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I am reading Caro's book on LBJ's senate years. He has a very long chapter on Richard Russell - a gentleman, a genius, and almost a super human Robert E. Lee type. But then you read what came out of his mouth about race, and what he failed to reveal known to his own personal experience. It is a bit of a cold shower. Thank heavens those days of mental gymnastics are over for most of us.

The thing that's amazing to me, that I will NEVER understand, is how the Democrats over the decades, centuries even, have been able to flip from side to side and dodge responsibilty for their reckless acts.

Some say "the Democrat Party of 1860 is not the Democrat Party of a hundred years later."

I say "bull-hockey." They've ALWAYS been the same: Demagogues of the worst sort.

Way back when, they used race-baiting. Now, they use...race-baiting. The identity of the race with whom they're aligned may have changed, but that's simply because Democrats have no principle. Whatever works to get them elected and keep them in power, that's what they'll do.

The Democrats are almost single-handedly responsible for the Civil War. They bear responsiblity for nearly making the division permanent, with their "peace movement" in the 1864 election (Hm, "peace movement," trying to capitulate to an enemy far weaker than you are, I think I see a pattern there, too).

The Democrats made sure the southern United States was "kept down" through the years so as to secure their hegemony.

And Democrats ruled all those years as pretty much a single party, and are the major reason the South lagged economically behind the north during that entire time.

Support for the slaveholders' rebellion is, emphatically, simply a support of Democrat Party dirty tricks then and now.

He has a very long chapter on Richard Russell - a gentleman, a genius, and almost a super human Robert E. Lee type. But then you read what came out of his mouth about race, and what he failed to reveal known to his own personal experience. It is a bit of a cold shower. Thank heavens those days of mental gymnastics are over for most of us.

The mental gymnastics are still going on, they've just been turned to discussion of history. Unfortunately, the passing of the segregationists means that people are able to construct their own Fantasy South. The Fantasy South looks a lot like the South or the America of today. But it's projected backwards to 1960 or 1930, 1860 or 1830. It's appealing to some in that one can appear to be a rebel and a loyalist, to thumb one's nose at political correctness, yet remain within its terms and conditions and even use current political correctness against those who tried to improve things in past years.

The old segregationists turned a lot of people leftward. If I had a dime for every liberal whose eyes watered at the mention of "Freedom Summer" and "Freedom riders" .... But the Russells at least made it clear that our past wasn't one great PC love fest. When one had to take ongoing segregation and bigotry into account, one couldn't whitewash past history, and turn Southern history into one long tale of victimization at the hands of the Yankees.