Still standing

So the "Protest" and attempt to remove the Andrew Jackson Statue in the name of Black Lives Matter because "racist or something" kinda fizzled out. And General Jackson is still there.

I did not get arrested. But four or five losers did, including this one who called on everyone to follow him over the police line, and then, after jumping it, was surprised to find himself alone...well alone except for these nice officers.

There were police on foot and on horses.

And they were arrayed against a few hundred white kids, most of whom are NOT New Orleans residents if the sample I talked to is representative of the whole.

Whitest BLM protest I ever saw. Guess the black folks in this city didn't care enough to come out. But then these statues were never an issue until Mayor Mitch Landrieu decided that he needed an issue to build a base on so that he could get a job on Hillary's team when/if she gets to Washington. And most of the agitators are either college kid temporary transplants with no ties to the city and probably no intent to stay, or else they came from somewhere else.

I hung around with them for a while at their rally point in Congo Square, taking all their pictures, but finally they started noticing me and taking MY picture, so I figured that was a good time to just go back to the statue and wait on them.

Oh--and David Duke was there too.

I'd loved to have seen someone run up and hit him with a pie or something. Because I hate Illinois Nazis, and he's like the closest thing we've got to one here.


The toads get repulsed when they tried to rush the statue. NOPD got in there FAST with the horses and closed the gap, and they only tried once. (See pic of arrested guy above.) Then they marched off down Decatur Street, a few throwing small balloons filled with paint at police and EMS vehicles from the safety of the middle of their crowd. By then I'd had enough so I went to get beer and came home. Nap time now, because Saturday night starts in a few hours.

Down to Chalmette

Yesterday being a nice day, I made a little trip inspired by Old AF Sarge's recent post.

Chalmette Battlefield. The place where the last battle of the War of 1812 was fought in January of 1815.

The Treaty of Ghent had been signed a month prior (but not yet ratified), and this treaty "officially" ended the war, but none of the thousands of British and Americans who assembled here knew about it, so the British attacked, doing their best to grab control of New Orleans and by extension, the entire Mississippi River Basin and the lands it gave access to. In their way: Andrew Jackson, American hero, leading a pick-up fighting force comprised of a few regular army types, volunteer militias from Kentucky and Tennessee, sailors and marines from a few sunken gunboats, local landowners and other members of the creole elite society, a band of Choctaw Indians who were loyal to the Americans, and a passel of pirates from the Barataria base of Jean Lafitte, who came with cannons and powder that the Americans lacked. (Pretty sure Old NFO was around somewhere too, but cannot confirm at this time.)

The battlefield looked like this:

There was a small canal that ran from a mangrove swamp where St. Claude Avenue and the rail line are today down to the river. The Americans threw up an earthwork on the New Orleans side of that canal and emplaced what cannon they had, a mix of artillery that included naval guns from privateers.

It's been restored as much as could be to what it looked like then.

Use your imagination and ignore the freighter at anchor on the river behind the battlefield. That wasn't actually there in 1815.

Here's a view of the American defensive line where the cannon crews and riflemen awaited the British as the sun was coming up that morning.

Looking out over the field in the direction that the British came from. The British had hoped to advance under cover of some convenient fog, but it lifted suddenly when they were about half way across. Awkward...

They made perfect targets in the early morning light. Making things worse for them, a unit of Redcoats who'd been tasked with bringing up ladders and fascines which were essential to bridging the canal and scaling the earthworks were out of position, so when the British troops who survived the fire pouring into them as they attacked got to the edge, they stalled and were cut down en masse by the muskets, rifles and cannon on the other side. In less than half an hour, the British suffered 700 killed, including General Packingham himself. They also had over 1,400 wounded and lost 500 more as prisoners, most of whom only survived by playing dead until the shooting stopped.

The Americans only had 13 troops killed. It was a total shellacking.


On this day, there were no soldiers, red-coated or otherwise. But the cannon were there.

Of course I brought my gun crew.

"Battery Five manned dogged and ready, Sir!"

"Bring on the Brits!"

The dogs got down in the canal too, which still has as much nasty black mud in it as it ever did.

"OK, I'm muddy now. Let's get back in the car!"

We strolled around for a couple of hours, and as the main gates were locked we pretty much had the place to ourselves because, while you can walk in, it's a bit of a hike in the heat.

Chalmette Dock just next door. Also not here in 1815.

I took the hounds over the levee so they could get a drink of Mississippi River water.

And along came a tow boat.

Murphy's just gotta run.

And play on logs.

Belle's a bit more of a Daddy's girl and just wanted to stay close to me once she got her drink.

It really was a beautiful day, and being surrounded by history like this made it perfect.

Here's an observation tower built as a monument after the war.

At the base are bronze plaques listing the units that fought here.

Andrew Jackson was truly the hero of the day and the savior of much of America, because had the Brits won here, it's doubtful that they'd have left the whole Mississippi region, treaty or not.

Harriet Tubman, by all reports, was nowhere to be seen.

America...where'd your spine go?

There was a time when Americans could justifiably take pride in their Presidents, because America has had, at times, some serious bad-ass Presidents who stood tall, spoke their mind and meant what they said. These were men who made the world spin just a little differently on it's axis, and no one wanted to mess with us when they were in the White House.

President Andrew Jackson was such a man. He began his career as a militia officer who excelled at solving "Indian problems" in the American South. Basically, when Indians got out of line and killed settlers, Jackson went down and whipped their asses until the survivors had enough and promised to behave or move west. Then he led a volunteer band from Tennessee and Kentucky down to New Orleans, assembled a pick-up crew that included farmers, shopkeepers, riverboatmen, naval sailors whose ships were sunk, freed blacks, and even pirates, and he cleaned the clocks of a professional British invasion force at Chalmette, Louisiana, killing over 2,000 of them for a loss of about 12-14 Americans.

When not killing Indians or the British, Jackson fought duels with pistols, suffering two serious gunshot wounds himself as a result of these fights but also killing one his opponents in return. He was also the subject of the first assassination attempt against a US President with a crazy house painter by the name of Richard Lawrence ran up and tried to shoot him with two pistols, both of which misfired. Jackson then proceeded to beat Lawrence near to death with his hickory cane before others intervened. How do you not admire a man like that? Even his inauguration was such a rowdy affair when his former soldiers and other frontier supporters showed up at the White House that the White House was nearly destroyed after the free booze caused things to get out of hand. Old Hickory was a President that no one here or abroad ever wanted to mess with.

A bit later, we had Theodore Roosevelt. He was an accomplished big-game hunter, a boxer, and a military man who, among other things, assembled a volunteer cavalry unit made up of cowboys and the upper-crust of Yale and Harvard's sports teams, and led them to Cuba where they kicked Spanish butt all the way up San Juan Hill and back down the other side. "Speak softly but carry a big stick," he said. And America did just that. He brought a lot of Central America under control and got the Panama Canal built. He was a man's man and no one wanted to mess with him. Like Jackson before him, he was the subject of an assassination attempt while campaigning in 1912. A man named John Schrank shot him on the chest, but Roosevelt decided that he was not in any danger of dying from the wound since he wasn't coughing up blood, so he went on to deliver his campaign speech, speaking for 90 minutes while bleeding.

Following World War Two, America elected it's former Supreme Commander in Europe, Five-Star General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the Presidency. Again, this man knew how to take care of business. Graduating West Point in 1911, he rose to the General Staff by the time that the US entered the Second World War and his decisions helped bring it to a successful conclusion. He went on to become the first Supreme Commander of NATO, and as President, he was responsible for the development of both our nuclear weapons program and our rise to the challenges of the Space race. He gave is the interstate highway system that we all know and use today (Originally intended to help move military traffic across the country quickly) and he implemented the Eisenhower Doctrine, under which the US would be prepared to respond with force against any aggression committed by a communist country. And the world understood that he wasn't playing.




And then there was President Ronald Reagan. He started out playing tough guys in the movies, and he ended up a real tough guy on the world stage, serving two terms as President. His credentials, like those before him, were not questioned by America's enemies. The Iranians had been punking America's prior president, Jimmy Carter, by holding our embassy staff hostage for 444 days. But they released them on the day that Reagan took office, because they knew that Reagan, unlike Carter, was a man who would have rolled up his sleeves and settled that Iranian problem with military muscle.

The eight years of the Reagan Presidency were bad years for communists and assorted bad guys everywhere.

He suppressed a communist-launched coup in Grenada, he called on Russia to tear down the Berlin Wall (and they did), he authorized US combat aircraft to intercept terrorists who had hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered US citizen Leon Klinghoffer, and he sent other combat aircraft to bomb targets in Libya in retaliation for Libyan President Khadaffi's support of other terrorist acts in Europe and the Middle East. Reagan's policies brought the Cold War with Russia to a stunning end as the Soviet economy collapsed, and he also brought about the fall of the Nicaraguan Communist government despite the best efforts of the Communists and the Democrats in Congress to stop him. Because of President Reagan, millions of people around the world knew freedom by the end of 1988.

America lost her way for a bit, as demonstrated by the election of Bill Clinton. Under Clinton, terrorists and dictators like Iraq's Saddam Hussein felt free to constantly kick our country in the nuts abroad and even here at home. The World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, and when nothing was done about it by the Clinton Administration, Osama bin Laden came back for another whack at it on September 11, 2001.

But he erred grievously, because America had just elected another President who was cut from better cloth. George W. Bush, a former military fighter pilot, took decisive action like a real man would. Afghanistan's terrorist-supporting Taliban was hit hard and Saddam Hussein was removed from power, brought to trial, and executed by the new democratically-elected government of Iraq.

I may not have cared for much of what President Bush did domestically during his time in office, but as Commander-in-Chief, he rocked.


So what do we have in office now, during a time when real leadership is required and our military is fighting two wars? Do we have a Jackson, a Roosevelt, an Eisenhower, a Reagan or even a Bush to make the tough decisions and support our troops? Do we have a man with a backbone, a firm jaw, and the first-hand understanding of what it means to fight?

No, we don't. We just have Obi Wan Ke-dopey:
















God help us.