[Bread and Circuses - Politics and other Silliness]

Among the blessings for which I was grateful last week: I did not sit down for Thanksgiving dinner with Charles Blow. If you’ve never heard of Charles Blow, that, too, may be a blessing. But since I’ve opened this door, I’m obliged to inform you: He’s a columnist for The New York Times which means he’s among the highest-paid opinion writers in America. His Nov. 27 contribution to the national discourse was headlined “The Horrible History of Thanksgiving.” “When I was a child, Thanksgiving was simple,” he reminisced. But when he became a man, he put away childish narratives, realizing that, “Like so much of American history, the story has had its least attractive features winnow (sic) away — white people have been centered in the narrative and all atrocity has been politely papered over. So, let us correct that.” How helpful of him (or them). Actually, however, among those who “always blame America first” — a phrase used 35 years ago by Jeane Kirkpatrick, a disillusione...

“Christopher Columbus enslaved, colonized, mutilated, and massacred thousands of indigenous people in the Americas,” asserts the resolution (without any documentation) introduced by D.C. Council member David Grosso. It would be quite a mean feat for a single man to do all that, if it were true. But it’s little more than character assassination and historical revisionism at their worst. History records that Columbus was a deeply religious man, a devout Catholic often seen wearing the Franciscan habit. As Ben Broussard wrote in an August 2012 article for a Catholic group, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property about Columbus’ missionary zeal: “Upon his first encounter with the natives of San Salvador [an island now part of the Bahamas, where he first landed], Columbus concludes, ‘I recognized that they were people who would be better converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force.'” Columbus’ records also show he characterized the na...

While tearing down everything that's great about our country, the left has always permitted us to celebrate patriotic holidays. But this year, on the week that we commemorate the unveiling of the Declaration of Independence, Nike yanked a Betsy Ross tribute sneaker off the market because the American flag didn't sit well with Colin Kaepernick. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is telling wild, provable lies about America's border agents. This Fourth of July, let's look at the tactics used by the left to blacken the reputations of American heroes. To wit, the lie that the principal author of the declaration, Thomas Jefferson, fathered a child with his slave, Sally Hemings. The charge was first leveled in 1802 by a muckraking, racist, alcoholic journalist, James Callender, who had served prison time for his particular brand of journalism. He had tried to blackmail Jefferson into appointing him postmaster at Richmond. When that failed, Callender retaliated by publicly...