Eugene Robinson: Gov. Barbour's civil rights fairy tale

[cal04]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/06/AR2010090602959.html

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who may seek the Republican nomination for president, is trying to sell the biggest load of revisionist nonsense about race, politics and the South that I've ever heard. Ever.

He has the gall to try to portray Southern Republicans as having been enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement all along. I can't decide whether this exercise in rewriting history should be described as cynical or sinister. Whichever it is, the record has to be set straight.

In a recent interview with Human Events, a conservative magazine and Web site, Barbour gave his version of how the South, once a Democratic stronghold, became a Republican bastion. The 62-year-old Barbour claimed that it was "my generation" that led the switch: "my generation, who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it." The "old Democrats" fought integration tooth and nail, Barbour said, but "by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration."

Not a word of this is true.

[KingFlorez]

1. If that were true, Republicans wouldn't have taken over the south

And how does he explain where all those Dixiecrats went? They didn't evaporate.

[bbdad]

8. Speaking as a 60-year-old man who lived through that period, ...

... I should remind everyone (including Republicans who would say otherwise) that the Southern "Democratic" segregationists were CONSERVATIVES themselves. Unlike today, both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party had a liberal left wing and a conservative/reactionary right wing. When I was a teenager living in the state of Texas (where I still reside, by the way), there were three political parties: the conservative Democrats, the liberal Democrats, and the Republicans.

[spanone]

2. the cheney doctrine...repeat horseshit enough times and the people eat it

[malaise]

5. DIng ding

We have a winner :hi:

[merh]

3. He is lying.

He still associates with known white supremest and is proud of his relationship with them.



(Note: In Mississippi the whites began private academies to send their children to rather than subject them to integrated schools and busing.)

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2004/fall/communing-with-the-council

[UTUSN]

4. K&R #4 n/t

[JohnnyLib2]

6. Started visiting future inlaws in MS in 1968. He's a damned liar.

Reminds me of men who claim to have been in combat and weren't. Pathetic. :grr:

[Kalyke]

7. As a Southerner who was coming of age during the time the South

switched from Democratic to Republican, I can tell you that Barbour's assertions aren't true, but the Southern strategy didn't really flip the entire region, either.

What flipped the South was hate radio via mass conservative media buy-ups in the early 90s. Many more Southerners commute via automobile because we don't have as much mass transit, so people only heard the Limpballs and Insannities of the world without ever hearing an opposing viewpoint. The South began voting Republican en masse in 1994, but still, by and large, voted to return Bill Clinton to office in 1996. That was the last time until Obama won Virginia and North Carolina two years ago.

[EFerrari]

9. Everyone should see the video of Barbour saying this crap.

This is what white supremacists sound like in public more often that those wackjobs that march in Nazi uniforms and yell the n word. They look and sound just like Barbour does in this interview.

Here is Gene with Rachel, watching and discussing the clip.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=385&topic_id=501661&mesg_id=501661

[miscsoc]

10. This right wing's civil rights movement revisionism makes me physically sick

It's evil, it's deep and profound evil. It's not just cynical amoral lying, it's a lot worse. It's like grave desecration.

People died for civil rights, and we'd like to think they didn't die in vain, because the truth was there, and the truth will out. The right isn't content with martyring people, they want to erase our martyrs from history.

i've said this before re: glenn beck and mlk - these people aren't distorting history from ignorance, or even mere political calculation, they are doing it out of spite and hatred for the good men and women in history. they know that these people were motivated by the idea that they would have a positive legacy even if they would never be around to see it, and they want to smash up that legacy, and thereby to render the lives of progressive heroes pointless.

[misanthrope]

11. I've heard it before among Southern GOPers...

...You would get a good laugh at the contortions of rationalizations and spin that goes on among many of his compadres.

[EFerrari]

13. You're exactly right.

Barbour says "never gave it a thought" as a way to say "we like things as they were". It's code for "fuck you".

[JNelson6563]

12. Another full of shit Rethug.

Gosh I'm shocked! Not.