending the military tribunerals’ ever shape-shifting “procedures” was a challenge even before the Pentagon took to enlisting slave catchers as freedom’s legions.

Obama Now One Of The Greats! 

For decades, criminal geniuses have disguised themselves in the act, and an early 90s film from the Patrick Swayze ouvrier sparked a seemingly endless wave of robbers wearing masks of the great. 

Now the current president has joined this proud line, with North Carolina gas station robber donning an Obama mask to do the deed.

Despite the crime wave, this is one of the least troubling parts of the Swayze legacy.  The the late actor was recently offered as an excuse for the multiple has-been-ed Jennifer Grey to appear on the last round up, “Dancing With The Stars.”

McNaughton’s Group  

Special thanks to the eagle eyes at Wonkette, who’ve spotted a big one.

Extraordinarily cheezeball artist Jon McNaughton has brought forth a gathering of greats, as the ghosts of presidents past hover around sullen, stand-offish looking Barack Obama, variously annoyed or aghast at his literal TRAMPLING ON THE CONSTITUTION!

McNaughton is the kind of crank who rambles along in incoherent Founderspeak for numbered paragraphs, passive aggressively concluding:

“The information is historical. If it is not familiar to you – Google it.“

Cramming all these figures into the frame seems to have skewed McNaughton’s perspective.  Small but perfectly formed James Madison is so upset at Obama’s boot-heel to our liberties that he’s bent over pleading, but appears to be almost Obama’s height.   The Forgotten Man is a giant seated on a toy town bench. Such is the occasion that Franklin Roosevelt walks.

McNaughton’s painting doesn’t leave much to chance, featuring ominous clouds, flags at half staff, and an accompanying video lush with  piano chords of doom.

Rally For Our View  
No doubt we can now look forward to the many conservative stalwarts revising and extending their complaints at Obama’s grandiose event staging.

History didn’t deter them at the time, but we Americans are an optimistic people.

Grant Me This 

It was a gathering of the conservative faithful at CPAC this past weekend, and the search for novel political analogies reached strange new heights.

Among the oddities was Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, whose doomed Presidential campaign took its first tentative steps off the cliff by reminding the assembled Neo-Confederates    of a past glorius Republican office holder,  U.S. Grant.

Somehow today’s conservative struggle resembles Grant’s grinding Civil War victories over the South, his scandel infested administration, or his occasional lunges towards protecting blacks and Republicans from the Klan in the South. Which is unclear, but Pawlenty has his own upbeat, crackpot version:

“We’re on the side of limited government. And, like Grant, we fight.“

But perhaps not win.  Pawlenty came in fourth in CPAC’s presidential straw poll.

Also up for CPAC recycling,  Margeret Thatcher, AKA The Iron Lady.  Indiana Representative Mike Pence, straw poll fifth place holder, put America’s striking coal miners and Trotskyist local office holders on notice by evoking everyone’s favorite Churchill in drag. Just wait till that North Sea oil saves our ass!

A Romantic View Of History

Pence also entertained the crowd with a musty Ronald Reagan yarn, one where Reagan encountered a magic pipe-fitter.  This proto Joe The Plumber begged Reagan to save tax cuts for the rich, so guys like him could be hired by them.  Pence has trotted out the tale of this wondrous encounter at least twice going back to 2005.

CPAC turned to Glen Beck for insane historical tales with a grain of truth.

Peeing all over John McCain’s myth of a muscular progressive Republican past, Beck rightly called Teddy Roosevelt an interventionist.

But calling Roosevelt a socialist is as insane as labeling Obama one.