Fact Checking Haley Barbour's Sanitized Fake Racial History
There sure seems to be a lot of this going around, isn't there? Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson do some fact checking on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's recent bit of revisionist history, attempting to sanitize the racism and rewrite the Civil Rights movement in the South and how the Republicans have been taking advantage of the racial divide in America for decades. Eugene Robinson did an especially good job of following up Rachel Maddow's critique of Barbour's interview with the right wing Human Events and explaining why Barbour is frankly just full of it when he tries to pretend he didn't experience segregation himself growing up and at the schools he attended. As they noted it looks like he's trying to shine up his image with white voters who might not want to vote for someone they consider a bigot in the 2012 presidential elections.
Salon's War Room has a great article on Barbour's interview here:
The GOP's new fake racial history: A Southern Republican with designs on challenging Barack Obama in 2012 offers a phony version of history. Go read the whole thing but here's a portion of it.
Almost 50 years ago, the Republican Party made a decision to embrace the backlash generated by civil rights among white Southerners.
Traditionally, they had been staunch Democrats, but they were also culturally conservative, and as Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party embraced civil rights once and for all, they were up for grabs. The Republican Party offered them a home, a steady, decades-long realignment ensued, and today conservative Southern whites comprise the heart of the GOP -- just as culturally liberal Northerners, who called the GOP home before civil rights, have migrated to the Democratic Party.
There's nothing new about this story. In fact, it's the story LBJ himself predicted when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and supposedly mused, "There goes the South for a generation."
But it's an inconvenient story for today's Republican Party, which still relies on cultural, racial and ethnic wedge issues to keep its base in line -- but which also needs to win over less conservative suburbanites across the country to compete in national elections. And it's a particularly inconvenient story for Haley Barbour, the 62-year-old Mississippi governor who aspires to run as the Republican nominee against the nation's first black president.
So Barbour has invented his own sanitized, suburb-friendly version of history -- an account that paints the South's shift to the GOP as the product of young, racially inclusive conservatives who had reasons completely separate and apart from racial politics for abandoning their forebears' partisan allegiances. In an interview with Human Events that was posted on Wednesday, Barbour insists that "the people who led the change of parties in the South ... was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it." Segregationists in the South, in his telling, were "old Democrats," but "by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration."
This is utter nonsense.
For a century after the Civil War, the South was deeply and overwhelmingly Democratic, a consequence of the "humiliation" visited upon white Southerners by the Republican-initiated Reconstruction that followed the Civil War. The level of support enjoyed by Democratic candidates in the region is almost too astronomical to fathom now. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson took 42 percent of the vote nationally in a four-way presidential contest. But in South Carolina, he snared 95 percent. In Mississippi, 88 percent. While he was grabbing 60 percent nationally in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt scored 97 percent in Mississippi and nearly 99 percent in South Carolina. The region's congressional delegation was uniformly Democratic -- and, thanks to the South's one-party status, disproportionately influential, with lifelong incumbents taking advantage of the congressional seniority system to secure the most powerful committee gavels.
Video of Rachel's follow up with Eugene Robinson below the fold. h/t Steve Benen
Is it just me or does Haley Barbour have a strange resemblance to J.D. (Jefferson Davis) Hogg, better known as “Boss” Hogg, a fictional character featured in the television series “The Dukes of Hazzard”? Oh, and to answer my own question in my "subject line", oh yeah! I'll bet he's as racist as they get!
Just a little taller.
is intended to be a factual statement
as far as it goes, but I don't understand why Rachel didn't address the elephant in the room: the Dixiecrats defection from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party precisely because of the passage of civil rights in the 60s. To me that is the most damning aspect of the Republican dominance in the South. They're so strong because the racists changed parties when Blacks won their civil rights there. (And, of course, this led to the infamous Southern strategy, so effectively employed by the GOP.)
Thought for a second you said racist changed panties...
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
because you didn't watch or had the mute button on.
"I mean Romney is the most conservative on illegal immigration and I don't think Ronald Reagan could get elected in California today."
Ann "Clipped" Coulter
I watched the entire segment as posted here, and Rachel does not address the Dixiecrats defection to the Republican party.
My bad. I watched the main clip when this was only posted on Video Cafe and missed the second clip with Gene Robinson.
I live in Georgia, and it's painful to listen to the contortions of Georgia Republicans as they rewrite history in order to avoid admitting the ugly truth of how the Republican party came to dominate Southern politics. Every couple of months some yahoo down here attempts to manufacture facts concerning the Confederacy, and what it stood for, refusing to acknowledge that the Civil War was fought over the South's desperate attempt to maintain slavery. Instead, they couch it as a dispute over "states' rights," careful to avoid any reference to the particular rights the Southern states wished to exercise.
Oh, wait, Barbour did that too:
http://www.americablog.com/2010/04/miss-gover...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jx0btkSALo
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jld1_lFB9iA&fe...
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
His school was integrated, they had colored people working as janitors when he attended. Just ask him. What an asshole.
Haley Barbour is the top pasty faced white "go to" guy for historical perspective on race - from the slave owners position.
:)
"I know that there are people who do not love their fellow
man, and I hate people like that! " ~ Tom Lehrer (1928 - )
Has Snorg tees replaced the sorority girls with MILF's with racks?
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
but what is wrong with folding them and putting them in a drawer?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem...
"I mean Romney is the most conservative on illegal immigration and I don't think Ronald Reagan could get elected in California today."
Ann "Clipped" Coulter
I'm sure it's over 5%. Oh....sorry....FACT check...my bad.
"Anyone that makes less than $150K in this country, has no business voting Republican."
that this bloated butcher of the English language actually graduated from a credible college. Perhaps they gave him an "honorary degree", such as the one Glenn Beck has? Barbour sounds like an illiterate redneck (with apologies to rednecks) every time he opens his mouth. To think that this buffoon is planning to run for president in 2012 is almost laughable----and that anyone would vote for him............unbelievable!
Although he would be a perfect pairing with Sistah Sarah!!
“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,”
I won't elaborate all the details here, but the version of history that Haley is trying to sell here is one of the tallest piles of horse manure I ever seen!! I lived in Mississippi at EXACTLY that same time as Haley pontificates here and provable FACTS that 95%+ of everything he saying IS A LIE.. Haley views the peoples of current day Mississippi as his personal servants. Every time he needs something done -smallest to largest- count on Haley to provide junior members of the KKK or prisoners from the Mississippi penal system to come and do what ever you need.
If any of you guys are movie buffs, you'll remember the part that Burl Ives played in the movie "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" - called "Big Daddy"... THAT'S the character Hayley Barbour is acting out today...
Couple of good links:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051459/ OR
http://www.filmsite.org/cato.html
sports himself, but the players gave him such an important central role on the team he was too busy to notice the player's race.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons...
"I mean Romney is the most conservative on illegal immigration and I don't think Ronald Reagan could get elected in California today."
Ann "Clipped" Coulter
Putting quotes around the word 'humiliation' shows how poorly informed the author of the Salon piece is.
"Humiliation" isn't nearly strong enough a word to describe the utter devastation experienced by The South, not only by the War itself but by the so-called "Reconstruction" as well.
Bear in mind the decision to secede was made by a tiny percent of the entire southern population.
Simply consider the Confederate Conscription Act of 1862 - anyone owning 10 or more slaves was exempt.
"Rich man's war - poor man's fight" was the slogan of the day.
And the devastation, rape and plunder of The South followed.
To some extent Barbour's contention that the Republicans are responsible for the "New South" is true. The Republicans were the business people who, in the late 50s and early 60s, wanted to participate in the commerce of the nation, as opposed to the Southern Democrats who were primarily rural and insular.
I know. I watched with horror as the Republicans made their inroads. The one-party rule of the Democrats came to an end - thankfully. They were holding the region hostage to their wornout ideology. Unfortunately the Republicans took advantage of the situation. For them race was not an issue, economic development was - and the money they could make thereby.
Democracy is too important to be entrusted to politicians.
Rise Up!
Protest!
Grant used a scorched Earth policy, creating the total devastation that you spoke of; starvation was rife from the formerly rich to the poor, and carpetbaggers made the situation worse taking jobs mean to help them recover from war, but profiting themselves instead.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
"To some extent Barbour's contention that the Republicans are responsible for the "New South" is true. The Republicans were the business people who, in the late 50s and early 60s, wanted to participate in the commerce of the nation"
You mean they were the 20th Centruy carpetbaggers who brought their Republicanism with them when the corporations transfered them to the southern suburbs. Read a history of the Bush family.
The difference is the 19th Century carpet baggers exploited freed slave votes to gain power. The 20th Century carpetbaggers just race baited better than the Dixiecrats who had their pants pulled down by their national party.
"I mean Romney is the most conservative on illegal immigration and I don't think Ronald Reagan could get elected in California today."
Ann "Clipped" Coulter
Nice try at a dodge, Haley:
"We had integrated schools - I went to an intergrated college ..."
In otherwords, I went to a segregated school.
thought they were making the smart trade, demographically speaking, when they swapped those played out northeastern liberal Republicans for their southern Dixiecrats but they should have gotten a deal on future draft picks. The new crop of players are coming from off shore and they don't seem inclined to play for the Republicans.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
Babour, a certified Chickenhawk never graduated from college!
In the spring of 1968 he quit Ole Miss to work on Nixon's Campaign for the Presidency. Never notifying the Selective Service of his dropping out of college, which at that time would have gotten good ole boy Haley a free ride to VietNam.
After the campaign was over and Nixon had won, Barbour all of a sudden remembered to notifty the draft board! He was then called up for a physical in Jan of 1969 which he flunked ,same thing with a physical in Feb of 1970. I've never heard or read of any physical ailments that Barbour had then or still has, but he mysteriously had them when it was time to show and serve his country! Maybe he was "a little light in the loafers!"
Barbour never graduated from Ole Miss quitting as a junior! He was accepted in the the School of Law at Ole Miss a couple of years later! The School of Law must not of had very hard entrance requirements back in the "good ole days!"
the segment was that as I watched it last night, I remembered that MSNBC resident jackass "Jethro" Joe Scarborough got into it with Lawrence O'Donnell a few weeks ago about how, Barbour will be painted as a racist by many on the left if he runs for President. I also recall O'Donnell saying that if Barbour simply wouldn't say racist and stupid things he wouldn't have that reputation. And what does Barbour do? Bust out with that boatload of bullshit in an attempt to rewrite history. I'm sure Jethro's head exploded if he was watching Rachel and we all know that he did. He's hated Rachel since she forced him to walk off the set of "Race for The Whiteshoue" a couple of years ago. Unlike that brain dead spokes model Mika, Rachel doens't let Scarborough get away with his bullshit. She's got a show who's ratings tripple his and can knock down the shit he peddles in primetime! Barbour is Boss Hogg and the people in the big cities are not going to vote for this escapee from the cast of Deliverence. He'll we can barely understand anything he says! What is that language he speaks?
He's got that crazy old cooter accent.
back in the 1860s.
There are many of us here in Mississippi who are totally embarrassed by this man. Heaven help this country if this mushmouth gets elected president. Surely the Republicans are smarter than that.... aren't they?
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