Almost from the first day of Obama’s presidency, I began seeing a really offensive bumper sticker, “So how do you like Obama now?” My reaction even at the time was, “I’m fine with him.” But my problem with the bumper sticker has always been that it was presumptuous. The implication was that Obama promised something that he hadn’t delivered. Or even more: that supporters of the president were duped by him. What it really says is, “I told you so!” But it isn’t clear what the reader is supposed to have been told. What’s really going on is that the conservative with the bumper sticker didn’t like Obama before and doesn’t like him now. There’s a shocker!

But recently, I’ve been thinking more about the “bait and switch” message of the bumper sticker. I’ve looked. There don’t appear to have been any bumper stickers that said, “So how do you like Bush now?” The only thing I’ve found is another bumper sticker that came out a bit later; it features an image of Bush with the text, “How do you like me now?” So there was a sense among conservatives that Obama had in fact conned the American people. And now they must know.

I’m not completely against that reading: I think that the nation as a whole (including Obama) conned itself into thinking that the Republicans were just like the rest of us and that they wanted what was best for the country. The only way that Obama misled the country was by claiming that he would usher in a post-partisan era. Well, he tried — far harder than was reasonable. But that was a pretty vague notion to start with. And regardless, that is not what conservatives were thinking of when they put these lame bumper stickers on their SUVs. They were thinking of policy. In general, they were not upset because Obama didn’t do what he said he would do but rather because he did almost exactly what he said he would do.

But now this is linked in my mind to Scott Walker. What do the voters of Wisconsin think of Walker now? Well, they aren’t as keen on him as they once were. And in that case, they have a reasonably good case: Walker did deceive them. Rather than telling the truth when faced with the subject of Wisconsin becoming a “right to work” state, Walker always brushed it aside claiming that it wasn’t in the realm of possibilities. When it was, he couldn’t get to his pen fast enough to sign it.

I’ve been critical of the people of Wisconsin — and other states as well. Anyone who pays attention to politics should have known what Scott Walker was up to. It wasn’t just his hedging on the “right to work” issue. Everything he had done in his four years as governor indicated that he would do absolutely anything he could to destroy unions. Politicians are usually pretty clear about what they intend to do. And when they won’t answer a question, it means they intend to do what is unpopular.

But most people are busy just trying to make ends meet. So they can be forgiven for not noticing some of the subtleties of politics. Obama did not intend to deceive. But clearly Scott Walker did. In fact, pretty much any Republican politician will intentionally deceive — unless they are in an area that is overwhelmingly Republican. That’s because (for the umpteenth time), Republican policies are unpopular. So it makes a lot more sense to ask voters what they think of Republicans after they have betrayed their voters.

I’ve been pleased of late to see that a lot of liberal writers are focusing on the Confederacy as I long have been: as an act of treason. Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money wrote two good articles about this recently. The first was, The Confederacy Won the Peace. Now, that is to some extent a distortion. The big problem with the sudden end of Reconstruction and the establishment of slavery by another name, was that the country as a whole reminded racist. As discussed in Ian Millhiser’s Injustices, it was many Lincoln appointed Supreme Court justices who allowed the south to establish a terrorist regime. The south did indeed win the peace, but only because the nation as a whole didn’t care.

A good example of this comes from an article that Lemieux quotes, from sociologist James Loewen, Why Do People Believe Myths About the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments Are Wrong. He noted that Kentucky officially stayed with the Union. The people were split, but not that much: 72% fought on the side of the Union. Yet “the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.” That’s staggering. But it probably doesn’t have much to do with the failure of Reconstruction.

I think that Confederate monuments and indeed, the Confederate flag itself, are the results of later efforts. For example, the Jefferson Davis Highway didn’t exist until 1913. The final part of this, Washington State Route 99, wasn’t so named until 1939. Similarly, the Colfax Massacre — more or less the beginning of terrorist rule in the south — saw the despicable “Colfax Riot” sign put up in 1950. I’m not saying that any of these things were necessarily celebrated elsewhere in the nation. But by and large the country got on with its business. There was really only one group in the nation with a real incentive to rewrite history — and that was the traitors in the south and their ideological followers.

In a second article, Scott Lemieux wrote, Why Honoring Jefferson Davis Is Unacceptable. In that article, he pointed out something that is profound and part of this whole tendency for us to ignore both the south’s treason and its continued disinformation campaign. One of the “liberal” arguments in favor of accepting the Jefferson Davis High School, for example, goes like this, “Davis was a slaveholder, but we have slaveholders on the $1 and $2, a white supremacist on the $5, a slaveholder and ethnic cleanser on the $20, and so on. Why is Davis different?”

I’ll admit, the argument has a certain resonance for me. I’m not too keen on the founders of the country. The only one who I hold in high standing is Thomas Paine. Washington and Jefferson were major slave holders. Adams was a royalist. And later, Jackson was truly horrific. There are things I like about them all, but they are soiled. Lemieux noted that there is a clear distinction: there’s only one reason that Jefferson Davis has roads named after him. And that reason is because he committed high treason against his country — in the name of one of the vilest of human behaviors. And we reward him with roads and public schools? It’s shocking.

It is all part of a larger effort to exonerate the south for the Civil War. And it is hard to believe that there aren’t people who think that the south will indeed rise again. They effectively reversed slavery; they’ve reversed history; they now have a small majority on the Supreme Court and complete control of one of the two political parties. What can they not achieve? I’ve long been on record for getting rid of Confederate generals’ names from our military bases. But as Lemieux implies, we need to go much further than that.

I know that going around closing public monuments to the Confederacy might seem like a vicious thing to do. But I discussed this last week, Confederate Flags and Nazi Tattoos. After the Civil War, the nation took a “look forward” approach to the south. The south returned this favor by doing nothing but looking back. Under normal circumstances, Jefferson Davis would have been hanged after the fall of the Confederacy and that would have been that. But he really wasn’t punished at all and he was allowed to go back to his old life, eventually dying rich and widely admired — for his treason.

After the fall of Iraq, we toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein. After the fall of the Soviet Union, statues of Stalin came tumbling down. It just makes sense that we should destroy laudatory monuments to the Confederacy. They are a pox not only on the south but on the whole nation. The only thing we might want to think seriously about is how we allowed such things to be built up over the last 150 years.

Over at The Intercept Tuesday, Liliana Segura wrote, What Justice Breyer’s Glossip Dissent Exposes About the Death Penalty. It is about Glossip v Gross, the case that questioned the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s lethal injection death penalty procedure. On the right, the response was, “Yippee, we get to continue killing people!” On the left, people have been focused more on Justice Alito’s callous comment, “While most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not have that good fortune. Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death penalty altogether.” It is a shocking statement: people burn to death in fires so we should execute people by burning them alive?

But Stephen Breyer (along with Ginsberg) argued that the entire death penalty is cruel and unusual. This idea was dismissed by the majority, of course. I think there is something fundamental here. There are simply some people who really want to kill other people. It is like Dick Cheney’s idea about having to work the “dark side.” Or Tom Clancy Combat Concepts. It’s about being “hard” and “tough.” Americans — men especially — are terrified to be seen as weak. I’ve always found it bizarre in a country that is so Christian. Americans apparently don’t go in much for sissy Christian concepts like mercy and grace.

What’s perhaps most interesting is that Breyer’s dissent is fact based. He talks about various problems with the death penalty: its racist application; its randomness; prosecutorial misconduct; and the fact that we kill innocent people all the time. The majority brushes all that aside. To them, as long as the states give it the old college try, it doesn’t matter if people are tortured to death or that we kill innocent people. Justice isn’t a matter of something that happens to individual people. It’s really just about the process. If innocent people have to die in the name of Americans feeling tough, well that’s a small price to pay. Besides, that kind of thing would never happen to someone Samuel Alito knows.

What’s notable about all of this is the lack of empathy when it comes to the death penalty. For a long time, I thought that The Mythical Perfect Government Killing Machine would make the death penalty untenable to most Americans. Once people saw that the system wasn’t perfect, they would rebel against it. After all, it would be one thing to be put to death by the government if you were guilty. Most people imagine they would never be in that position because they would never murder anyone. But being put to death when you are innocent? Well, that could happen to anyone.

But it turns out that even an argument based upon self-preservation doesn’t work. They think (rightly) that getting railroaded is something that happens almost exclusively to the poor and those with darker skin. The odds are already relatively low that one will be put to death. It is even lower that one will be innocent. And it is lower still that either of those things would happen to a nice middle class white person. So they just don’t care. The deaths of innocent people are just not that big a deal compared to being “tough.” And apparently, the conservatives on the Court don’t think any more deeply about this than the American people themselves.