Haley Barbour’s Ridiculous Story
Posted on Sep 6, 2010
By Eugene Robinson
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who may seek the Republican nomination for president, is trying to sell the biggest load of revisionist nonsense about race, politics and the South that I’ve ever heard. Ever.
He has the gall to try to portray Southern Republicans as having been enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement all along. I can’t decide whether this exercise in rewriting history should be described as cynical or sinister. Whichever it is, the record has to be set straight.
In a recent interview with Human Events, a conservative magazine and website, Barbour gave his version of how the South, once a Democratic stronghold, became a Republican bastion. The 62-year-old Barbour claimed that it was “my generation” that led the switch: “my generation, who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college—never thought twice about it.”
The “old Democrats” fought integration tooth and nail, Barbour said, but “by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn’t gonna be that way anymore. And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.”
Not a word of this is true.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who may seek the Republican nomination for president, is trying to sell the biggest load of revisionist nonsense about race, politics and the South that I’ve ever heard. Ever.
He has the gall to try to portray Southern Republicans as having been enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement all along. I can’t decide whether this exercise in rewriting history should be described as cynical or sinister. Whichever it is, the record has to be set straight.
In a recent interview with Human Events, a conservative magazine and website, Barbour gave his version of how the South, once a Democratic stronghold, became a Republican bastion. The 62-year-old Barbour claimed that it was “my generation” that led the switch: “my generation, who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college—never thought twice about it.”
The “old Democrats” fought integration tooth and nail, Barbour said, but “by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn’t gonna be that way anymore. And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.”
Not a word of this is true.
Shorter to read the remainder than to see/listen. We hope.
3 comments:
Standard wingnut practice: Robert Byrd was in the Klan, yadda yadda.
Followed by the usual rebuttal, Nixon's Southern Strategy, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove running the SS 24-7 at FAUX Nooze, and around and around we go.
The intent of this crap isn't to establish any facts of course, it's just to give the teabaggers something to shout about.
~
As it has become obvious that Republicans will not pay a price for diverging from reality and truth, their lies have been destined to become more and more blatant.
Well if you don't pay any price for making shit up, why wouldn't you. A forum which I used to frequent had this meme well established about how the Republicans were the real Civil Rights strugglers. They truly believed their own bullshit so strongly that one couldn't make a dent in it.
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