Oh, for the want of a third party. . .

Watching the story of the election in Alabama, which will occur today (I'm dreading the flood of news tonight), I have to once again wonder; why is it that we stick to a two party system in this country?

Truly, most nations have more than just two parties. Why should the voters of Alabama have to decide between just Moore and his opponent.  This is casting the election as one, it seems, where people fear that they must vote for a candidate who is morally dubious or a party that is.  That shouldn't have to happen.

I really wonder what would occur if some serious, known, Alabaman came out on a ticket backed by a party like the American Solidarity Party, which I suspect probably reflects the views of most Alabamans more than the Democrats or Republicans do.

For that matter, with candidates slowly starting to line up for the Wyoming Gubernatorial race next year, I'm lamenting that we don't have something like that here. I'm hoping that the GOP won't model itself after Utah's GOP in this race and that somebody like our current Governor comes out. Surely that will happen, right?

Boys Town Founded, December 12, 1917

Monsignor Edward J. Flanagan

On this date in 1917, Monsignor Edward J. Flanagan founded an orphanage outside of Omaha Nebraska which was called the City of Little Men.  Later changing its name to Boys' Town, the orphanage for boys pioneered the social preparation model for orphanages.  It still exists.

Monsignor Flanagan was Irish by birth and the son of a herdsman.  He immigrated to the United States at age 18 in 1904 and received a bachelors degree just two years later, going on to receive a MA two years after that.  He then entered the seminary in New York and completed his studies in Italy and Austria, being ordained there in 1912.  He was then assigned to Nebraska as a Priest. He became a US citizen in 1919.. His views on the care and development of orphaned children were far ahead of their time.

Aviation Machine Gun School, December 12, 1917.

Roads to the Great War: 100 Years Ago: General Edmund Allenby Enters Jerus...

Roads to the Great War: 100 Years Ago: General Edmund Allenby Enters Jerus...: 100 Years ago tomorrow, Field Marshal Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby entered Jerusalem as its conqueror.   General Allenby was 56 years...

Field Marshall Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem. December 11, 1917.

On this date in 1917, Edmund Allenby, the victorious British commander of the recent campaign to take Jerusalem, entered it.

Allenby, who was a cavalryman by branch, approached the city on horseback in an era when all professional officers not only knew how to ride, their occupations required that they in fact ride in the service.   But, cognizant of the slight given the city by the Kaiser's mounted entry into it in 1898, he and his party dismounted and walked into the city.

Allenby and his staff enter through the Jaffa Gate on foot.

As Allenby recounted it:

...I entered the city officially at noon, 11 December, with a few of my staff, the commanders of the French and Italian detachments, the heads of the political missions, and the Military Attaches of France, Italy, and America... The procession was all afoot, and at Jaffa gate I was received by the guards representing England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, India, France and Italy. The population received me well...

The population of the city did in fact appreciate the dismounted entry.

 Allenby and his staff receive the city notables, note the camera photographing the event.

Allenby, who was quite religious himself, was careful to respect the religions in the city, sending Muslim troops under his command to guard Islamic holy sites.  He is even reputed to have even stated "only now have the crusades ended."  Use of the word "crusade" or "crusader" was in fact banned in his command in order to not associate the English and Allied cause with a religious one in the Middle East.

Reflecting the diverse nature of the city, a Franciscan Monk reads the Allied decree on the city in French and Italian.  The city hosted Arab, Jewish, Greek and other populations and had religious cites that were maintained by Jewish, Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox bodies.

Of course, as pointed out the other day, the initial local goodwill would not be infinite and the League of Nations Mandate giving the British a protectorate status over Mandatory Palestine would become sufficiently unpopular by the 1930s to lead to an Arab revolt in Palestine, followed of course by the troubles that followed World War Two as the British struggled to resolve the national aspirations of the Arab and Jewish populations.

 

An argument on what you can and cannot think about stuff that people don't understand with implications you just don't expect but maybe ought to.. Fallout from Obergefell

Let's start with something here which ought to be obvious from the text, but this post isn't about same gender marriage, or same sex marriage, or homosexual marriage, or whatever you may call it.

 Working on a wedding cake.  It it art?  Expression? Free speech?  Just a cake?  And if you refuse to bake it, is that speech.  Oh, the tangled web we weave. . .

People wanting to debate that, will have to discuss it outside of this thread. . . assuming they can, because this post is about whether you can do that, and how you can do it, maybe.

No, this post is about what happens when the Supreme Court doesn't think out the results of its opinion and issues what at least some of its Justices no doubt know isn't an opinion that's well founded in the law, but rather which puts them out ahead of a social movement and allows them to claim for themselves a victory which might have, or might not have, come about otherwise, but which if it did, rightfully belonged to other people and not the Justices.

And so we start with a concluding statement in that opinion.

Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned. The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons. In turn, those who believe allowing same-sex marriage is proper or indeed essential, whether as a matter of religious conviction or secular belief, may engage those who disagree with their view in an open and searching debate.

Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. ___ (2015)
 
And now we'll find out if Justice Kennedy is made into latent prevaricator or a fool as well as having a poor attachment to jurisprudence.  And that will depend on what will be his probable swing vote in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd.  It'll certainly be a test of his legal abilities and will likely cause him to be regarded as a fool by some segment of the American public, although which one that will be has yet to be determined.  Having made something unworkable and unfair, he must now do something unworkable that will be perceived as unfair.  It didn't have to be that way.

If his swing vote holds that a person holding an "utmost, sincere [religious] conviction"* prohibiting him from attending to a same gender wedding in some fashion can be compelled to do so in spite of those beliefs, the near concluding paragraph of Obergefell will have proven to be completely false, as opponents of Obergefell feared it would be.  If he holds the other way around, Obergefell will start to descend into the unworkable or, alternatively, it'll be a big turn in direction on implied protected speech wrecking much of that body of law.  Any way the court goes, American democracy will be hurt and the legacy of Kennedy will be all the more tarnished.

The issue, in practical terms, is this. Can a person with deep religious convictions be compelled to do what is regarded in theological terms as "cooperation with evil", if the United States Supreme Court, or at least five of its members including the most aged amongst them, feel, mostly based on trying to be hip and cool, that it isn't evil, with evil in this context meaning something that the actor believes to be morally wrong.

Nearly every governmental decision of this type comes to be regarded as a horror in later more sober years, but most people will just go along with it at any one time. Some won't. Those who won't are regarded as heroes later, but at the time they're reviled if they won't back down and have to be reported to some government body, as in this case a cake baker was, so that they can be strong armed into social compliance.  The question, therefore, is strong arming people who oppose same gender marriage by refusing to lend their services to it something the Constitution cannot tolerate, particularly if it is the course of the free exercise of their religion?

Hold on a moment, some are thinking, did you say;

Nearly every governmental decision of this type comes to be regarded as a horror in later more sober years, but most people will just go along with it at any one time. Some won't. Those who won't are regarded as heroes later, but at the time they're reviled if they won't back down and have to be reported to some government body, as in this case a cake baker was, so that they can be strong armed into social compliance.

Yes, I sure did. And I'll go one step further.  Folks like the owner of Masterpiece Cakes will be regarded as heroes because they are in context, and it doesn't matter if you agree with them or not. They're heroes not because of what they believe, but because they're taking a stand in the face of massive government opposition, massive movement opposition, and the quite indifference or cowardice of everyone else.

Just like the Hollywood Ten.

 Screenwriter and Communist (and perhaps ironically here a Coloradoan) Dalton Trumbo in front of the House Committee on Un American Affairs. He really was a Communist in the 1940s.  Should he have been punished for that?  Should you be punished for refusing to bake a cake?  You can't answer yes to one and no to the other.

The Hollywood Ten?  You mean those guys accused of being Communists who wouldn't back down?  Are you rally comparing, you may be thinking, accused Communists with a Fundamentalist Christian baker?

Well, yes I am, even though, as the ten really were Communists or fellow travelers, not just accused Communists, I don't think these folks would share a common view on anything.

And here's why.

Today nearly everyone takes the position that Senator McCarthy was a horrible dude because he accused people of being Communists and they weren't. Not so.  He accused Communists of being Communists.

And that's besides the point.

We're so enamored of our heroes that we forget why they were heroes in the first place and place on them universal good qualities and place ourselves on their side.  More often than not heroes are the few people who aren't willing to just go along with everyone else and are reviled by everyone else.  And more often than not they aren't really all that universally admirable.  It's their stand, that protects us all, that makes them admirable.  When we look back at people accused of being Communist in the 1930s and 1940s, during the 1950s, chances are really good that they really were Communists. We admire their stand, not the thing they were standing for, as the thing they were standing against was so wrong.  It's un American and unjust to require people not to be Communists.  Yes, Communism is bad, but that doesn't mean that a person can be prohibited from being one, or should be so prohibited.

And that's how this thing works out as well.  Whether or not you agree with the baker, telling people who they must bake for is just flat out wrong.  So that get us back to the first question that we'll have to answer thanks to the situation we're now in, which is a completely predictable question.

The question, therefore, is strong arming people who oppose same gender marriage by refusing to lend their services to it something the Constitution cannot tolerate, particularly if it is the course of the free exercise of their religion?

The second question is did we even need to get here? The answer to that question is very clearly no, and there's very clearly a way out of this now, but the Supreme Court, ossified in decaying age, the decay of legal thought and infirm, won't go there.  More on that in a moment.

A report from Scotusblog on the argument:

Argument analysis: Conservative majority leaning toward ruling for Colorado baker (UPDATED)

Obergefell was problematic, and indeed devoid of any grounding in the law, right from the onset.  The very long history of the U.S. Constitution in relationship to marriage makes that very plain that Obergefell isn't based on the law, but on Kennedy and his fellow travelers trying to jump out ahead of what they perceived to be a social movement that was going to prevail, thereby claiming the laurels that would have otherwise been claimed by those who prevailed democratically.  It was a coup, and an ill advised one they likely thought harmless or beneficial.  It would take legislative enactment to redefine marriage in any sort of valid way, assuming that a legislative enactment on what is a pre legislative institution can be made valid.  Indeed, prior to Obergefell the courts only asserted that legislatures had the right to regulate marriage, not to completely redefine it and there can be little doubt that prior to the 20th Century they would not have conceived of themselves as having such a right.**  A judicial reworking simply smacks of the aged trying to get ahead of what they think is going to occur in history anyway.  And they botched it.

At the time it was insisted that the only result of Obergefell would be to allow same gender couples to marry, as long as that meant that many of the instances of marriage were wholly ignored. That view was extremely naive as marriage touches everything and its grounded in an incorrect philosophical and physical understanding of marriage.  It very rapidly ceased to be the case. Already the concept that a person be allowed to criticize the holding as contrary to natural law is being shouted down in the press and in some places, such as Colorado, people are now compelled to serve same gender marriages in spite of having religious objections to what was regarded as deeply unnatural only very recently.  It smacks very strongly of reeducation camps, and necessarily so.  Justice Kennedy's assertion that religion would not be impeded have proven to be false, so far. Indeed, his claim that people could even advance the opposite opinion has very quickly proven false and "it's decided" is the shout down cry of those whose legislative efforts were taken from them as they are forced to pin their hopes on the incorrect assumption that a decree by the Supreme Court actually decides things in society.   And they had to be.  To rework an ancient institution by judicial decree requires an element of force and is unlikely to work even then.  A society, in spite of Kennedy's naivete, cannot suddenly start to think in a different fashion whole-scale overnight in spite of what a bunch of old robed people declare that they should. Indeed, as Court's in democratic nations are only respected by the average person in a highly qualified fashion, such a decision is more likely to harden opposition on the side that looses.

The degree to which Obergefell is deeply anti democratic and offensive to American concepts of liberty is easily demonstrated by imagining only slightly different versions of the same scenario.  Would the law hold that a couple wanting a ham dinner for Easter, or perhaps for their wedding, be allowed to compel a Jewish deli to provide it?  Can Orthodox Jews demand that the rest of the world shut completely down on Saturdays? Can a couple getting married on Saturday demand that an Orthodox Rabbi perform it?  Can a same gender couple demand that a Priest perform a ceremony that he finds contrary to his faith. Can a person who simply feels that same gender marriage is contrary to nature without even going into the topic of religion be silenced for "hate speech" just for expressing his views?**

If Kennedy can find his way around to holding that bakers must bake cakes that are contrary to their convictions, the contempt for this decision will grown exponentially while, as the same time, it's hammer like reach will hit harder.**  The backers of Obergefell now no longer argue that they only want the same rights that others want, which in fact they already actually had. Instead, the backers will, and indeed are, demanding that everyone accept their view completely and that those who don't hold them shut up.  It's a McCarthyite approach. Are you now, or have you ever been, an opponent of same sex marriage?  Senator Joe. . .  your seat is waiting.

At the end of the day the Supreme Court will issue a limited but important decision here. Chances are, based upon the early reports, that this decision will hold that the religious views of people are protected and they cannot be compelled by the state to go against them, although exactly how it gets there is far from clear.  Liberals will howl as a result and will claim that Obergefell has been gutted and make analogies that are strained and which serve to undercut prior legitimate victories.   But it's not impossible that Kennedy, confronted with the dog's breakfast of his decision and notable already for his sensitive feelings, will go the other way, in which case the significant section of the populace that holds this decision in contempt will grow in the level to which it despises it and refuses to acknowledge it, and by extension everything the Court does.

Indeed, Kennedy's decision did more than any other single act to put us into the political situation we are now in, in which a large section of the country has no faith whatsoever in political institutions.  If he's amazed by our times, he should realize that he advanced the clock to cause them.  And if we actually end up impeaching an elected President and removing him from office for the first time in the nation's history, thereby putting the survival of the republic in real doubt, Anthony Kennedy can get the blame for getting us to that point to at least a significant degree.  Everyone who wonders how we ended up with Trump should start carrying an Anthony Kennedy card.

An awareness of at least some of this is why the court is clearly tempted not to reach a decision on free excise of religion grounds at all but, rather, on the topic of free speech.  If it does that, it will instead take a look at the question of whether or not baking a wedding cake is "speech".  Indeed, a lot of the various justice's questions were on that topic.

But that's really dangerous ground for the court to be treading on, and if goes in that direction, it will have opened up a bunch of case law that it previously regarded as settled.

It was Kennedy, after all, who authored the opinion that held burning a flag is free speech, an opinion which I agree with. But that opinion falls in with a bunch of other opinions that hold all sorts of things are speech. Art can be speech.  Dance can be speech.  Pornography, as long as it isn't obscene, is speech, as long as it contains some serious "scientific, literary or artistic merit".  If Hustler magazine is protected speech, why wouldn't a wedding cake be protected speech? Or if burning a flag, which isn't speech at all of course but an act, is protected speech, why wouldn't decorating a cake be speech?  Or maybe refusing to decorate a cake is speech?

Ironically, in the recent oral arguments, it was the liberal justices who scoffed at that idea.  And this shows what a disaster Obergefell is.  Justices who would have held that dancing flag burning pornography is speech, now scoff at the idea that decorating a cake is art and therefore speech.  But in doing that, all the rest of it goes out the window at the same time.

Oh, what tangled web we weave . . .

This all stems, of course, from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provides:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So Congress, and by later incorporation the states, cannot abridge free speech.  And if it can't do that, Colorado can't tell people when to bake a cake. Can it tell people when they can't bake a cake, or when they must bake a cake?




It all sounds rather surreal, but that's where we are on this.

Quite a few commentators believe that what the framers meant in regards to this provision is that Congress couldn't abridge political speech.  Maybe it could, therefore, prevent other types of speech.  The framers sure acted like they could as libel laws were more more restrictive at the time. For that matter, Congress had no problem with running out and abridging speech right off the back with the original sedition act, which seems pretty darned unconstitutional.

Anyhow, the Court here really focused on "art".  And that suggest that the Court was looking for the easy way out, which it often does as a matter of interpretation and which it should. The way this would work would be this.  If a cake is just a cake, and not art, well then its just food, and not speech.

If you go there, then Colorado can legally argue that a baker can't make a decision not to sell a cake based on his beliefs as a cake is just a cake.  It would be like NAPA refusing to sell auto parts to a gay couple on their way to their wedding if their car broke down, maybe.

Or maybe not.

The problem there is that if a wedding cake isn't art, then much of the other obvious baloney that court's have determined to be protected speech over the years must fall. So here too, Kennedy has set everyone up, including himself on one of his mostly dearly held opinions.  If a cake is a cake. . .well a flag might be a flag.  And then Kennedy's decision in Texas v Johnson is either out the window, or now dubious.

The sad thing there is that Texas v. Johnson is correct in my view.  But if a majority on this Court holds a cake is a cake, it looks like that case has been overruled sub silentio.  If the Court takes steps from that not being the case, it looks like they're making things up as they go. . .as they'd be making things up as they go.

Indeed, the Justices who sort of sneered at the idea that a cake is anything more than a cake already look like elitist fools, something that some people are increasingly holding regarding the Court. The Court can ill afford that as at some point people just flat out disregard it.  At that point, it become pretty ineffectual.  So the Court has to really hold, if it doesn't want to look that way, that a cake can be art. Or that refusing to bake a cake can be speech. . . or maybe refusing to bake a cake is an example of the free exercise of religion.

Whichever way it goes, it cuts a big gaping hole into the logic of something it's already held.  It has no choice with any of these options but to look pretty foolish.

Which is why a proper course of action, and one that could be done right now, would be to repeal Obergefell and return the topic of same gender marriage to the legislature where it was controversial, but not in the fashion it currently is, as embarrassing to the Court as that would be.

The basic Constitutional issue is now before the Court, if it wishes to take it up. Four out of the Five Justices opposed this.  Kennedy is now confronted by the fact that his desire to let a thousand happy marriage daisies bloom is instead a Constitution mess that cannot be handled under our system without doing violence to the law, to the Constitution, to the beliefs of millions of people and to an expanded concept of free speech.  He could bring it up and simply say that upon further reflection it is clear that the earlier decision was wrong.

People would howl, but that would take this issue back to the legislatures where it belongs.

And that, and here's where things get really sticky, would actually require people to discuss what marriage is. And few people are prepared to do that in the early 21st Century. Anthony Kennedy certainly isn't, based upon his anemic writing.  He thinks that it's about love and flowers and not being lonely.  It's about none of those things, even if all of those things are ideally an element of marriage.

Marriage is not an institution created by the state and preexisted any state of any kind, in a strictly male female relationship, as a way of handling sex and its byproducts in a conventional sexual relationship. For that reason, in spite of the focus on the minor details that make up differences from culture to culture, it's remarkably consistently the same in its basic nature in every culture.

Chances are extremely high that if the underpinning issues had been debated in the law prior to the 20th Century this would have been noted and the chances are very high that most Courts would have held that marriage could be regulated, as the U.S. Supreme Court has held, but that it can't be redefined as its a natural institution incapable of being redefined except by nature.  Kennedy, who grounded his views on the idea of Constitutionally protected love, wouldn't be capable of grasping an argument such as that.

And what that means, and here's where many in the opposing camp would grow uncomfortable, if we're going to redefine marriage, we must first define marriage, and if we do that, and find that its a natural institution, maybe we need to redraft our human institutional framework, IE., our laws, to match that.

In other words, not only does same gender marriage perhaps not make any sense at all, perhaps forcing the recognition of marital obligations on people with children so that they're not forced on society makes sense.  Maybe not allowing easy divorce, or divorce at all, for couples with children make sense.  There'd be a lot of really hard issues to be debated in a very deep way, something that hasn't been really debated in this society since the 1530s.  And debating it in the 1530s resulted in a pretty rough go of things for a really long time.  Of course, you get those debates when they arrive, and we're sort of seeing the arrival of that right now.

Maybe no state role in marriage at all makes sense.  If the proponents of same gender marriage, as Kennedy would have it (and not all of their arguments are so unsophisticated as his) are limited to it being about love, why does the government have any role in that?  That, quite frankly, makes no sense whatsoever (and very few serious proponents of same gender marriage would in fact take that as a primary foundation of their arguments as it is so very weak as one). Maybe tying it irrevocable to children and their natural parents makes sense, from the point of view of protection of the state and the protection of children.  Indeed, we might well recall that at one time the state imposed the recognition of marriage upon such couples, rather than simply conferring it upon all who wished for state validation of their relationship status.

It's deep water indeed.

But that would take a Judge who had the courage to admit he was wrong and go back on himself.  And the intellect to reconsider and thrown these deep questions out into the public venue where they'd make everyone very uncomfortable.

I don't see Anthony Kennedy as that kind of guy.  So this mess will go on, and on, and on until sooner or later, by one means or another, its back in the legislative arena, decades later, and after the worst Supreme Court Justice in recent memory is just a footnote in casebooks.

Funny how those who once acted, they claimed, to oppose oppression can work their way around to imposing it.

__________________________________________________________________________________

* An interesting aspect of this is that this issue seems to be considered only in these terms, but there are those who are deeply opposed to same gender marriage on reasons other than religion.  Indeed, during the period during which this movement has been spreading in the Western world its occasionally drawn opposition from individuals who are notable and who very clearly do not hold to conventional religious or moral views otherwise.  And in some populations, France's in particular, the forcing of the same gender marriage has been massively unpopular with huge segments of the population that are not strongly observant, even if they are not opponents of religion.  In Italy it drew the notable opposition of at least one very well known gay individual who had thought out the philosophical nature of marriage and came to the opinion that it made sense only in the heterosexual context.

Missed in all of this is that there are those who feel that same gender marriage is unsound for reasons grounded in culture, science or philosophy but who don't put the debate in the context of religion.  Those people's views are simply ignored, particularly by the political left as these same individuals tend to fit into the political left.

You'd have thought Kennedy and the Supreme Court might have noted that, but the Ivory Tower nature of the upper rooms of the court would of course preclude that, dominated by the isolated elderly as it is.  It's a shame that it has been noted as such opinions are important and should be considered.

**Indeed one prominent "civil rights" organization has caused organizations that oppose same gender marriage to be listed on its widely circulated list as "hate groups".  And in the liberal left its commonly accepted that this issue is over, and expressing any contrary opinion simply cannot be done.

What this has caused and will cause is exactly what I feared it would.  People now feel these views are being forced on them and they really detest it.  The argument may descend into corners it never had to go into, with the left maintaining anyone who agrees with it deserves to be oppressed, and the right regarding those in the opposite camp as oppressors. How bad this may become may have been revealed recently when an extremely naive homosexual Wyoming legislator went out to promote her bill to redraft all of Wyoming's laws to be gender neutral, replacing "husband and wife" with spouse, and so on. She met with a brick wall of opposing and blistering comments and then went away shocked and upset. She shouldn't.  In places where the law has been imposed, it's an imposition, and things like marriage really matter to people.  The lines now are very hard and fast.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 11

Today In Wyoming's History: December 11: 1917  Rawlins struck with disaster when its hospital burned.  Attribution, Wyoming State Historical Society.

Dean Knight Resigned as Dean of the University of Wyoming, December 11, 1917.

The minutes of that meeting:

Minutes

Knight Hall is of course named for him.

Roads to the Great War: Doughboy Basics: What Are the Lasting Contribution...

Roads to the Great War: Doughboy Basics: What Are the Lasting Contribution...: Maybe, in the broadest sense, the great contribution of the Doughboys is what all of America's warriors have given their nation over...

Roads to the Great War: Doughboy Basics: What Did the Doughboys Contribut...

Roads to the Great War: Doughboy Basics: What Did the Doughboys Contribut...: Let me form this posting around several blanket statements. 1.  America Did Not Win the War Single-Handed, but Its Entry Probably ...

Time to plan for a post Trump future. Success or Failure.

Man alive, there's a lot going on in the world of politics in the US.  It's too much to keep up with.

Or at least its numbing.

It's almost has hard as keeping up with the latest media or Hollywood figure to be caught with their pants down, after they've been down for some time, it seems.

Starting the week before last, with Gen. Flynn's acceptance of criminal guilt, we have now entered into a situation in which it is increasingly possible, possible, not probable, that President Trump will be impeached.

Note, I said possible, not probable.

I'm not alone in this view, however.  If you listen to the Democrats in Congress there are clear rumblings of this.  And one of the round table folks on Meet the Press, from the conservative side, flat out declared that if the Democrats take the house in 2018, and it looks increasingly likely that hey stand a pretty good chance, the result will be an impeachment.

That latter opinion I'll note is disturbing as it comes close to predicting what would amount to a coup.  Simply removing a President as you don't like him isn't an impeachment.  At best its a weird way around to what in a Parliament is a vote of no confidence.  In our system we dont' have that, of course.  In our system, it'd border on being a coup.

But not everyone who is edging up on an impeachment is doing it as they feel that Trump simply needs to go. Some are as there are now pretty clear rumblings that Trump's close inner circle may have been involved in criminal activity prior to his election and prior to his taking  the oath of office. Clearly Flynn was.

Indeed, it's hard not to feel like we're back in 1973 again, which leaves anyone who remembers any of that with a sick feeling in their stomach.  Rumblings and news come out in leaks that start to resemble a flood. ..  the White House denies any wrongdoing. .. .but some of the things we know about are hard to ignore.

It makes a person feel icky.

Now, I"m not venturing an opinion on illegality, and I don't think that any layman is in a position to do that at this time.

What I am saying is that something I thought totally impossible now is looking pretty possible.

So, let's say it happens.

And let's say Trump is removed.

I think we, and by that the nation . . . and more particularly the political part of the nation,  needs to prepare for that.

And not in the way, to be sure, that hardcore members of the political left currently are.

First we better revisit how a President is actually removed from office through impeachment.

How is a President Impeached?

Not very easily, that's for sure.

In order to be removed by the process, the House must vote to impeach the President.  Then it goes to the Senate where 2/3s of the Senate must vote for removal in order for that to occur.

That's never happened.

It likely would have happened with Nixon, and he knew it, which is partially why he resigned.  He also may have genuinely resigned in order to spare the country the agony of going through an impeachment.  Trump wouldn't do that.

In order for it to happen now, with the Senate nearly evenly split, all the Democrats would hvae to vote for removal.  That's can't be taken as a given, as its such a drastic thing to occur.  And then Republicans would have to join in.

I think some Republicans would join in.

Now, that's right now.

But let's keep in mind that Trump is deeply unpopular with some Republicans in the Senate (and the House).

And let's also keep in mind that there are plenty of highly savvy Republicans in the Senate who are really upset about the direction of things right now.  They don't like Trump as President and they live in fear of what a Moore victory in Alabama means for the reputation of the GOP.

If they could remove Trump, or Trump and Moore, they'd likely do it.

Or they'd like to do it.

But let's also keep in mind that the process of impeachment itself is damaging to the country every time it occurs. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson effectively rendered the remainder of his term ineffectual for everyone.  The impeachment of Bill Clinton, which was extremely political and extremely ill advised, has had negative political ripples down to the current era.  Indeed, it dumbed down American politics in a way that has just kept on keeping on.

So quite a few from the right and the left would fear to impeach the President unless they feel it absolutely necessary.

So, while the House may get there after the 2018 election, one year from now (which is a really long time in politics).  The Senate may very well never get there.  If if they took on a Bill of Impeachment and didn't impeach Trump, the remainder of his term would be insufferable in a way that we can hardly imagine, given that he acts in ways we've never seen before. For that reason alone I hope we don't get there.

But let's say we do.

How we got here

But before we imagine that, let's recall how we got a President Trump in the first place.

It's not as if there was a massive ground swell of support, ever, for Trump. Rather, the rank and file of the GOP and the old hard hat element of the Democratic Party grew flat out disgusted with both parties, and that disgust remains.

The GOP seemed, to their average rank and file, to lie about all of its goals and to never act on them. They never acted on immigration.  They didn't do anything about an increasingly statist left wing bureaucracy coming to influence daily life and social policy.  They did nothing, they felt.

And for he hard hat element of the Democratic Party, it became impossible for them to recognize their own party.  A party which was once the party of the working man had become the party of identity politics and gender confusion.

In short, you couldn't be a Republican worried about immigration, worried about social policy, or worried about an increasingly Statist American nation and take the GOP politicians seriously.  And you couldn't be a Democrat who opposed abortion, or opposed radical gun control, or who worried about his job on the factory floor, and take the Democrats seriously.

And those people came to hate  their own parties.

That's how we got here.

And they still hate their own parties.

Going forward

And that's what we need to recall.

If the radical left feels removing Trump today means a gender neutral Trotsky tomorrow, a Trump impeachment will make the situation much worse, not any better.  The political civil war would go nuclear thereafter.

If the GOP feels that removing Trump just takes the party back to the good old days of George Bush II, or I, they're not going to get it.

You can lance the boil, to be sure, but the infection that's causing it is really deep.

And that's what needs to both give us pause, and cause us to need to use that pause for some pondering and planning.

And part of that planning and pondering should lead to the conclusion that Trump came about because of a massive Democratic and Republican failure, but not the same failure.

The Democrats have become a party run by a hard left, ossified, ancient elite.  They formed their political views in the very early 1970s and they believe that politics can lead people to a bright shiny secular urban tea sipping gender neutral city on a hill.

Whatever the views are of younger people, they aren't what Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuckles Schumer think they are.  Nor are they what Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Donna Brazille think they are.  The Democrats have to dump the crazy left and relocate the center, even their own center.

And the GOP elite has to quit lying.  It's made it a long ways on promising to do increasingly unlikely things and their bluff was called in the form of Trump.  Going from just conservative during the Reagan era to far right in an increasing lock step every year, in their pronouncements if not their actions, voters finally abandoned them in favor of a candidate who would actually attempt to do the increasingly hard right things promised.  For example, moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem was never a sound idea, but GOP candidates promised it, and then (wisely) backed out.  It was never a good idea, but they kept tossing it out there.  Now voters who kept hearing that promise voted in a guy who actually did it, no matter how unsound that idea was.

So, if Trump is removed, unless things are to go from extreme to even more extreme, both sides nearly need to take Trump as an example of how extreme things could get and back off a whole lot.

What would that mean?

Both sides have to dump the disgruntled crazies in their ranks for one thing.  Everyone sees them, but nobody feels that they can silence them.  University professors who think they are Marxist revolutionaries. . .judges who can't tell men from women and want to force everyone else into gender neutrality. . . individuals who have their own secret copy of a constitution which provides that the United States was to be a Protestant theocracy. . . people who hate the government because it is a government . . people who hate other people because of their race, gender, or proclivities or who hate other people as they won't acknowledge that their own race has a special place as its special, or specially oppressed, or that their proclivities are deserving of forced public accolades.  People who would write science out of science text books or history out of history text books.  

It won't be easy.

And, moreover, for the Democrats it likely means that they need to discovery actual nature and working people a bit.  Democrats sound like they really truly hate human nature and would prefer a nation of Greenwich Village dwelling castrati if at all possible.   That's not going to happen.  And they need to find a sense of philosophical values that's not based on complete nonsensical hot air.

For the GOP, it means that they have to decide which of their right wing promises they really mean and stick to them and explain them in a cogent fashion.  And they need to rediscover science and education in a major and serious way.  They need, quite frankly, to abandon the gadfly fruit loops that they let run amok in the political hinterlands suggesting that the FBI is right over the top of the hill and they need to be resisted.

Put more bluntly, the GOP needs to kick out Roy Moore and cheerleaders for the Bundys, and most of the delegation from Utah that hates public lands.  The Democrats need to loose Chuckles Schumer, anyone named Clinton, and Wasserman Schultz.

If they don't, we'll be headed to a series of presidents, right and left, which will make Trump look like a model of calm behavior and middle ground positions.  And we'll suffer greatly as a result.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. James the Less Catholic Church, Ulupalakua, Maui, Hawaii.

Churches of the West: St. James the Less Catholic Church, Ulupalakua, Maui, Hawaii.

This is St. James the Less Catholic Church in Ulupalakua, Maui, Hawaii.  It's a mission church served by Our Lady Queen of Angels, which is actually fairly close to it on the same highway.  Being used to the large distances of most rural areas of the West, to find two churches of the same faith so close together is surprising, but even in such locations as Denver Colorado that still occurs, so perhaps this should not be surprising.  This church is actually older that Our Lady Queen of Angels and the original church built in this location was constructed at least as early as 1875, with missionary activity having dated back to the 1850s.  The current structure was built in 1950 and renovated in 2002.

123d and 124th Infantry Regiment. Camp Wheeler, Macon, Georgia. December 10, 1917.

124th Infantry Regiment Camp.

123d Infantry Regiment Camp.

Best Posts of the Week of December 3, 2017.

The best posts of the week of December 3, 2017.

A week marked here by tanks, bicycles, old predictions that panned out, and rediscovering the obvious.

December 4. Predictions and Predicaments old new.

The bicycles strike back. . .

The M26 and its children

D'oh! Rediscioverying what was already obvious. " Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated A new book challenges how we think about human progress."

Jerusalem surrenders to the British, December 9, 1917

Ottoman forces had withdrawn the day prior, but the town surrendered on December 9, 1917.

The Mayor of Jerusalem with two British sergeants.  It must have been muddy, based on the appearance of everyone's shoes.

The capture of the city marked the hallmark of Gen. Allenby's first campaign in the Middle East, which had seen a lot of dramatic fighting over the past two or so months.  It wouldn't be the culmination of Allenby's efforts by any means, but it was his first indisputable major success.

 

Crowd viewing the entry of British officers near the Jaffa Gate 

It also put the British in a sensitive position which they were never really able to work out, and which in some ways has never been worked out.  Alleby was sensitive to being seen as a crusader by the Arab population of the multi cultural city and strove to avoid that.  Be that as it may, it can't be ignored that an English, Christian, army was entering a mostly Arab, Muslim, town that had been evacuated by a Turkish Muslim leader who claimed to rule a caliphate.

British rule would prove to be relatively short, a little over thirty years, but controversial.  Prior to Allenby's entry the British had already extended promises to both the Arab Muslims as well as to the Jews regarding the ultimate fate of Palestine, promises which they were not later successful in reconciling.  The British promises extended to two out of the three major religions that have holy sites in the city, and perhaps tellingly the British, a Christian people not wanting to seem to be Crusaders, but an officially Protestant nation as well, did not seek to make promises of the same type to the minority Orthodox or Catholic populations, although they did of course protect the religious sites of all the religions located there.  The city had, at the time, a Muslim majority.

And as the British did not reflect either of those cultures themselves, their rule grew to be unpopular in various quarters with both.  Prior to World War Two the British would find themselves forced to put down an Arab independence movement and following World War Two it was faced with a Jewish independence movement in its League of Nation's mandate.  That was accompanied by growing Muslim unrest as the Jewish population of the mandate increased by the influx of Jewish refugees caused by World War Two.  Ultimately they simply left, which was probably the only thing they really could do.

 British guard at the Jaffa Gate

Even now, of course, the echoes of 1917 can still be heard.  The city was split between Israel and Jordan until the Six Day War in 1968, at which time Israel occupied the entire city.   Israel proclaimed the city as its capitol as early as 1949 but most nations have not recognized that claim.  The US recognized it in 1995, by Congressional resolution, but also provided that the embassy could only be moved after certain conditions were realized.  The Palestinian National Authority claims the eastern half of the city as its capitol while recognizing the western half of the capitol as the Israeli capitol.

 Turkish prisoners of war.

Just this past week President Trump declared that the American embassy would in fact be moved, fulfilling a campaign promise made by various Presidents before him, as well as by him, but which is guaranteed to be massively unpopular and likely result in violent protests.

And it all started on this day, in 1917.

D'oh! Rediscioverying what was already obvious. " Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated A new book challenges how we think about human progress."

Goose decoys in a farmed field, Goshen County Wyoming.

Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated

A new book challenges how we think about human progress.

Did we not already know this?  I thought it was pretty obvious.

Indeed, we've known for a really long time that people in hunting cultures are pretty happy as a rule. Why wouldn't they be? That was our original state, after all.  Something that we, in our modern civilized societies, seem to be continually surprised by.  However, looking around, you'll find that the level of general discontent in civilized societies, and in particular in "advanced economies" is really high.  And no wonder. The more advanced a society, the less connection with life, as we were intended to live it, exists.

Indeed, many of the problems that we worry about in modern society are pretty much unique to "civilized" societies, and in particular modern ones.  Depression, anxiety, identity disorders, and suicide. . .these are first world modern civilized problems.

And yet this is apparently as astounding conclusion and discovery.  And apparently James Scott, a professor of political science and anthropology at Yale University, is the latest to discover, or shall we say more correctly, rediscover this.  He's just authored a book entitled Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.  Sean Illing, for Vox, interviewed him. The interview is interesting, but  it is a bit odd to find positions that you've known of and taken for years being presented as revolutionary revelations.

Anyway, let's start off with something that I was well aware of and that I've heard others note.  Civilization involves a lot of work, and that's what we signed on board for when we went civilized. Or, rather, that's what our ancestors enrolled us for.

Even today, there is this idea that life with civilization is easier and affords more leisure, but hunters and gatherers spend only about 50 percent of their time producing or searching for what they needed to survive. The idea that hunters and gatherers and foragers were living hand to mouth and one day away from starvation is nonsense, even for those in pretty marginal areas where there is less access to natural migrations of fish and animals and the fruiting seasons of trees and so on.

No kidding. We didn't know that?

Why didn't we know that. Our own American culture encountered, directly, aboriginal people for the first few centuries, if we go back to Colonial times, of our existence.  It seems we should have known that aboriginal people were generally not starving.  Hmmmm.

The author was asked about how civilized life "improved" human existence in some ways.  His answer was as follows.

Yes, things are better now, but it’s really only in the last 200 years or so that we’ve enjoyed the health and longevity that we do today. But this initial period when we think civilization was created was, in fact, a really dark period for humanity.

Dark period may be laying it on a little thick, but by the same token the idea that we really are enjoying that much in the way of any kind of "improvement" does as well.  Some aboriginal people are known to have lived very long lives.  It's indisputable that medicine has hugely advanced, to be sure, but then some of the modern diseases we confront have come about due to our modernity.  Diseases like diabetes, for example, pretty clearly afflict us to a large degree because of our diet and living habits.  Obesity is a modern problem.  And pretty clearly a large number of modern psychological problems are ours alone.  Medicine has undoubtedly improved, but I don't think we've begun to plumb the depth of how our modern civilized life afflicts our health in all sorts of ways.

And he was asked about environment.

Well, I think we’ve gotten ourselves into a fix with our natural environment. We keep building and destroying and growing, and I worry that we might jeopardize everything if we can’t slow down and reexamine what we’re doing. Part of why I’m interested in studying these lost cultures is to understand how humans have lived for 95 percent of our existence, and to remind myself that things could be otherwise.

There's the key.

"Part of why I’m interested in studying these lost cultures is to understand how humans have lived for 95 percent of our existence, and to remind myself that things could be otherwise."

They could be otherwise.  As Chesterton noted:

If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back."The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour.In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

Now, to be sure, we likely can't in real terms, particularly given our numbers, say let's chuck it all and become aboriginals.  And we probably don't want to either.  Truth be known, one of the things I suspect the good professor is missing is that the line between agricultural peoples and hunting peoples isn't anywhere near as sharp as he, and many others, seem to think.  Indeed, in reality, almost every hunting culture, with few exceptions, is also a farming people unless environmental conditions simply to not allow for it.  Many of the supposed "hunter gatherer societies" out there are really also subsistence farming cultures as well, and always were.  So what is really alien to us is not farming, but rather deep urban life.  That we can start to address.

And we can do that by protecting and expanding, yes expanding, the wild and putting both agriculture, as a local individual activity, and hunting and fishing, as the core human activity, back in their proper prospective.  You have to recall that; 1) you aren't going to live forever, so quit freaking out about whether you should take up the latest weird diet beliefs; 2) plant a garden. . .seriously; and 3) buy that rifle, shotgun, bow and rod and take up some thing real.  Hunting and fishing.

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago: The Efficient Way to Wash Dishes

The Efficient Way to Wash Dishes

The Cheyenne State Leader. Disaster and bad decisions

On December 7, a date we associate with a later war, Cheyenne's residents had headline about another maritime disaster.

And they got to read about a stupid proposal., the concept of eliminating German from the high schools even though it was a popular course.

War . . .

December 7, 1917. The United States Declares War On Austria Hungary

Whereas the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Government has committed repeated acts of war against the Government and the people of the United States of America : Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That a state of war is hereby declared to exist between the United States of America and the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Government; and that the President be, and he is hereby, authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Government; and to bring the conflict to a successful termination all the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 7, 1917: USS Wyoming arives in Scapa Flow.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 7:

1917  The USS Wyoming, under sail since November 25, arrives in Scapa Flow.  Four U.S. battleships arrive at Scapa Flow taking on the role of the British Grand Fleet's Sixth Battle Squadron. These include USS Delaware (BB-28), USS Florida (BB-30), New York (BB-34), and USS Wyoming

(BB-32).

The M26 and its children

A thread about the evolution of American Armor.

More specifically, it's about the M26 Pershing and her daughters, a great series of tanks.  Perhaps the best series of tanks every made.

M26 being ferried across the Rhine at Remagen.  It's odd to see it in this photograph as it does not appear to be a large tank by today's standard, even though it was at the time.  It's very modern suspension is quite visible in this photograph.

 The M26 Pershing

We just posted about the M4 Sherman, noting that it was a much better tank than its many naysayers would have us believe.  Those naysayers often decry that "the US never developed a tank as good as the Tiger or Panther".

Those critics are flat out wrong.  The US developed a tank better than the Tiger or the Panther.  It just didn't get very many of them overseas during World War Two and it couldn't have, unless we were planning on fighting the war into 1946, which would have been pretty bad planning.

But that doesn't mean that we didn't get M26s into action, and that they weren't better than any of the German tanks they contested.  And they did contest them.

The M26 Pershing was the best, if imperfect, American tank of World War Two and, accepting that it was deployed only in very small numbers, perhaps the best tank of World War Two fielded by any nation (and noting that I'd otherwise give that position to the T-34/85). 

The record of the Pershing in World War Two combat speaks for itself, limited thought it is. It also shows that the era of modern tank combat had arrived.  And that's important to recall.

People who like to dump on the M4 Sherman are accidental fans of the M26, as they essentially argue that the US blew it by not focusing on the M26 earlier than it did and that it didn't get them into action sooner.  We've' addressed that in our other thread and we'll simply note that this is just flat out unrealistic.  

The M26 wasn't a fully developed design, in part because we were focusing on the Sherman, by the time it was fielded in  1945 and in fact it still bore the experimental designation of "T26" at that time. That it was fielded was due to the shock of the Battle of the Bulge in which an earlier, in theater, decision not to deploy Sherman's with the 76mm high velocity gun, even though they were available,m proved to be a mistake.  That mistake resulted in the U.S. Army in the Europe immediately reversing that decision and it also lead to an immediate desire that T26s be made available.  They were, but only in very small numbers.  The US's decision to concentrate on the M4 meant that the M26, while still being developed as its developers believed in it, wasn't really as far along as it could have been.

In spite of what M4 naysayers may think, the US actually never stopped trying to advance its tank designs during World War Two. As we've already discussed, the US went rapidly through tank series during the war. While I didn't cover it in the M4 Sherman thread (and I should have) the Sherman was the "M4" as it was the fourth model of medium tank to be adopted by the United States following the outbreak of the crisis.  The M3, which came before the M4, and which was built in large numbers and fielded well into 1943 in North Africa, and at least as late as 1944 on the Eastern Front (by the Soviets, of course) actually replaced the M2, of which there had only been eighteen built since it had been adopted in 1939.

The officially adopted, but barely produced, M2 medium tank.  Note that this tank fielded the type of drive and suspension associated with teh M4 Sherman.

While conditions and demands meant that the M3 quickly yielded to the M4, and the M4 remained the main American tank throughout World War Two, the US actually did begin to design a replacement for it nearly as soon as it was fielded. That resulted in the T20, T21, T22 and T23 experimental modes, all of which leaned on the now well established M2/M3/M4 type suspensions and all of which featured high velocity 76 mm guns.  While any one of them was probably a little better than the M4, none of them were all that much better.

 T20.

T23

The T23, while never adopted, was significant in that it began to have features, in smaller scale, that the M26 would later have, including a significant cast hull.  Following work on the T23 a new design was worked on keeping some of its features, and throwing away others, that resulted in the T25 and the T26.

Almost a M26, the T25, which retrained the older suspension design.

Both the T25 and the T26 recognized the reality of the new German cat tanks and the need for a heavier tank with a larger gun.  While coming out of a "medium" tank design program which was designed to replace the M4, both were considered heavy tanks at the time and sported a massive 90mm gun, a gun much larger than anything any western tank had used before. Fans of the M26 and enemies of the M4 point to this as proof of what the US could have done late war with tanks, and to some degree they're correct.

That puts me on both sides of an argument, of course, but those who claim the US was ignoring the larger new German tanks are flatly wrong.  The US had by late 1943 recognized the need for a tank with a heavier gun. But that was late 1943 and frankly the ability to field such a tank during the war itself was doubtful.  The Army pressed on with development of the T25 and T26, coming to focus on the T26 which had a completely new suspension, but that was done with the knowledge that fielding such a tank during the war was likely going to be unnecessary and difficult to accomplish.

Nonetheless, it was in fact done.  The T26, as the T26, was fielded late war following the Battle of the Bulge during the general panic over German cat tanks.

People who aren't impressed with this should keep in mind that the US went from the M2, depicted above, to the M26 in six years.  That is, the US went from adopting an inadequate medium tank at the start of the war too a good one, to its effective intended replacement, a fully modern tank, in just that short of time.  That's frankly amazing. Some other countries, it should be noted, also rocketed along in tank development, the Germans being the only really comparable example, but no other nation faced the daunting task of trying to do this while supplying its other principal allies and shipping everything it made over the oceans.

Following the Battle of the Bulge, about twenty T26s were shipped to Europe.  Not many, but they wold see action.  Interestingly, twelve were sent to the Pacific where they were deployed to Okinawa for the battle there, but were not offloaded until after the fighting was over. As a result, those twelve Pacific M26s were the last deployed in the war (and after the official adoption of the tank as the M26) but they didn't see combat. the ones deployed to Europe, however, did, including the one single "Super Pershing" that was deployed.

The very first M26, or rather T26, to see action against a German tank was a tank nicknamed Fireball.  It was overseeing a roadblock with it was ambushed by a Tiger.  The encounter went very badly for the M26 which was hit three times and put out of action by the first shot, which had been fired from only 100 yards away.

Two of the Pershing's crewmen were killed in the encounter, with the Tiger's first shot going through the machinegun port in the mantlet.  The second actually hit the gun barrel causing the round in the barrel to go off and distort it.  The third shot bounced off the tank.  After that, and perhaps emblematic of the problems the German's faced, the Tiger backed up and became entangled in debris, putting it self out of action. The Pershing was repaired and put back in action in just a few days.

 The unfortunate M26 "Fireball", which was hit and put out of action by a Tiger on February 26, 1945, to the loss of two crewmen. The tank was hit three times by the Tiger, being put out of commission with the first shot.  The third shot bounced off the M26. The Tiger put itself out of commission due to mechanical failure immediately thereafter.  Fireball was returned to service on March 7, having been repaired.

Disabled Tiger I that had the distinction of knocking out a M26 Pershing, the first Pershing to be knocked out in combat, even though the M26 was a better tank. After achieving that, this tank became disabled and had to be abandoned.  German tanks were frequently disabled.

Almost at the same time, however, one M26 put one Tiger and two Panzer IVs out of commission in the same town.  Unlike the first encounter, the victorious M26 was not put out of action by mechanical failure and the loss to the Germans of their armor was permanent.

The most famous M26 action came on March 6 in a heavily filmed encounter in Cologne in which a M26 engaged a Panther in a tank duel.  In that instance, the Panther had been laying in ambush and destroyed a M4 Sherman's when the M26 was called over from a street over.  The following then occurred as recalled by the M26's gunner:

We were told to just move into the intersection far enough to fire into the side of the enemy tank, which had its gun facing up the other street. However, as we entered the intersection, our driver had his periscope turned toward the Panther and saw their gun turning to meet us. When I turned our turret, I was looking into the Panther's gun tube; so instead of stopping to fire, our driver drove into the middle of the intersection so we wouldn't be a sitting target. As we were moving, I fired once. Then we stopped and I fired two more shells to make sure they wouldn't fire at our side. All three of our shells penetrated, one under the gun shield and two on the side. The two side hits went completely through and out the other side.

The same day, however, a M26 was put out of action by a German 88mm self propelled anti tank gun, a type of tank destroyer, at Niehl, which was near Cologne.  Following this event, near Cologne, M26s knocked out a Tiger and a Panzer IV.

Sent overseas as a "heavy tank" the M26s next saw action at Remagen, where they were used for artillery support.  Their large size presented a problem in getting them over the river, however, and they ultimately had to be ferried across. They did not see action against enemy armor in that battle.

M26 acting as artillery support at Remagen.

Even as the M26 was proving itself in action in Germany, a new variant of it was introduced, in a single example, in the theater, that being the "Super Pershing".  This new variant of the T26 featured a more powerful 90mm gun and additional armor.  This new variant was actually designated to replace the M26 even thought the M26 had only just started to see service.  Only a single example made it to Europe, however, and only twenty five were made prior to the order being cancelled due to the war's end.

 M26 "Super Pershing"

The T26E4 Super Pershing was clearly a more advanced tank than the  T26, although part of this recoil system was external on the turret and therefore vulnerable.  Interestingly once it arrived in Europe it was actually up armored in theater, making it an even more heavily armored tank than it was designed to be.  The single Super Pershing destroyed three tanks before the war ended, with one claimed to be a Tiger by the crew.

Following this, twelve were shipped to be used in the battle for Okinawa, but none of them were landed prior to the battle ending.

The results of armored development in World War Two demonstrated that what the original concept for the M26 had been was correct.  Following the war, it was reclassified as a medium tank, which it had always really been. The concept of it as a heavy tank was due to tanks like the Tiger being conceived of that way, but in reality, the Tiger and the Panther were simply the next generation of tank.  A person can debate it, but we'd regarded the T-34 as the first modern tank.  If it wasn't, then the Tiger was.  The M26 was the first American modern tank, and it was a good one as further developments would show.

It's common to take the position that the U.S. Army did nothing but sit on its hands between World War Two and the Korean War, but as we've already shown, this just wasn't true.  If it was, there wold have been no tank development by the US at all following the war, but in fact the opposite was the case.  The results of late war fighting had shown that tanks had entered a new phase. The US had a tank in that class, the M26, but it set about working on an improvement. In the meantime, the US withdrew from service all of the M4s that were not equipped with high velocity 76mm guns and US armor consisted of M4s so equipped along with the M26.  The US had just over 2,000 M26s at that time.

The M46 Patton

The designed replacement for the M26 was the M46 Patton.

M46 Patton in Marine Corps Service in Korea, Korean War.

The M46 Patton was in fact the M26 Pershing with improved engine and transmission.  Originally it was classified as the M26E2, but ultimately re-designated as a new tank entirely, even though it was clearly an improved M26.  As the improvements, which included a new bore evacuator, were principally designed to address mobility problems with the M26, the M46 would in fact replace the M26 in combat in the Korean War.

The service of the M26 and the M46 in the Korean War is very much worth noting.  The tank proved nearly completely invulnerable to the T-34/85, the most modern of the Soviet made T-34s.  The projectiles fired by the M26/M46 proved so potent that they would go completely through T-34s.  In fact, the M26 and M46 proved to be overkill for the T-34, which was remarkable as the same design had never met that fate with any German tank.  By and large the Patton's and Pershing's were withdrawn from service in Korea after the war became a static fight there in part because they simply weren't needed.  Indeed, while it's surprising, the M4 with the 76mm gun proved to be a match for the T-34/85 in Korea.

So, from the 1945 to 1955 time frame, the U.S. had fielded a tank that was better than the best of the late war German tanks and, as it turned out, better than the best Soviet tank, the T-34/85, which is arguably the best tank of World War Two.  The M26 and M46 never had the opportunity to take on the Soviet heavy tanks, which were in a truly very heavy class, and its not known how they would have done against them, but there's reason to suspect that they would have done well.

Of course, the Soviets hadn't stood still in this period.  By the late 1940s they were working on what would become the T-55, a tank they introduced in the mid 1950s. Bet that as it may, throughout the 1950s the T-34/85 accounted for 88% of Soviet tank production. The US was far ahead.

 Soviet T-55. The design had been standardized by 1946, and it went into service in 1949, but the tank still made up only a small part of Soviet tank production in the 1950s. The Soviets ceased production of the tank in 1981 and it remains in service in large numbers around the world today.

M47 Patton

Even as M26s were rebuilt to the M46 standard, another development was occurring to the tank which would see the turret of the M26/M46 replaced with a new design, which was fielded as the M47 Patton.  Closely based on the Pershing and featuring its chassis, the tank was in fact a new design with a new turret and therefore differing appearance.  The turret design would be one familiar to later American tankers.

M47

Still called the Patton in honor of General George S. Patton of World War Two, the M47 was the first US tank to be designed since the interwar period and it was introduced in 1951.  It was supposed to replace the M4, the M26 and the M46.  Over 8,000 were built, but developments were happening quickly and it was in fact soon supplanted in U.S. service by the M48 Patton.

M48 Patton

 

South Korean Army M48, March 1987.

The third US tank in a row to be named in honor of Gen. Patton, the M48 featured the new familiar Pershing chassis but omitted the bow machinegun, the first main U.S. tank to make that omission.  It was in fact an entirely new design, obviously based on the old M26 lineage, and was an enormously successful tank.

M48 Patton in South Vietnam.

The M48 would be the principal US tank in the late 1950s and go on to see heavy use by the US and its allies for many years.  It was the tank the US principally used in Vietnam.  The last variant of it, the M48A5, was sufficiently close to its successor, the M60, that it was up-gunned to the 105mm gun the M60 used and it can be very difficult to tell the two apart.  Indeed, the M48A5s actually replaced the M60 in service with the US Army and South Korean army in Korea in the late 1970s, showing how close they really were.

M48A5, equipped with a 105mm gun and much resembling its successor, the M60.

Before we can go on to the M60, and why it came about, and what its story is, we have to first, however, deal with the M103.

The M103

M103

Following World War Two a lingering feature of tank design was the heavy tank.  The modern heavy tank was really something that entered into combat in a serious way with the Tiger.

Heavy tanks certainly preexisted the Tiger, but the Tiger was really the first heavy tank to feature prominently in a serious way on the battlefield.  While the Soviets had prior heavy tanks, the Tiger was something that they immediately began to design to counter, resulting in the "Joseph Stalin", i.e., the "IS" series of tanks, starting with the IS 1.

IS 1 prototype.

Following the IS 1 the Soviets rapidly upgraded their heavy tanks.  The IS 1, with an 85mm gun, was very quickly replaced by the IS 2 which was similar but which fielded a 122mm gun.  The 85mm gun was instead used in the T-34/85.  The IS 2 was made in significant quantities during World War Two and was supplied to the Red Chinese following the war.  However, even by the war's end the IS 3, a new heavy tank, had been introduced.

IS 3, which featured the archetypal sauce pan turret that would be featured on generations of post war Soviet tanks.

The IS 3 was introduced in 1945. Following this the Soviets continually upgraded their heavy tanks until introducing the last variant of it, the T-10 (originally the IS 8) in 1952.  The T-10 had the characteristic appearance of post war Soviet tanks and was distinguishable in appearance only by its large size.  Like its predecessors, it featured a 122mm gun.

Concerned about the Soviet heavy tanks, the US set about designing its own heavy tank to counter it and came up with the M103.  The M103 was essentially a super sized tank in the M26 lineage.  It had heavy armor and a 120mm gun.  While it had mechanical reliability problems, it was competitive with the T-10.  It never saw action.

The M60 "Patton".

 

M60s at Ft. Carson, 1986.

During the 1950s and 1960s it increasingly became obvious to the United States and the Soviets that the era of heavy tanks was really over and that armies were better off just fielding a main battle tank. The US, in keeping with this development, went to working on an improvement of its existing medium tank line and introduced the M60 in 1960.  It went on to replace the M103 and mostly replace the M48, but as can be seen final variants of the M60 were very close to it in design and remained in use along side of it.  The M60 remains in use around the globe today, although not by t he United States.

M60 in Germany.

The M60 featured a 105mm gun, replacing the 90mm used on the M48s, and featured a larger turret resembling that which had been used on the M103.  It proved to be a very capable tank and was widely used in combat by armies supplied by the United States, as well as by the US.  It remains a front line tank in many of the world's armies today, although not in the US Army which replaced it, over a long period of time, with the M1 Abrams

M60 in Germany in 1985.

The Soviets in this period were not standing still, and in 1961, the same year the M60 was introduced, they introduced the T-62.  The -T-62 was an improvement on the T-55 which had never been able to supplant the T-34/85 in the 50s and which remained in production along with the T-62. The T-64 was soon augmented by the T-64. Both of these tanks featured larger guns than their predecessors.

 T-62 at Nellis Air Force Base

T-55s, T62s, and T-64s have all seen action against M60s and M48s around the globe.  Their good tanks to be sure, but the American tanks have more than stood their design ground against them.

The Leopard I

The Leopard I?  That's a post war German tank.

 Later variants of the Leopard I in Germany.  This one has been up armored. The original Leopard Is were fairly lightly armored.  Let's see, six wheels that look remarkably like the six on all of the Pershing descendants. .. rear sprocket drive like the Pershing and its descendants, roller wheels to support the treads up on top (not visible here. . . . hmmm.

Yep, it is.

Inclusion of the Leopard I here is going to make its fans angry, but the Leopard I resembles the M48 more than it does any German tank of World War Two, something that isn't true of all post war German equipment.

One of the most famous of the post war tanks, the Leopard I came in after West Germany had been equipped with M47s and M48s.  Wanting to field its own design, West Germany first worked with France to come up with a tank design and then abandoned the pursuit. Going on its own, it came up with the Leopard I.

 Earlier variant of the Leopard I with a cast turret that looks remarkably like that on a M46/M47/M48.

You will not be able to find (or at least I couldn't) anything that will claim that the Leopard I was based on part on the Pershing tank chassis and the M47 and M48 tanks.  But the similarities are remarkable.  Most notably the chassis is nearly identical. something that departed enormously from all prior German tanks.  The original turrets were also remarkably like those of the period M48s.  Perhaps, just perhaps, there was no influence, but that would certainly counter they way they looked at the time of their introduction.

The M88

While the M60 is now gone from U.S. service, the Pershing's story nonetheless lingers on in the form of the M88 tank retriever, an armored crane designed for recovering disabled combat vehicles.  It continues to feature the original M26 chassis and there's no sign of replacing it anytime soon.

Conclusion. . . a real armored success.

For some reason, not only does the M4 Sherman get no love, American armor, save for the M1 Abrams, tends not to either.  It's odd.  It's been consistently good from the very onset.

Certainly the M26 was.  It's basic design was reworked and reworked from 1945 onward and it was always better than its opponents.  A real unacknowledged success.