[Pelham]

He was rivaling that with some of his yammering today about ‘segregationist Democrats opposing civil rights’, casting them as Leftists.

Well guess what, opponents of the Civil Rights Act included both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. George Wallace and Bull Connor may have been Democrats and segregationists, but it’s a crock to claim that they opposed the civil rights movement because they were ‘Leftists’. The Left was unified in their support of the Civil Rights movement. But go back and read copies of Buckley’s National Review from the 60s and you will find NR opposed for a variety of reasons. That’s simply fact.

If Rush wants to align himself with the Rockefeller Republicans, Dirksen Republicans, and the Mike Mansfield Democrats who passed Lyndon Johnson’s social revolution he’s certainly free to do so. But he’s not free to rewrite history and pass it off as “conservative”, a habit he shares with Hannity.

Of course in his defense Rush isn’t doing this with the intent to deceive. He simply didn’t pay any attention to the history that he was living through as a teen and has never bothered to see what he missed. So he’s saying what he imagines could have happened like he did with his idea that the Confederacy sought to conquer the entire US and not just separate and go their own way.

[Ohioan]

You are completely correct, and completely apt in your comment on the "civil rights" laws, adopted in 1964 & 1965. They were clearly the furthest extension of Socialist thought in America, up until that time. It is ridiculous to suggest that legislation, which made it illegal for a businessman, spending his own money, to give preference to rooted American neighbors over someone of foreign birth, was somehow consistent with traditional American values, which never tried to dictate to anyone how to spend their own money. Or that it was somehow consistent with the First Amendment to allow Congress to prohibit such an employer from taking religious faith into accounting in determining whom to trust in his employment, and with his property.

Under the "Civil Rights" theories, Booker T. Washington's appeal to the Business community at the Atlanta Exposition--that they hire the Southern Negroes, who had been loyal to the South during the War & Reconstruction, rather than the new arrivals from overseas--would have been an appeal to break the law, the Socialist EEOC was intended to enforce.

(Two of my grandparents had recently arrived in the era that Washington addressed, so the appeal would not have been in my interest; but right is right, and people have a right to their preferences in their management of what is theirs!)

I will admit that in Junior High School, when Harry Truman first proposed a Federal FEPC law, I thought it idealistic. By Senior High School, I had woken up to what it really amounted to--the Nazi form of Socialism, which allowed continued private ownership; but ownership dependent on the owner using his property only as the central government dictated.

But freedom only so long as you accept the dictation of Government in your own decision making--the "so long as" criteria, is not freedom at all. It is seizure of the attributes of ownership without compensation.

For more on the issue: "Civil Rights" vs. A Free Society.

Rush may have ignored the issue as a youth, but there is no excuse for failing to look at the full context of what was involved, as an adult. I seldom disagree with you; but think you are too kind in this.