The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Because @MikeElk Deserves a Reply

Posted on | December 10, 2013 | 80 Comments

An e-mail arrived at 9:50 a.m. today:

Subject: u still sore you lost the civil war?

From: Mike Elk (mike.elk@gmail.com)
To: Robert Stacy McCain

Shit son, I am about to go visit some Civil War battlefields where we kicked the fuck out of you degenerate Confederate bastards. I bet you are still sore you guys lost that one Bobby.
—
Mike Elk
In These Times Staff Writer
Cell: (412) 613-8423
Twitter – @MikeElk

Simple courtesy required a polite reply:

Sir:
You have an obnoxious habit of making your personal superiority the point of every argument, and you always seem disappointed that others do not admire you as much as you admire yourself. Declining your invitation to join the Mike Elk Fan Club, I will also waive the opportunity to tutor you in grammar, but must make a few additions to your pathetically small store of historical knowledge.
My Alabama ancestors were not degenerate, and were certainly no less patriotic than my wife’s ancestors from Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio who fought for the Union. However — and perhaps this touches also on your erratic grammar — your first person plural pronoun would seem misplaced: “we kicked the fuck out of you,” et cetera.
To whom does your “we” refer in that context?
In an e-mail to Eli Lake, you said your grandparents were “the children of Russian Jewish immigrants.” In which Civil War regiment did your ancestors serve?
My own paternal grandmother was the daughter of Private Winston Wood Bolt, who served in the 13th Alabama Regiment, Company K. The colonel of my great-grandfather’s regiment was Birkett Davenport Fry, and they were brigaded under A.H. Colquitt (at Seven Pines, South Mountain and Sharpsburg), then under J.J. Archer at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Both General Archer and my great-grandfather were captured in the first day’s fight at Gettysburg when the Union’s famed “Iron Brigade” turned their right flank. I’ve walked the ground where Winston Bolt was captured — just east of Willoughby Run, a hundred yards or so from where Union General Reynolds was killed — but regret that I’ve never had an opportunity to visit Fort Delaware, where my great-grandfather spent the next two years as a prisoner of war.
At any rate, it seems quite likely your ancestors never fired a shot at any of my ancestors, and so your use of the first person plural “we” is wrong. But you’ve never let being wrong stop you before, and I doubt you’ll let it impede you in the future. All you ever do is boast and threaten and insult, then claim to be a helpless victim when someone calls attention to the symptomatic traits of your warped and sadistic personality. My confident prediction is that these habits of yours will eventually bring you unhappiness and misfortune in life, and that in the near term you will be deeply offended by anyone’s effort to counsel you against continuing in your present course of conduct. Your conceited sense of superiority has the effect of alienating you even from those would-be friends who might dissuade you from your doomed folly.
You will excuse me if I take the liberty of publishing our correspondence immediately, as I consider it a waste of time to respond privately to a deliberate insult.
— RSM

 Don’t expect Mike Elk to appreciate such courtesy. Fools never do.

UPDATE: It took six minutes for Elk to reply:

Subject: Re: u still sore you lost the civil war?

From: Mike Elk (mike.elk@gmail.com)
To: Robert Stacy McCain

By we I mean boys from my home state of Pennsylvania. Look at this monument, those keystone boys sure cleaned up at orchad’s knob — makes me proud to be a Pennsylvanian think of the slavers ass that they kicked
Sent from my iPhone

He’s proud to be from the same state as Jerry Sandusky? The mere accident of having been born in Pennsylvania instills in Mike Elk such fierce emotion? Exactly where this “orchad’s knob” is located, I’m not sure. No photo was attached to his e-mail.

UPDATE II: A Google search for “Mike + Elk +Pennsylvania” turns up this typically demented rant against Penn State:

“As a native Pennsylvanian, I never once considered attending Penn State University. Penn State always seemed like a place full of cliquish white people recalling their glory years of making fun of the dorky kids in high school. More progressive white people and people of color went to big city state schools like Pitt or Temple while whiter, more conservative types tended to dominate the settings of the rural, fraternity-heavy Penn State campus.”

Read the whole thing to get an idea of exactly how long Mike Elk has been a blustering fool (i.e., his entire life).

 

Category: History, Journalism

Comments

80 Responses to “Because @MikeElk Deserves a Reply”

  1. Rich Vail
    December 10th, 2013 @ 4:34 pm

    yes it did. As a matter of fact, a cabinet secretary was Jewish: Judah P. Benjamin, the 2ns Sec of War for the south. cut and paste:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_Jewish_Americans

    During the war, approximately 3,000 Jews (out of a total of about 150,000 Jews in the United States and the Confederacy) fought on the Confederate side.[15] Although antisemitism was widespread in the South, with Jews often labeled malingerers and unprincipled speculators, many Jews also served on the Confederate side.[20]

    Probably the most notable Jewish figure was Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884) who, before the Civil War, was the first Jewish Cabinet member in a North American government. Benjamin was born a British subject in Saint Croix to Phillip Benjamin, an English Jew, and his wife, Rebecca Mendes, a Portuguese Jew (Sephardic).[21] He emigrated with his parents to the U.S. several years later and grew up in North and South Carolina. He was considered the “brains of the Confederacy,” serving in high office throughout the war: as Confederate Attorney General in 1861, Secretary of War in 1861 and 1862, and Secretary of State from 1862 to 1865. President Jefferson Davis called Benjamin “the most capable statesman I have ever known,”[20] but he was subject to “vicious anti-Jewish attacks” as the object of popular discontent after becoming acting Secretary of War in 1861.[10] He quarreled with the Confederate generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Stonewall Jackson over strategy. In 1864, as the South’s military position became increasingly desperate, Benjamin publicly advocated a plan whereby any slave willing to bear arms for the Confederacy would be emancipated and inducted, but his proposal faced stiff opposition from traditionalists. It was not passed until March 1865, by which time it was too late to salvage the Southern cause.

    Other prominent Jewish Confederate figures include Colonel Abraham Charles Myers of Charleston, South Carolina, the Quartermaster General of the Confederate States Army[22] and Dr. David Camden DeLeon, the Surgeon General of the Army.[23][24] The surgeon Dr. Simon Baruch, father of the financier Bernard Baruch, served on General Robert E. Lee’s personal staff. His widow became an early member of the Daughters of the Confederacy.

    Major Raphael J. Moses, a Georgia businessman and later a state representative, before the war was commissary officer of Georgia. He carried out the last order of the Confederate government on May 5, 1865, by taking possession of $40,000 in gold and silver bullion from the Confederate treasury and delivering it to defeated Confederate soldiers headed home – following President Jefferson Davis’ instructions. All three of Moses’ sons served in the Confederate Army, and one was killed at Seven Pines[25][26]

  2. JeffS
    December 10th, 2013 @ 4:51 pm

    Could be!

  3. MikeElk
    December 10th, 2013 @ 4:56 pm

    “A Google search for “Mike + Elk +Pennsylvania” turns up this typically demented rant against Penn State” http://t.co/4HK9qq9yUZ

  4. Dianna Deeley
    December 10th, 2013 @ 5:12 pm

    I think you might want the “principle”, not “the first, or main” (thus “principal”)?

  5. AmPowerBlog
    December 10th, 2013 @ 5:17 pm

    RT @BobBelvedere: Because @MikeElk Deserves a Reply by @rsmccain http://t.co/rcVcABP3S8 Beautiful.

  6. instapundit
    December 10th, 2013 @ 5:19 pm

    RT @BobBelvedere: Because @MikeElk Deserves a Reply by @rsmccain http://t.co/rcVcABP3S8 Beautiful.

  7. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 10th, 2013 @ 5:30 pm

    Fixed. Thanks.

  8. Ken Carroll
    December 10th, 2013 @ 5:57 pm

    Mike Elk: The gift that keeps on giving; the Energizer Bunny of Demonstrative Ignorance and Asinine Correspondence; and, the Grand Poobah of the Sloped Forehead.

    Cheers, Stacy, for being able to read enough of his childish spew to reply. I don’t think I could have managed it on a bet.

  9. M. Thompson
    December 10th, 2013 @ 5:58 pm

    What an idiot. I’m descended from Union veterans (there’s one relation who got decapitated and did not reproduce), but I’ve got nothing against Confederate veteran’s descendants.

    The stupid triumphalism is especially annoying. The man has no clue.

    Also, RSM once again shows us that being polite to your opponent should never mean you don’t demolish his argument.

  10. KenInEastman
    December 10th, 2013 @ 6:13 pm

    In which Stacy McCain brilliantly demonstrates the proper way to handle a boorish correspondent. http://t.co/ZygfiLBgAQ #tcot

  11. KenInEastman
    December 10th, 2013 @ 6:14 pm

    In which @rsmccain brilliantly demonstrates the proper way to handle a boorish correspondent. http://t.co/V5Zx34ciCt… #tcot

  12. Calvin Everhart
    December 10th, 2013 @ 6:52 pm

    Hear! Hear!

  13. M. Thompson
    December 10th, 2013 @ 7:14 pm

    Or infectious disease organisms.

  14. rsmccain
    December 10th, 2013 @ 7:35 pm

    RT @KenInEastman: In which @rsmccain brilliantly demonstrates the proper way to handle a boorish correspondent. http://t.co/V5Zx34ciCt… #tc…

  15. AMartel
    December 10th, 2013 @ 7:54 pm

    The Great White Northern Chief is attempting to communicate with The Other in its native patois. According to Hollywood, Southerners are known to respond to semi-alliterative vulgarities (“shit, son”), diminutized albeit hyphenated names, and sentimental references to military units as “the boys.”

  16. AMartel
    December 10th, 2013 @ 7:54 pm

    Or cancer.

  17. Quartermaster
    December 10th, 2013 @ 8:06 pm

    A dork complaining about about snobbish people making fun of Dorks. A whiner from the state of Jerry Sandusky.

  18. BobBelvedere
    December 10th, 2013 @ 8:06 pm

    RT @KenInEastman: In which @rsmccain brilliantly demonstrates the proper way to handle a boorish correspondent. http://t.co/V5Zx34ciCt… #tc…

  19. Quartermaster
    December 10th, 2013 @ 8:10 pm

    Nah. He’s a dork and phony.

  20. Quartermaster
    December 10th, 2013 @ 8:13 pm

    The number of deaths in combat were about equal. I can’t recall the exact number, but the numbers were somewhere less than 200K apiece. The rest were a result of disease that followed military camps of the time.

    What that means is simple. The Boys from the South were more effective in killing yankees, per capita, than the reverse.

  21. Quartermaster
    December 10th, 2013 @ 8:15 pm

    And heteronormative patriarchal, not to mention homophobic.

  22. Billygotegruff
    December 10th, 2013 @ 8:30 pm

    I walked parts of the Chickamauga Battlefield recently and was struck by how tiny the houses that served as surgeries were for the wounded on both sides. How many shattered limbs were taken off without the benefit of anesthesia?
    Mr Elk manages to offend me for both sides of my civil war ancestors.

  23. Kelsonus
    December 10th, 2013 @ 9:24 pm

    Because @MikeElk Deserves a Reply http://t.co/wZCzs8x8Cq

  24. Bob Belvedere
    December 10th, 2013 @ 9:32 pm

    Same here and I agree.

    Great-Great-Grandfather fought for The Union and his Father along with two of his brothers fought for The South.

  25. trangbang68
    December 11th, 2013 @ 1:06 am

    Dang what’s that I read? This Mike Elk guy cleaned up somebody’s knob out in the orchard?

  26. robertstacymccain
    December 11th, 2013 @ 6:04 am

    Ah, Pickett’s Mill — part of the long affair generally known as the Battle of New Hope Church. Used to drive past the place all the time while I was working as sports editor for the Paulding County Neighbor. It’s a sad thing, BTW, that many of the entrenchments around New Hope Church have been destroyed by developers.

  27. robertstacymccain
    December 11th, 2013 @ 6:16 am

    Elk’s attitude is a reflection of how badly history is taught in schools today. Most of us of a certain age were taught a view of the Civil War that prevailed, generally, from 1890-1965: “Brother against brother,” the war as a tragic misunderstanding, a study in the failure of small-d democratic politics.

    After the Left’s “long march through the institutions,” however, what can only be called a Marxist revisionist interpretation.took hold in academia and, by the 1990s, had trickled down into grade school curricula. (You may recall the 1995 controversy over the National Standards for U.S. History.) Mike Elk, born in 1985, was likely taught to believe what he believes, and you will find that such attitudes are quite widespread among those under 40, who don’t even realize why they believe what they believe.

    What’s odd is the stridently moralistic fervor these young leftist fools feel about a war fought so long ago. The best of our ancestors understood the folly of such bitterness, so that in the South at one time, the war was sometimes politely referred to as “the Late Unpleasantness.”

  28. The Other Jeff S.
    December 11th, 2013 @ 9:35 am

    Surely this Mr. Elk is related to Anne Elk of Monty Python fame.

  29. richard mcenroe
    December 11th, 2013 @ 10:43 pm

    Lee’s chief of staff was also Jewish.

  30. neshobanakni
    December 15th, 2013 @ 10:52 pm

    One of my direct ancestors joined the CSA army. Does that make me a Confederate? He was ten years old but didn’t join the line until he was eleven. Alabam, don’t you know.