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Chris Hayes took a shot at him the night before and this Thursday, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart took his turn skewering Rand Paul for his appearance at Howard University. Paul asked the audience there how his party has managed to go from being one that elected the first twenty African American congressmen to becoming a party that now loses ninety percent of their vote, and Stewart was happy to answer that question for Sen. Paul.

Stewart proceeded to explain for Paul that maybe that pesky Southern Strategy employed by Nixon and St. Ronnie and Bush Sr. -- all the way up to recent times and presidential contender Gov. Rick Perry and his Niggerhead Ranch -- might tend to alienate a voting bloc.

Jon continued by going through baby Paul's train wreck of a speech at Howard which you can read more about here: The history Rand Paul struggles to understand:

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Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Sunday pointed to the roots of Southern strategy of the late 1960s -- which appealed to racism in the South -- as an example of how the Republican Party should reform itself after President Barack Obama won re-election.

"If the reaction to the election is let's dig into our core principles and try to remake them, I think the GOP will lose even more seats in 2014," Ingraham told Fox News host Chris Wallace. "If it becomes a bidding war with Republicans in either this group or that group -- whether it's Latinos or women -- we're going to give you more stuff or we're going to do amnesty plus... it's not going to work."

"The Republicans have to take a lesson from -- and I hate to bring up Reagan again -- when Goldwater got shellacked in '64, Bill Buckley and Brent Bozell Sr. and all these conservatives got together and they said, we're going to figure out how to sell this idea of economic conservatism and the conservative framework to new voters. And they went into the South and they transformed Mississippi and Alabama, all these places where people had never voted Republican before."

In his book "From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism," author Joseph Lowndes points out that William F. Buckley used the National Review to argue that southern whites were superior to blacks and Brent Bozell wrote that the federal government had no right to end segregation.

The National Review later moved away from overt racism and supported Barry Goldwater, whose presidential run became the template for the "Southern strategy" to appeal to white voters in the South.

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I'm sure CNN got exactly what they expected by bringing on former New York Mayor, Rudy Giuliani on Piers Morgan's show this Wednesday evening, to call Vice President Biden names, since I'm sure he's still smarting from Joe calling him "a noun and a verb and 9/11" a while back when Giuliani was running for president himself.

Giuliani just continued to prove that Republicans have little more than feigned outrage, projection and lies to run on right now during this interview. The party that's been playing the race card for decades and that implemented the Southern Strategy and that is still doing its best to make sure minorities can't vote to this day needs to shut the hell up when it comes to charges of racism.

But they won't, and we're going to see more interviews like this one from our corporate media that's happy to go along with them before the campaign season is over. We got a tiny bit of push back from Morgan on Giuliani's hypocrisy and whether he actually believes what he was saying here, but he basically just let Giuliani spew his venom unchallenged.

Giuliani also has that feigned victimhood card down pat, since he claimed we've got a media that actually gives deference to liberals, when that's about as far from the truth as you can get. Actual liberals are almost never allowed on the air by our corporate media and if by accident they let some of them on, there is always at least one to five "conservatives" on to counter them for "balance," with some of MSNBC's programming being the exceptions.

He also pretended that the corporate media regularly calls Republicans out for their race baiting, which is utterly false with the exception of again, just a few shows on MSNBC, and that Biden got some sort of "free pass" when that is also completely ridiculous. If the media was giving Biden a free pass, they wouldn't be letting Giuliani on the air to talk about what he said in the first place. And Fox News, which race baits themselves pretty much on a daily basis, if not an hourly one, would not be on the air running this story about every hour as well. And we wouldn't have CNN running with the story all day long.

Biden didn't get a "free pass" when this nonsense dominated a good deal of the news cycle on almost every single station that calls themselves "news" these days for the last couple of days, along with largely uncritical coverage of Romney's feigned outrage in response. The one who got a "free pass" was Rudy here playing the typical GOP feigned victimhood card.

Rough transcript of Rudy's hackery below the fold.

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Despite the fact as was noted yesterday on Chris Hayes' Saturday show on MSNBC, that Newt Gingrich's national favorability ratings nationwide are absolutely terrible, that didn't stop Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Gov. Haley Barbour from trying to put their best positive spin on his win in the South Carolina Republican primary race.

Gingrich may be winning over Republican primary voters with the race baiting and a repeat of Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy, but that doesn't necessarily translate well to a national election. I'm sure Graham and Barbour are well aware of that, but that didn't stop them from trying to paint South Carolina Republican primary voters as being typical of the mainstream of the rest of the country.

Transcript via CBS.

SCHIEFFER: All right, if you can help me and call Governor Romney, I think we can make this work. Senator Graham, what happened down there? Did-- is-- is South Carolina just too conservative for Mitt Romney or is there a problem here that goes deeper than that with his campaign?

GRAHAM: John McCain won, Bob Dole won. Not the most conservative people in the world but good-- good Americans who impressed South Carolina in sobriety, Newt won. The debate Monday night in Myrtle Beach was probably the best explanation of conservatism in a bold fashion coming from Newt Gingrich I've heard in decades. And Newt not only won the debates. He convinced people that he could beat Barack Obama and electability was the issue before South Carolina primary, during the primary and on voting day. And Newt won. He's the guy that we saw forty percent of us, the best to go into the arena and beat Barack Obama. Governor Romney did fine. Rick Perry did very well. He had some stumbles by Romney. We had six hundred thousand people vote. The largest Republican primary in history occurred yesterday. And people were energized. They were looking close and they picked Newt. This was Newt winning more than anybody else losing.

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As we've discussed and posted on here repeatedly, Newt Gingrich's use of racist "code words" or what some would call "dog whistles" have really been more of a siren because there's nothing veiled about them. There's nothing subtle about putting "Juan Williams in his place" or calling President Obama "the food stamp president" and equating being on food stamps to the black community, when in reality most of those using the program are white.

But regardless of the fact that the game Gingrich is playing is as obvious as the nose on his face, CNN's Candy Crowley plays coy here in this interview with Rep. James Clyburn and pretends she doesn't see it and isn't aware of what Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy was. I find it pretty pathetic that she forced Clyburn to have to explain it to her as though she's oblivious to the race baiting.

I also wonder what it's going to take for any of these so-called "journalists" and I use that term lightly, to recognize the fact that our economy was hemorrhaging jobs when George W. Bush left office and the job losses we've seen are not primarily the fault of the Obama administration when he's had to deal with a record amount of obstruction from the Republicans and Republican governors all across the country doing their best to sabotage the economy for the benefit of the wealthiest among us. Clyburn shouldn't have to be explaining to her why the Obama administration has had trouble turning the economy around either, but that's how he spent the latter part of the interview.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Rachel Maddow hits another one out of the ballpark with her reporting on the GOP's resurrection of the Southern Strategy for the mid-term 2010 elections. What's astounding, as she notes, is that they're not paying a price for it from the media. Time will tell shortly if they pay one with the electorate. I'm not sure if they're capable of enough caging operations to make up for the amount of bigotry and race-baiting we've seen from Republicans this year. Maybe they're just counting on Diebold to make up for it instead.

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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

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Time for your weekly Driftglass and Bluegal podcast. Enjoy everybody!

You can listen to past editions here and at http://dgbgpodcast.blogspot.com/, and the podcast is also available on i-Tunes. If you enjoy these as much as I do, donations are greatly appreciated. Please consider throwing five bucks in the hat.

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Rachel Maddow talked to Nixonland author Rick Perlstein about Michael Steele's admission that there is actually a Southern Strategy and that they have alienated minority voters by using it. As TPM noted the Republicans are not happy with him for this.

Touchy Subject: Steele Slammed For Criticizing GOP's Southern Strategy:

Michael Steele's charge this week that the GOP's southern strategy has "alienated" minority voters may not have provoked as many headlines as a trip by young Republicans to a lesbian bondage club. But in the long run it could cause just as much trouble for him.

During a speech at DePaul University, Steele declared:

For the last 40-plus years we had a "Southern Strategy" that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, "Bubba" went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.

He added that, even today, blacks "really don't have a reason" to vote for the GOP.

The remarks represented a frontal challenge to the party's preferred version of history, which has long denied that race-based appeals have played any role in the GOP's success in the south, at least in the post-Nixon age. And some defenders of that line are responding as you'd expect. Read on...

I wanted to get this up right after it aired and got too busy. Her interview with Perlstein was too good not to share even if it's a little bit late.

Full transcript below the fold via Nexis Lexis.

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For your listening pleasure a bonus edition of the Driftglass and Bluegal podcast.

You can listen to past editions here. They are also available on iTunes.

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