I don't know how old you are, but if you're old enough to remember politics in the 1980s and earlier, then you may have noticed that no one back then got all bent out of shape over the Rebel Flag. No one. Not even Democrats. People waved Rebel Flags at Reagan rallies and no one cared. Hell, CBS even aired a TV series called “The Dukes of Hazzard”, where the heroes drove around in a car named the General Lee with a Rebel Flag emblazoned on top. And no one got their panties all in a twist about it.
But today it would be a national scandal if a Rebel Flag popped up at a political rally. When they made a movie version “The Dukes of Hazzard” a few years back, they tried to dump the Rebel Flag car. After fans protested, they finally agreed to keep it but they added a scene in the movie where the heroes bought the car not realizing the flag was painted on top, and they got called racist and bigot for having it on there.
So what changed? Why did the Rebel Flag go from being a fun symbol of regional “orneriness” to being castigated as lower than a swastika? How did honoring Confederate history go from being an innocent form of regional pride and ancestral dignity to being billed as an exhibition of “hatred” and “bigotry”?
Well, everything changed on a day in 1993 when the trademark logo of the Daughters of the American Confederacy was up for a routine renewal by the U.S. Senate. The DAC are a charity group who help all races and whose members are descendants of Confederate soldiers. Their logo contains both the U.S. Flag and the Confederate Battle Flag. Their renewal wasn't even scheduled to be debated since it wasn't even considered to be controversial.
But then Senator Carole Moseley-Braun came to the floor. Newly elected, she was a media darling as “the first African-American woman in the U.S. Senate”. She was also a race-baiting demagogue who had built a political career in Chicago by browbeating opponents into submission with howls of “racism”. She saw that DAC logo and went berserk. She began ranting and raving about how offended she was to see such an evil symbol of hatred, racism, and white supremacy being approved by the Senate. The other Dems immediately saw an opportunity and began siding with her, even though up to that point they had had no objection to renewing the DAC logo and their leadership had even placed the issue up for a automatic voice vote without even intending any debate on it.
Moseley-Braun milked it for all it was worth. She even pretended she was about to faint, so horrified was she at the spectre of an evil Rebel Flag. Dianne Feinstein ran over and held her, lest she collapse to the Senate floor in horror. By this point, the Dems were in full scale race-baiting mode, They vowed to kill the DAC logo renewal and demanded to know if the GOP agreed, indicating that if they didn't, then they were “racists”.
Now, if the GOP had any guts, they'd have said Moseley-Braun was behaving like an idiot, that there was nothing wrong with that innocent logo, and that the people upset about it should get a life. To their credit, about half the GOP Senators did just that. But, alas, the other half melted and begged not to be called “racist”. They claimed to be horrified that some of their fellow Republicans were supporting a symbol of evil and hate and all that's bad in the world. The DAC logo wasn't renewed, being voted down something like 75-25, with the Dems & RINOs crushing the conservatives.
The Dems, of course, high-fived one another. They'd found another issue to whip the cowardly Republicans with. Not only that, but it was a lose-lose for the GOP, since by trashing the Rebel Flag they lost Southern white votes while picking up zero black votes. The media, of course, jumped on the bandwagon, and began prowling for evil Rebel Flags with which to bash Republicans. Hey, Mr. Republican, what do you think about the Rebel Flag flying in South Carolina? Are you for taking it down or are you a racist? Being the STUPID PARTY, the typical GOP response has been to capitulate, to the point that today the GOP is totally on the defensive on this issue, as they are on abortion, the gay agenda, affirmative action, and every other issue where they've allowed the Democrats to define the debate.
And, of course, the left has its own Fifth Column operating within the GOP and on conservative message boards on this issue, ready to scream “racism” and play the race card with the ferocity of Nancy Pelosi or John Conyers. Now I know there are all kinds of rationalizations for this idiotic and cowardly behavior by these Fifth Columnists. They'll tell us that the original Confederates were Democrats, as if the Democrat Party of that era has a damn thing to do with today's Marxist, centralized, anti-white Democrat Party. They'll claim the Confederates were traitors, just like the Code Pinkos. Yet the Code Pinkos hate the Confederate Flag. In fact, today's GOP opponents of the Rebel Flag are siding with today's Democrats and today's Code Pinkos on this very issue. As irony on the cake, most of these same “non-racist” Republicans brag about supporting the King holiday, ignoring the fact that Martin Luther King sided with the Commie Vietcong during the Vietnam War. They can forgive that but can't forgive a secession movement that took place a century and a half ago. Not to mention that Southerners have been among the most patriotic Americans, volunteering in droves for wars and living in a region that has never been a center of anti-American activities or isolationist sentiments like other regions often have been.
So there you have it. I think Southerners have every right to honor our ancestors and our heritage, and no amount of race card playing or leftist browbeating will change my position. And I think that's true of most conservatives here at FR. Unfortunately, the GOP appears to be racially and ideologically whipped right now, so you can probably expect your view to prevail as the party deteriorates into nothing more than a “me too” party copy-catting the Democrats’ leftism and Political Correctness.