Joe Conason: Joe Wilson’s Confederate Cronies

[babylonsister]

Joe Wilson’s Confederate Cronies

Posted on Sep 16, 2009

By Joe Conason


The stupid misconduct of entertainer Kanye West and politician Joe Wilson demonstrated, if any fresh proof is necessary, that thoughtless rudeness isn’t confined by ethnicity, ideology or background.

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As a staunch defender of the antebellum way of life, he has advocated displaying Confederate symbols on public property and opposed the Martin Luther King holiday, and sought to restore the reputation of slave owners.

His magazine used to market T-shirts denigrating Abraham Lincoln that displayed a portrait of Lincoln above the slogan “Sic Semper Tyrannis”—the phrase shouted by John Wilkes Booth after he shot the Civil War president. No doubt Quinn considered the assassination, too, to be an expression of “patriotism,” although not to the United States of America.

It is not accidental that Wilson is a client of the Quinn firm (which has also represented John McCain, much to the Arizona senator’s shame). The South Carolina congressman is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, once a relatively harmless organization of nostalgic Southerners that has been transformed into a virulently racist outfit in recent years.

Before his election to Congress, Wilson was among the tiny minority of state legislators in South Carolina who fought to the bitter end for the right to fly a Confederate flag over the Statehouse—a campaign in which those die-hards enjoyed the support of Quinn’s fundraising and publicity apparatus.

This is the ugly underside of the farthest right-wing elements of the Republican Party. Promoting Joe Wilson as a symbol of the GOP is a dangerous game, but it is nothing new for a political leadership that has been flirting with the neo-Confederates for decades now. Ever since Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party in 1948, what was once the party of Lincoln has veered closer and closer to the ideology of his assassin.

Even now, Republican leaders in Washington—presumably including the black chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele—make common cause with the neo-Confederates. They pretend not to notice the Dixie flags, the habitual expressions of racism and bigotry or the poisonous attitude toward Lincoln, King and the other saviors of the nation. And they pretend that the politicians who stoke these smoldering hatreds are loyal to the same ideals as the rest of us.

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090916_joe_wilsons_dixie_partisans/