Debbie Reynolds too: Today's news for December 29th

Fox News:

Iconic actress Debbie Reynolds dies at 84

Iconic actress Debbie Reynolds died Wednesday at the age of 84, one day after her daughter Carrie Fisher died after suffering heart failure, her son Todd Fisher confirmed.

"She's now with Carrie and we're all heartbroken," Fisher said from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where his mother was taken by ambulance earlier Wednesday.

He said the stress of his sister's death "was too much" for Reynolds.

The entertainment website TMZ, without naming any sources, said Reynolds may have suffered a possible stroke. It also said she had been at her son Todd’s Beverly Hills home discussing funeral plans for Carrie when a call was made to 911.

This is too sadly morbid to comment.

Next topic...

The following was the main headline at CNN:

CNN:

How Trump's victory turns into another 'Lost Cause'

After President-elect Donald Trump's recent victory, some of his supporters celebrated by flying Confederate battle flags from pickup trucks and waving them at rallies.

But Trump's victory may mark the resurgence of the Old South in another more sinister way: The return of "racial amnesia."

That's what some historians are saying as they watch a familiar storyline emerge. Trump's triumph is now being roundly described as a revolt by white working-class voters; racism, sexism and religious bigotry had little, if anything, to do with it.

People making this argument are following a script first honed by another group of Americans who made history disappear. After the Civil War, "Lost Cause" propagandists from the Confederacy argued the war wasn't fought over slavery -- it was a constitutional clash over state's rights, they said; hatred toward blacks had nothing to do with it.

It was an audacious historical cover-up -- to convince millions of Americans that what they'd just seen and heard hadn't really happened. It worked then, and some historians say it could work again with Trump.

"It's already happening again," says Brooks D. Simpson, a leading Civil War historian who teaches at Arizona State University. "A lot of people are saying we're going to have to unite behind the new guy and forget what he had to say. People who feel that they are part of those populations targeted by Trump are going to be told by whites to get over it."

First, this is not a news story. It is progressive propaganda parading as "news analysis".

Second, slavery was a secondary issue in the Civil War. Lincoln and most of the North didn't give a rat's behind about slavery. He only signed the Emancipation Proclamation to spite the South and encourage the media's support for the war (Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune which was the largest publication in the U.S. at the time, was fervently abolitionist). History wasn't re-written by the losers.

If anything, the Yankees used the end of slavery to give their war crimes a nice glossy veneer. Nearly half the deaths from military conflicts in U.S. history have come from the Civil War. Can you justify the freeing of nearly 4 million slaves with the deaths of 620,000 people? Maybe it is just me, but I have to believe that if you wanted to free the slaves, there had to be a better way than war. Even in a good cause, that is a lot of people to kill.

The truth here is that it is CNN re-writing the history by quoting Yankee apologists. The alleged "racial amnesia" is a problem from the big government supporters, who like to use the Civil War as a justification for a strong central government over more localized politics.

Third, this news analysis takes this flawed premise and tries to turn it into some kind of statement about how white Americans elected Donald Trump based on "racial amnesia". You can tell this news analysis is going to be one doozy of a lie when you get to this statement:

There is some evidence, though, that explains how a white voter who supported Obama can still be driven by racial resentment.

Think about that statement: How could anyone possibly vote for a person when they resent that person's race?

Then the article proceeds to show a study of how white people can be uncomfortable with people of other races. Discomfort is a far cry from resentment.

From Merriam-Webster, the definition of "resentment": "a feeling of indignant displeasure or persistent ill will at something regarded as a wrong, insult, or injury". If someone resented Obama for the color of his skin, they could never possibly vote for him, certainly not when his opponents were supposedly of the "right" color (which is the underlying assumption of the CNN article).

The longer and more complex a political opinion piece is, the more likely it is to be wrong. This CNN editorial proves that.