Monday

Good Morning,

Quote of the day

When speaking of Margaret Thatcher he said “She has the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula.”

                                     Francois Mitterrand

April 9, 1865 was the day that Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia in the home of Wilbur McClain. As always those people that do not know anything about the history of what really happened beat their breast shouting the Civil War was not about state rights or anything else, it was about slavery. These “experts” have not read a damned thing about what was on the minds of 95% of the Confederate soldiers that fought with unparalleled ferocity and were NOT slave owners. Lincoln initiated recruiting and a military draft under the premise that “the Union must be preserved”. After the Union army had its ass handed to it in the first few battles a cry went up “Let them have their own country, stop the slaughter”. Brilliantly Lincoln figured out that patriotism was not going to get the job done so he switched to the premise of “Free the slaves” then it became a matter of conscience. That worked. In any event almost all of those Johnny Rebs that were interviewed immediately after and even long after the end of this calamity said that they began fighting because “They were down here.” “They” being the Union army. The Rebs felt they were being invaded and indeed they were. The Union army invaded those states that had seceded and for nearly 3 years nearly all the battles were fought in the Confederate states. I think that a young man from a hardscrabble farm in central Tennessee who was helping scratch out a bare existence was not very sophisticated nor informed and he did not give a damn about who owned slaves and who didn't nor was he concerned about states rights but he did give a damn about soldiers marching onto his farm and enforcing martial law. He also did not give a damn about the political ramifications of the beginning nor the end of the war, he just wanted to be left the hell alone. It was not the politicians and financial wizards that were risking getting their ass shot off, it was that young man from that hardscrabble farm and those thousands of men from those little villages and farms up and down the Pee Dee river and hundreds of other typical locations. It is their thoughts and opinions that matters. It certainly is not the opinion of a present day soothsayers and wannabe historians who have never read one scintilla of what the soldiers of either side thought. They know nothing, not even the depth of their own ignorance. Don't get me wrong, I am thankful that things worked out the way they did, we are much better off united than we would have been divided...in spite of the squabbling. In every documented war the members of any combat unit declare they did not fight for “the cause”, the flag or Mom and apple pie (certainly not so some plantation owner in Mississippi can keep their slaves)...they fought for each other. Perhaps we should all fight for each other...all the time.

This Date in History   April 13

1997 On this date the son of a black US Green Beret Sergeant father and a Thai national mother won his first golf tournament as a professional and does it in great fashion. Eldrick “Tiger” Woods won the vaunted Masters Golf Tournament by 12 strokes over the nearest competitor with a total score of 18 under par for the tournament. Tiger had just graduated from Stanford a few months before where he won the US Amateur title several times. What stunned everyone were his soaring drives of 320 yards or more on a regular basis and his aggressive short game. His father and his mother had divorced years earlier but both were there to greet him at the entrance to the scorer’s tent. It was a touching scene when Tiger and his father embraced with tears flowing from each. Tiger was 21 years old, the youngest to ever win the Masters. The day he turned professional, he signed a $40 million endorsement deal with American Express followed shortly by similar deals with Nike and Buick among others not to mention his winnings on the golf course. Tiger has won four green jackets at the Masters. He has won the grand slam of golf (Masters, US Open, British Open, and the PGA Championship) more than once. There is no questions that if he stays healthy he will end up being the greatest golfer to ever swing a club. He has only Jack Nicklaus’ overall record to overcome to stand alone in the record books. How much money is this man going to make in his lifetime? It boggles the mind.

1777 On this date British General Lord Charles Cornwallis commanding a 4,000 man combined unit of British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries attack the 500 man unit of Continentals commanded by Major General Benjamin Lincoln at Bound Brook, New Jersey. The British attacked in four columns designed by the commander of the Hessians, Captain Johann Ewald Lieb Jaeger, a superior military strategist. General Lincoln had no choice but to retreat and lost most of his artillery pieces to Cornwallis who took them back to their main encampment at New Brunswick. George Washington believed in the strategic location of Bound Brook and sent Continental General Nathaniel Greene to re-occupy the town. Later on Washington changed his mind and decided that he would had a better defensible position atop the Watchung Mountains in north central New Jersey and re-established an encampment there. Continental General Henry Knox and several other Patriot Generals were impressed with the Hessian Commander Johann Ewald Lieb Jaeger and after the end of the Revolutionary War he was invited by Knox to attend West Point. He declined and ended up writing several books on military strategy including “A Treatise on Partisan Warfare” which was more or less a book on how to conduct guerilla operations. The book was highly praised by the best military leader of that time the Prussian, Frederick the Great.

1990 In 1939 the German army invaded Poland from the west and Russia invaded Poland from the east in the spring of 1940. During the Russian invasion, they gathered up over 5,000 Polish military officers and moved them to the Katyn Forest and for reasons known only to them, massacred them all and buried them in a common grave. Later the Germans overran the Katyn Forest and drove the Russians out. The mass grave was discovered and everyone assumed it was the Germans that had committed yet another atrocity. The German army vehemently denied participation in this massacre. On this date, as a part of Glasnost Russian Premier Gorbachev admitted that it was the Russian Army that had committed the massacre at Katyn Forest, not the Germans. Since the end of World War II the relationship between the Polish Government and the new German government had been strained because the Germans refused to admit culpability for the Katyn Forest affair. After this admission, diplomacy between these two governments became more tolerable and relationship with the Russians became somewhat tense and remains so to this day.

     Thanks for listening    I can hardly wait until tomorrow