Why liberals think the GOP harbors bigots

Because they do.

We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal.

The social norm in Mississippi is that it's still o.k. to think integration in the bedroom should be, not even merely frowned upon by white bigots, but against the law.

Of course, they can turn Fox up LOUD and see the stupidest men in television act even dumber by pretending that everyone is as pasty white as they are (except for Michelle Malkin, and they know she'd rather be white).

You know what Fox is doing, right?  They now continue, after the so-called liberal media's memories of Martin Luther King, with their thinly veiled racism ("but we never said n*****!") already in progress.

Whitewashing

Nothing else to call it...

Haley Barbour (R-nostalgia for the white experience of Jim Crow) climbs down from his nostalgia:

When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns' integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn't tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the 'Citizens Council,' is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.

But by no means far enough.  The White Citizens Council was actually coercing other people, uppity black people:

"Look," said Nick Roberts of the Yazoo City Citizens Council, explaining why 51 of 53 Negroes who had signed an integration petition withdrew their names, "if a man works for you, and you believe in something, and that man is working against it and undermining it, why you don’t want him working for you — of course you don’t."

In Yazoo City, in August 1955, the Council members fired signers of the integration petition, or prevailed upon other white employers to get them fired. But the WCC continues to deny that it uses economic force: all the Council did in Yazoo City was to provide information (a full-page ad in the local weekly listing the “offenders”); spontaneous public feeling did the rest.

Bless ol' Haley's heart. At least his esteemed bigots didn't lynch anyone. They had such high standards!

Why Jim Crow was necessary

Race-blind democracy in the vanquished South after the end of the Civil War would have completely changed the last century and a half. Mississippi and South Carolina were majority black.


Can you imagine those two states leading the civil rights movement! Louisiana and Alabama weren't far behind, either.

Jim Crow - and the Ku Klux Klan for that matter - were necessary to prevent the permanent loss of political power by the landed white aristocracy that had wanted and lost the war. Enfranchised black folks would not have voted for the bullshit that white folks voted for.

Nowadays, disenfranchisement is done by dipshits attacking ACORN and by voter intimidation efforts. These are mainstream Republican activities.

The aristocrats and oligarchs never stop fighting to own everything.

No lie too base or too obvious

For three decades or more, Republicans have needed to whitewash the racism of their Southern base, and they appeared to have settled on how to do that. Their hands were clean. It was segregationist Southern Democrats who passed and defended Jim Crow, not Republicans.

Now Haley Barbour (R-wherever bullshit is lily white) goes even further. He blames all Democrats now for the acts of long-dead Southern Democrats. His rationale is this:

• The transformation of the solid Democratic South into the mostly Republican South roughly coincided (very roughly) with the rise of civil rights for African Americans.
• Therefore, it was a new generation of Southern Republicans who brought about desegregation in their triumph over those eeevil Democrats.
  

Ne'mine' all that stuff about Nixon's Southern strategy offering a home to Southern racists who fled the Democratic Party because they didn't want to be desegregated. Definitely don't pay any attention to who it was who called out the National Guard in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama to integrate schools, who presided over passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, who sent the FBI into Mississippi to break the Ku Klux Klan. (Democrats!)

Don't believe that even a Republican would try such a big-balled, outright lie? Here's a direct quote from the vidlet (about 4:00 in):

My generation, who went to integrated schools - I went to integrated college - never thought twice about it. And it was the old Democrats who had fought for segregation so hard. By my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, wadn't gone be that way any more. And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.

Barbour went to Ole Miss starting in 1965 at a time when, it's true, James Meredith had graduated, though his mere matriculation had led to a white race riot that left two dead and dozens injured. What stopped the violence? Thirty-one thousand federal troops sent by Democrat John F. Kennedy.

When Barbour arrived two (loooong!) years after Meredith graduated in 1963, I'm sure there were a handful of black students amidst a hostile white student body. In Barbour's three years in Oxford, did he attend even a single class that included a black man?

Of course, Barbour's claim that he and his generation never thought twice about integration is patent bullshit. The civil rights movement and the white racist backlash were in full swing all around him.

Trent Lott (R-Dixiecrat-lover), who would later be a high-ranking Republican Senator, had been busy in 1962 defending his all-white fraternity against membership for African-Americans. Even now, a few years after Lott resigned for lauding Strom Thurmond's openly racist 1948 campaign for President, Barbour still praises him!

Medgar Evers had been assassinated in 1963 in Jackson, 50 miles from Yazoo City, where Barbour was going to high school.

Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had been murdered in 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, about 90 miles from Yazoo City and 125 miles from Oxford.

James Meredith was shot in 1966, while Barbour and his generation had supposedly put segregation behind them. Did one more in a long succession of white race crimes make racial integration seem fully settled in Mississippi?

Barbour was a junior at Ole Miss that April day in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. Didn't he think about that? In his past carefully built out of bullshit, how did that even happen after his generation had determined that its heritage of white supremacy was "indefensible"?

Even now, African-Americans are about 13% of the student population at Ole Miss, while they're 37% of the population at large. How successful is desegregation even now if Brown v. Board of Education still hasn't provided a more even preparation of high schools students?

These Republicans were the successors of the Southern Democrats. Trent Lott was endorsed for Congress by his nominally Democratic predecessor. These Republicans played no role whatsoever is the overthrow of segregation, such as it has even happened in Mississippi. They weren't even mere spectators. They played to the same racist white voters as the Dixiecrats had for generations. Only the label had changed.

Trying to pass the lie that Southern Republicans are liberals on race disqualifies Barbour for any office in the United States.

We Shall Overcome

The tears have come - I knew they would. It's strange that they took so long.

My mom called with her joyful tears and choked me up. She recalled 1964 when she was barely an adult and I was just learning about the wider world. Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman had gone missing, murdered by KKK racists in Mississippi, just beyond the meaningless boundary from where we lived in Memphis. I was barely old enough to understand, no, I'm still too young to understand, how vicious those evil people were. What I remember from that time is that my parents were holding their breath for the time when the bodies were found.

Mom recounted how from her own youth she had no longer considered her Methodist pastor to be Christian after his objections to Brown v. the Board of Education. Too early, he had preached, when too late was the truth.

Now, though, all that work, all those compromises, all that waiting is over. I had not thought that this day would come so soon, but I am glad that it has. Barack Obama won me over with his speech on race not just to support but to belief in his ability to transform America.

Someday? Someday is here.

Debate bail bondsmen

McCain to Congressional Republicans:

"Please, puh-leez, do not make a deal. I really, really don't want my bail revoked. Mississippi wants me, but I can't go back there."

Which is exactly why McCain's craven introduction of Presidential politics into the credit crisis was the opposite of everything he claimed it was.

Imagine the flip side

Atrios or one of his minions has probably already blogged this, but can you imagine Carl Hulse writing about what a problem the Republicans would have if they won a moderate seat, say, Christopher Shays's seat in Connecticut?

Much easier to imagine the column Hulse would have written had conservative Democrat Travis Childers lost MS-01: Tut, tut, the Democrats can't win in the old Confederacy.

Is anyone else sick and damn tired of the reflexive contrariness of the pundits toward Democrats?

West Virginia mountain momma

Hillary is still making the case for her electability. This is a pitch for the superdelegates to change or to change back.

Ironically, long ago and far away (in a galaxy much like our own), it was her lack of electability that concerned me. She was the only candidate for President I had ever heard of who had negatives above 50% among likely general election voters. I didn't think there was any way she could possibly change that after sixteen years in the national limelight.

Nonetheless, electability is an unpredictable commodity. The pundits can't predict much of anything, but their collective record on electability is even worse than usual. Here in Massachusetts, Deval Patrick was unelectable - too liberal for a state with an established practice of countering our thoroughly Democratic legislature with a Republican governor. He won anyway.

In joining the Patrick campaign early, I gave up on the fine gradations of electability that had made me support Shannon O'Brien over Robert Reich in 2002. In 2006, it worked, and I'm hoping for more of the same in 2008.

For President, I initially supported John Edwards. He had broad appeal, true, but he was also the most liberal candidate in the race. He wanted to restore the middle class and restore the Constitution. He had the good health plan that Hillary has since adopted (and it's better than Obama's). Above all, he knew that we are in for a bitter, dirty fight to recover the American economy and American democracy from deeply entrenched plutocratic interests who are perfectly represented by the Bushists.

When his Democratic primary electability was conclusively disproven, I had to pick between the two remaining viable Democrats. Obama, for all his sweetness and light, is the more likely candidate to move the Washington conversation back toward the pragmatic liberalish center of American voter views. Hillary botched Iraq - and still botches it. Obama is of the two the less establishment figure. Hillary would be like Bill before her a President of small measures and triangulation. She would also be instantly pinned down by the next Richard Mellon Scaife funding right-wing scandal-mongering, though that will probably be true for Obama, too, as it would be for any Democrat (other than a false one such as Zell Miller or Joe Lieberman).

Obama is much less likely than Hillary to go along to get along with the Bushist destruction of the Constitution. He's more likely to accomplish large things - peace, universal health care (even half a loaf), investigations of the Bushist depredations, a charismatic appeal to our better natures.

Of course, the electoral map worries me, even if yesterday's result in Mississippi-01 should give us all heart. Current polling suggests another 2000 election, with the Democrat winning the national popular vote while the Republican wins the Electoral College.

But it's May. Think of how many races have reversed in the six months before the election. Last night, I saw Obama on TV making the point that McCain is another four years of Bush. If he'll keep hitting that vulnerability even moderately hard, McCain is toast. So, Barack, go for it!

Was Reagan that oblivious?

Lou Cannon tells us that Ronald Reagan could not possibly have been willing to use racism while having on occasion shown personal concern for blacks. Why, he even had a couple of 'em up to the house one time! OK, sorry, that's unfair, but even Cannon has to admit that Reagan supported continuing Jim Crow voting discrimination.

Uh, Lou, wake up. Even Reagan could not have been oblivious enough to fail to understand the symbolism of advocating states' rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi. If Reagan was not a bigot personally, he didn't mind bigotry much in others.