Appeasing Carthofascism: Have We Learned
the Lessons of 149 BCE?
The Carpetbagger Report points us to these charming remarks by our Secretary of State:
Secretary of State Rice compared the Iraq war with the American Civil War, telling a magazine that slavery might have lasted longer in this country if the North had decided to end the fight early.
“I’m sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold,” Rice said in the new issue of Essence magazine.
“I know there were people who said, ‘Why don’t we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves?'” Rice said.
I agree with Secretary Rice, but I would take it a step further: today’s appeaseniks in the Democratic Party are the direct descendents of the cowardly Roman Senators who opposed confronting the Punic Menace in Carthage by burning their entire capital city to the ground in 149 BCE.
Above: Hannibal and his Elephascist Brigade try to stampede Freedom during Punic War II.
Imagine the horrors that would have befallen us if the Roman hippies had gotten their way and had let Carthage rampage through the countryside with their Pachyderms of Mass Destruction gouging their tusks into liberty’s very foundations. Try envisioning an America where Queen Dido’s face adorns the dollar bill, where the ol’ Stars’n’Stripes are dyed Tyrian purple, and where our children are made to bow before the altar of Tanit and Ba’al Hammon. It is not a world in which I want to live, and I suspect that many members of The Left would find it unappealing as well. And yet if it were up to them, Hannibal and his war elephants would be stampeding through the streets of suburban Iowa without impunity or resistance. Truly, The Left’s capacity for delusion, madness and hypocrisy knows no bounds.
…
Man, warblogging is fun. I could seriously write this shit all day. All I need now is a big bag o’ Cheetos… mmmmmmm, Cheetos…
Have you filled out your wingnut welfare application?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. The elephascist angle might confuse wayward Republican voters.
Can you photoshop that picture so that Hannibal appears unnaturally thin and is riding a donkey through smoldering city ruins (with extra black smoke). Be sure to insert the revised pic into a wikipedia entry for accuracy.
Steve- that’s an EXCELLENT idea. I’ll be sure to get on that as soon as I stop being lazy.
tommy- my application’s in the mail. Currently I’m trying to decide between a gig at Townhall or getting my own syndicated radio show.
I-yi want to tha-ay-nk you for giving me the best day-hey of my liiiiiife. Ooooooh, just to read wingnutty prose has given me the best day-yay of my life.
You forgot to declare “Tehrano delenda est’ for your VDH bonus points.
Extra points for slipping Alcibiades and Barney Frank in as well.
Brad, I would go straight to the Regnery publication Wingnut Welfare route.
It’s less work- rip a few comments, copy some other posts, and hey Presto it’s a book!
I mean, if the Doughy One can do it…
See a tongue-in-cheek visual of Condi performing her newest “Neocon Concerto�…here:
http://www.thoughttheater.com
So instead of an innocent troll drinking llama piss, we have to drink it instead?
Those who really have no idea of what the fuck history is about are doomed to make us repeat it.
The conflict between Rome and Carthage is responsible for a popular expression we use nowadays. Very few people are aware today that Hannibal’s army of attack elephants was defeated by a Rome’s own animal warriors, their legions of attack hares. These relatives of the rabbit were trained to leap up onto the elephants and cling to the elephant handler’s cloak with their sharp incisors. When enough hares had gotten a grip, their weight would pull the handler off and the bewildered elephant would stampede out of control, wreaking havoc in the Carthaginian ranks. After the war, the people of Carthage would use this as an analogy to being in a desperate situation that you could not escape from, hence the expression “being grasped by your Punic Hares.”
Sorry.
The Left is in bed with elephant-wielding baal-worshipping Carthaginians, and i have the proof. a) our environmental policies are ultimately about hurting business, and business and the free market can best protect the elephat, so we HATE ELEPHANTS AND WANT TO DRINK THEIR BLOOD, and b) we are all atheists, so we obviously would be happiest to worship someone’s god.
if that isn’t clear then remember:
history repeats the old conceits, the same replies, the quick defeats.
Damn Neville Chamberlins for sucking up to Hitler and paving the way for today’s appeasers of muslamofascists.
Oops, I meant Damn Copperheads! It’s all your fault that wussy lefties are agitating for appeasement.
Oops, I meant Damn Romans for not exterminating the defeatest element seeking to appease Hannibal’s elephascists.
Hmmmmmn. I wonder how we can spin Genghis Khan…..
you hippies will never learn!
some things are worth fighting and dying for.
just long as it’s somebody else doing the fighting, and especially that… dying part.
Brad- you missed a huge oppurtunity for extended genius here- while I laughed my ass off, shouldn’t you first have stepped back to the Revolutionary War? Then we can march back in time through all the wars. Doesn’t the left want to pay excessive tax on tea? Don’t we desired to board English soldiers? Don’t we strive for higher taxation with concurrent reductions in representation?
I am just waiting for someone to go off on how the Left failed to learn the lesson of the Pyrrhic War.
How awesome would that be?
If it’s classical inspiration for the War on Whatever you’re after, you could do worse than check out good ol’ Victor Davis Hanson.
His artfully constructed evocations of Athenian phalanxes standing firm in the face of Xerxes’ infantry and the steely determination of the Spartan Immortals at Thermopylae stand as eloquent testimony to the necessity of the immediate destruction of all Persian cities. And he’s not being ironic.
I shit you not.
You could even accuse The Left of being objectively pro-Neanderthal.
Doesn’t Condi – who was, if I recall, some sort of history scholar at some point – know that there were plenty of folks in North who would’ve been perfectly happy to let the South and the slaves therein rot if they so chose? Slavery, though a definate issue in what led to the Civil War, was still a side issue compared to who had more control in Washington, the agrarian slave states or the industrialied free states. Man, it’s like folks who seem to think the U.S. entered WWII out of rage over what the Nazis did to the Jews, just too simplistic to take seriously. Hellfire, the Emancipation Proclimation only freed slaves in territory held by the South. Slaves in the border states like Missouri and Kentucky, as well as slaves in Federal-held territory like New Orleans and West Memphis, were basically left up shit creek.
And on a second stroke, isn’t Condi worried about pissing off a substantial portion of the GOP’s faithful in talking like the Grahnd Olde Sooth was somehow ever in the wrong when it came to the treatment of her African-American children? There’s people down here who take a 140-year-old ass-whippin’ way too personal, and these aren’t the type of folks to join up with the ACLU or NAACP, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
but has VDH ever discussed how the Delian League became tyrranical, and how this empowered and emboldened Athens into invading Sicily, dooming Democracy for more than Two Thousand years?
There is a reason Democracy was in disrepute for all that time, and it had something to do with Athens acting with the very arrogance and foolishness we see in this administration.
Tsk Tsk. Don’t you understand, it was the Carthaginian business elites who responsible for Hannibal’s loss. They stayed the course of tax cuts for their kids and yellow ribbons to support the troops! Fought them over there so they wouldn’t have to fight them over here, ’til Zama. Of course the great Republican’s of Rome let Hannibal live, not to actually fight another day but to serve as the great ‘enemy’ while they whittled away the rights of Roman citizens. Kind of like the Republican’s in D.C., learning the wrong lessons from both the loser and the winner.
Carthage cost the Romans, in modern dollars, about what Iraq is costing us. Revenge may be sweet, but it’s expensive.
I pointed out years ago why they won and we lost: they were led by Scipio, and we are led by Skippy.
Damned liberal ninnies don’t want us to salt the Carthaginian fields!
Also, slavery was pretty much doomed by 1860. No more land suitable for slave farming, and an increasing amount of technological innovation made it clear that the knell for slavery had rung.
The only other plausible outcome would be this: the CSA forms a stable country, and slavery gets eliminated in the south by 1960.
Oh this post is funny.
And seeing as how the destruction of slavery was well underway durring the Civil War as enslaved people themselves, you know, decided to split when the opportunity arose — I’d say the institution of slavery was dealt a severe blow by slaves themselves durring the war.
Damn you Bradrocket! Get out of my head! When first I saw this report about the new ridiculous Civil War analogy, my brain started spinning…
“Hmmm… let’s see, what historical conflict can we make a bullshit comparison to next? The Franco-Prussian war? Nah, who do you root for in a fight between Otto von Bismarck and Napoleon III? War of Spanish succession? You can’t tell one Hapsburg from another without a scorecard. The Thirty Years’ War might work… has the requisite absolutist religious overtones, and is the only war I can think of started by throwing people out of windows…”
But this is as far as I got before I clicked over here to find you quick-typing bastards at S!N had already run with the same schtick.
Just imagine if today’s liberal cut-and-run appeasers were at the Alamo? They would have just handed the Alamo over to Santa Anna.
By the way, have you tried the new organic Cheetos?
Why is Jeebus walking behind that elephant?
Hannibal and his Elephascist
I just spewed Coke out of my nose.
Cut And Run – Sung to the tune of “Let It Snow”
(Feel free to sing along with the instrumental version
http://www.geocities.com/lupey_107/LetItSnow.mid)
Oh the Weathermen all were Marxists Their successors now are heartsick So they beat their anti-Bush-war drum Cut and run, cut and run, cut and run
They’re showing no signs of stopping And their leadership’s flip-flopping Surrender-monkeys everyone Cut and run, cut and run, cut and run
When we finally win this war I’ll enjoy saying ‘I told you so’ To the people who think Al Gore
Really won back in O-Ohhhh…
The peaceniks just keep on bitching As their moles go right on snitching John Murtha’s their favorite son Cut and run, cut and run, cut and run
“the only war I can think of started by throwing people out of windows…â€?
Ha. It’s not even the only war started by throwing people out of windows in Prague. (Hussite Revolt).
“Marie Jon’ said,
September 6, 2006 at 8:27
…”
thank god we have a “resolute” leader, even if he did invade the wrong fucking country. let’s all get behind that 1000%. anyway.
Brad, be serious for a moment… what’s the best way to clean a cheeto stained keyboard? Mine is becoming something of a joke at the office.
Being a specialist on the defunct Soviet Union, our SoS cannot be expected to know that the discussion she is describing took place four score and seven years prior to the war between the states. And that the war was the consequence of the founders failure to put thier money where their mouth was.
[…] Service that eerily mirrors the single-payer system that LIEberals love today? Or how about Hannibal and his wicked army of Elephascists? Do you not see how allowing pachyderms into the military is a dark foreshadowing of today’s […]