The GOP's new fake racial history

[ashling]

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."

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/republican_party/index.html?story=%2Fpolitics%2Fwar_room%2F2010%2F09%2F02%2Fhaley_barbour_race_history

[McCamy Taylor]

1. What part of "Southern Strategy" doesn't this Bozo get?

I live in the South. Nonracists are Democrats. Racists are Republicans. Maybe in the NE and western US GOP does not equal "bigot" but down here below the Mason-Dixon line it sure does.

[LiberalFighter]

2. Then why did those Democrats (Dixicrats) that were against the Civil Rights Act

leave the Democratic Party and became Republicans?

[RDANGELO]

3. Racism no - Tribalism yes!

Southern whites are the most tribal minded group of people in the country. America is increasingly becoming a more diverse and tolerant country. This is making them increasingly more insecure. Tribalism is an instinct,while racism is deliberate.

[EstimatedProphet]

4. Yeah, those were the days...

Govs. Orval Faubus and Ross Barnett threatening to not call in the National Guard because of school integration...

Brian De La Beckwith un-assassinating Medgar Evers

The driver not stopping the bus because Rosa Parks wouldn't give up her seat...

[Swamp Rat]

5. Don't forget about the Magic Negro who started the wars and gutted the national treasury

[Iterate]

6. Haley, you're full of shit.

Nixon turned down the moderate and anti-segregationist Nelson Rockefeller as his VP in a now famous and well-recounted meeting with Strom Thurman, who promised segregationist southern support in exchange for Nixon's choosing either Ronald Reagan, John Tower of Texas, George Bush, Howard Baker of Tennessee, or Spiro Agnew. Thurman knew there was only one name on that list, the unknown Agnew, that Nixon would tolerate. The south went for Nixon.

Reagan was an overt racist in his early years and even on the occasion of his first speech after the nominating convention chose Philadelphia, Mississippi, just a few miles from the murder site of three civil rights workers. ""I believe in states' rights" he said, and everyone knew full well he meant the end of civil rights enforcement.

If you need more of a straight line I could go on for hours.

[Lesleymo]

7. This is the same type of crap Glenn Beck is pushing ...

At first I misunderstood what the racially "enlightened" right wing was up to. This sentence from the Salon article says it well:

"A message not so much to black voters but to white suburbanites who want reassurance that they're not voting for a Goldwater party."

My question is, how do so many of the right-wingers get on the exact same page, message-wise? Do they have strategy meetings where they decide, "Ok, let's pretend WE were behind the civil rights movement" - ? Do they mail secret handbooks to each other?

How do they do it, and who is behind it?