Posted on 12/30/2002 5:39:35 PM PST by asneditor
Displaying a virtuosity that would have impressed George Orwell, the Democrats and their minions in the media have transformed segregation and racism into a Republican product.
Typical of this effort is the Los Angeles times column by Harold Meyerson. Meyerson asserts that Sen. Trent Lott's inane remark about Strom Thurmond "uncovered an entire history that the Republicans would greatly prefer to keep under wraps."
Meyerson goes further, saying that the GOP "would rather not be reminded of its origins." In reality -- in case anyone in the media cares about reality -- the "origins of the Republican Party were just fine as far as race is concerned. The GOP came into existence because the Whigs, the only contemporary party opposing the Democrats, were too timid to take a stand against slavery and secession. The party's first presidential candidate was Abraham Lincoln who, as the saying used to go, "freed the slaves." In fact, Lincoln was the reason that blacks, up until Roosevelt built his coalition, voted overwhelmingly Republican, except in the South, of course, where Democratically controlled state governments prevented them from voting at all.
But it didn't stop with Lincoln. There are more recent and more relevant points that expose the lie that links the Republican Party's to racism and segregation. For decades, the Southern tier of states was known as the Solid South because they voted solidly Democratic. In most of those states, if a politician won the Democratic primary it was tantamount to winning the election because the Republican presence was so feeble. So unless we're to believe that segregation -- separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains, schools and restaurants -- was the law in Boston and New York, it was the Democrats in the South that established segregation.
In fact, the civil rights movement of the 1960's, which saw many people from the Republican northern states challenge the authorities in Dixie, was a crusade to dismantle a system created and maintained by Democratic state legislators. The names associated with that struggle still resonate -- Orval Faubus, Ross Barnett, George Wallace, Bull Connor. The fire hoses and vicious dogs that were turned on civil rights marchers were in Democratic hands, not Republicans.
But even before the main thrust of the civil rights movement took hold, in 1957, there was a Federal court order mandating desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Four black children showed up to attend the school and a Democrat governor turned out his state's National Guard. Soldiers in full battle dress, equipped with rifles and bayonets bravely held out against the four black children.
Those kids might never have seen the inside of Little Rock's Central High School if it hadn't been for a Republican president who nationalized the state National Guard and sent in Federal troops to ensure the court orders were obeyed by the Democratic government of Arkansas. It was Democratic -- not Republican -- governors who stood in the schoolhouse door and cried, "Never!"
And, it's worth noting, they are still standing in the schoolhouse door crying never only now it's to prevent black and low-income kids from escaping the public schools by obtaining a voucher to attend a better, private school. Now, of course, the issue is not race but subservience to the teacher unions. But the effect is similar. It is minority children that suffer the consequences of this sellout to the unions.
The 1960s also saw passage of the landmark Civil Right Act of 1964 -- a bill that would not have passed but for Republican support. Meyerson notes that a majority of Republican senators voted for the bill but again, with considerable rhetorical skill -- uses that against the GOP but telling us that Republican congressman Tom DeLay "hastens to point out" that fact. Somehow, DeLay reminding us of the Republican role nullifies it.
Meyerson even resurrects Willie Horton, the black killer who was furloughed from prison by Democratic Gov. Mike Dukakis of Massachusetts. Dukakis' furloughing of Horton, who went on to kill while on furlough, was used against him in his presidential campaign against the first George Bush in 1992.
Meyerson's point seem te be that folks don't mind being killed by furloughed white convicts but if a governor furloughs a black convict who kills, voters will vote against him.
Harold is so determined to smear the GOP he tweaks history just a bit. He attributes the Willie Horton ad to Lee Atwater, the political operative who ran Bush's presidential campaign. In fact, the Horton ad first appeared in the Democratic primary. And, it was an independent group, not the Bush campaign and not the Republican Party, that used it against Dukakis in the general election.
We can look for this campaign to brand the GOP the party of racial segregation to continue right up until election day 2004. Republican voters should hope that their party leadership and their candidates have the moxie to label these charges as lies. The time for euphemisms is past.
The historical fact is that Democrats invented segregation, Democratic states spawned the KKK and the lynch mob and to say otherwise is a lie.
"The original intent of the Civil Rights Act was to provide equal opportunity to all - a worthy objective. It has been perverted by non-elected and unaccountable bureaucrats and appointed and unaccountable Federal Judges into a law that requires equal results. Republican efforts to adhere to the original intent of the Civil Rights Act are characterized as discrimination - a return to "Jim Crow Law" days - by the Democrats and dominant media."
But the next line is wishful thinking:
"It is past time that our elected representatives took back their authority and responsibility from bureaucrats and federal judges as the ONLY officials who are to make laws."
There are not enough elected or to-be-elected officials alive who'd be willing to step up to the unionized bureaucracy, the entrenched leftists, and the activist judiciary to do any good. If they did recover their spine enough to override the system, they'd just keep on passing new laws that built on the bad precedent of decades.
It's a nice thought, but the battle is left and right, not just who gets to dominate the system.
PS: To Walt, this is a discussion of civil rights, Lincoln's reputation will probably survive without your "Lincoln is God" mantra fogging up the issue. Slavery was a secondary issue in his policies, right or wrong, his program was to keep authority in DC and to manage the rest of it as it might develop.
This discussion is all about what's happened since that came to pass and DC has issued multiple, but misrepresented, edicts involving 'equality', 'race', and now 'diversity'.
I could be wrong, but I thought that John C. Fremont was the first Republican candidate for President, Lincoln being the first one to win.
And I suppose that's why they took the ONE action that would permanently separate them from any future access to those very same territories?
I agree that the horrible incident you witnessed 20 years ago, is racism at its worst, for the man was intimating something worse than hatred, action against a person or group, for no reason other than race.
You are also right, that the republicans need to go on the attack, read the Clinton playbook and campaign nationally, constantly, and smear the other guys with all manners of accusations. We can use the truth, which makes it even harder for them to be refuted.
The post by an American Indian, was "Why I would have voted for Strom in '48
Actually, it was a Reader's Digest article that roused the country, and spread national anti-Dukakis sentiment beneath the mainstream media radar screen. Atwater overheard truckers discussing the article at a truck stop. Here's the kicker: the Digest article, titled "Getting Away With Murder," DID NOT MENTION HORTON'S RACE. At all.
OK. Funny thing is....I'm 7th generation Mississippian and have never known a Klan member personally from that state hence I found your statement about Northern Mississippians being a half Klan voting block a bit of a stretch. I'm glad my homestate is there to give everyone a nice toughstone for superiority musings....what would FReepers do without Mississippi or West Virginia....geez, I don't know?...maybe self reflect...lol
And I suppose that's why they took the ONE action that would permanently separate them from any future access to those very same territories?
The slave power expected to get Mexico, Cuba and Central America, at least.
I posted this once before. I guess you just missed it:
"Pollard could vision steps and advances "toward the rearing of that great Southern Empire, whose seat is eventually to be in Central America, and whose boundaries are to enclose the Gulf of Mexico." Ahead were "magnificent fields of romance" for the South, as he saw its future. "It is an empire founded on military ideas; representing the noble peculiarities of southern civilization; including within its limits the isthmuses of America and the regenerated West Indies; having control of the two dominant staples of the world's commerce—cotton and sugar; possessing the highways of the world's commerce; surpassing all empires of the world's ages in the strength of its geographical position." Philadelphia newspapers quoted a speech by Senator Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia in their city. "We believe that capital should own labor; is there any doubt that there must be a laboring class everywhere? In all countries and under every form of social organization there must be a laboring class -- a class of men who get their living from the sweat of their brow; and then there must be another class that controls and directs the capital of the country. He pleaded: "Slave property stands upon the same footing as all other descriptions of property."
--"Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II, Prairie Years, by Carl Sandburg pp.217-221
Polk tried to get the money to buy Cuba.
Don't you know the history?
Walt
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