History Rewritten Again

Republicans are at it again, rewriting inconvenient truths to serve their larger national ambitions. This time it is Mississippi's GOP governor Haley Barbour(http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/09/02/haley_barbour_race_history/index.html?source=rss&aim=/politics/war_room) who wants to avoid being tagged with any of the Southern strategy history as he prepares to take on the first black president. History is clear in showing that LBJ and the Great Society support for the civil rights movement realigned the political landscape in America. The party that had once tacitly supported segregation and opposed attempts at true equality for Blacks, at least in the South, was now aligning with the civil rights movement and as LBJ purportedly said in 64, "losing the South for a generation." Barbour wants to erase this history and rewrite the move of Dixieland from democrats to Republicans as completely unrelated to White resentment at the improving conditions of Blacks across America. From the birth of the Republican Party and its support for Abolition and then Reconstruction, the South was firmly Democratic, no matter the mood of the country. That all changed with LBJ and support for Barry Goldwater as the anti-affirmative action candidate. Ever since, the GOP has been building its base on latent racism and attacks on affirmative action and any policies that were perceived to hurt White, Christian America. While Obama had some surprising victories in the new South, that racism continues to be at the heart of so much Republican campaigning. Political expediency has stepped in and it will be interesting to see if the mainstream media allows Barbour to tell his tale without any fact checking and challenge. Recent history tells us he just might get away with it ...