Are Democrats racist?

Wandering around the conservative end of the internet, every so often I'll slam up against the phrase "the Democrat Party is the most racist!" Usually misspelled, and often in all-caps.

It's easy to refute, but you end up knocking down the same arguments, over and over. For example:

The Democrats are the Party of the Klan

Now, it's true that Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Democrat even before he set up the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan (there have been three, if you're curious). And it's also true that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican when he was first elected.

(Fun fact: Lincoln left the Republican Party at the end of his first term. Republicans are rarely aware of that: for his second term, Lincoln created the National Union Party, a coalition party made up of both Republicans and Democrats.)

But here's the thing: at that point in time, the Republican Party was liberal, and the Democratic Party was conservative. (This fact particularly angers the Teabaggers, who've been brainwashed to think that liberalism is synonymous with "evil.") And from the Civil War to about 1950, the Southern Democrats (sometimes called "Dixiecrats") were among the most conservative (and usually racist) people in America.

In 1948, though, Truman, as the Democratic candidate, put forward a very mild civil rights platform, and that was too much for the Southern Democrats: 35 of them walked out of the Democratic National Convention, and they split off into their own political party, called the States Rights Democratic Party (a.k.a. "Dixiecrats," a term which has been used ever since for hyper-conservative Southern Democrats).

The Dixiecrats ran Strom Thurmond for president, and actually managed to carry four states (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina) along with one stray electoral vote from Tennessee. (Incidentally, that, plus the 39 electoral votes drained from Truman by Progressive Party nominee Henry A. Wallace, was expected to have produced a Republican victory, which is why we have the most famous newspaper flub of all time.)

The Dixiecrats never ran another presidential candidate, and eventually the party dissolved. And following that victory, the liberal Democrats became a stronger and stronger force in the party, eventually reversing the formerly conservative platforms, and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

This same action, of course, drew the Republican Party to the right, in an effort to pick up the disillusioned Southern Democrats.

Following the 1964 Civil Rights act, LBJ famously said “I think we just lost the South,” which would prove to be remarkably prescient: in the late Sixties, Richard Nixon, with the help of his advisor Pat Buchanan, devised the "Southern Strategy," using dog-whistle racist terms (example: "states' rights" - the states would have the "right" to ignore these new civil rights laws).

In 1980, Ronald Reagan (working with Nixon's advisor Pat Buchanan) further honed the "Southern Strategy." In fact, it was another of his aides, Lee Atwater, who famously spilled the beans years later, thinking he was speaking off the record to a reporter.

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

And that's where the Republican myth of the "racist Democrats" comes from: the Dixiecrats, and the changing face of the Democratic party. Back when Democrats were the conservative party, they were, in fact, racist; in swinging to the left, they also became the party of racial equality. To the point that, yes, the Ku Klux Klan may have been founded by Democrats, but these days, while not every Republican is in the KKK, almost every Klansman votes Republican.

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Edit: (12/6/14) Corrected "North Carolina" to "South Carolina," with apologies to any North Carolinian in the audience.

"Obama Hasn't Accomplished A Damn Thing": Oh Yeah?

Proudly lifted from NEWS JUNKIE POST:

There are a few excellent resources where the victories of Change and Reform have been assembled on the internet, including the Democratic Change Update (reposted on News Junkie Post), the 244 Accomplishments of Obama, and the Things Obama Has Done page on Facebook.

While the mainstream media narrative has been dominated by right wing and Tea Party talking points, many of the fundamental changes in direction of this country have not received the attention they deserve. Now in one day, the very politicians who venomously opposed these reforms, the very people who want to take America back to the days of Bush are poised to retake the US House of Representatives. They are banking on the short attention span of voters, so share this list liberally!

Following are the "chapter headings" with categories further defined under each heading - by the bucket fulls.
And being good liberals, there are links to back up each and everyone of them.

Banking and Financial Reform
Civil Rights
Commerce, Trade and technology
Conservation
Economy
Education: College
Education: Health of Children
Employment: Jobs
Energy: Green
Energy: Old
Energy: Oil
Foreign Affairs and International Relations
Government Efficiency
Health and Wellness
Health Care Reform (See also Taxes)
Housing
Humanitarianism
Immigration
Infrastructure
Labor
Law and Justice
Medicaid/Medicare/Social Security
Military and National Security
Military Veterans and Families
National Disasters and Emergencies
National Service
Scientific and Medical Research
Space Exploration and Space Station
Taxes
Transparency and Accountability
Recovery, Progress and Change
Miscellaneous



IMPORTANT NOTICE: DEMOCRATS WHO DON'T VOTE ARE NO BETTER THAN YELLOW BLUE DOGS. IF THE CRAZIES WIN, THE ENTIRE COUNTRY LOSES. DINOS ARE TO DEMOCRATS WHAT THE TEA PARTY IS TO LOVE AND HONOR.*

VOTE FOR A DEMOCRAT NEAR YOU

IT IS YOUR PATRIOTIC DUTY

This is just my opinion and may not reflect the views of The Swash Zone. TnLib

The rage is not about health care

President Obama could have proposed a tax rebate of $10,000 and the conservatives still would have gone stark raving mad. When the Health Care Bill passed Republicans and Tea Partiers turned into a raging sea of childishness, insanity, ugliness and stupidity.

Representative John Boehner went apoplectic chanting "Hell no, you can't." Frank Rich, in a New York Times Op-ed piece, The Rage Is Not About Health Care, suggests Boehner "had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons."
In a debate with David Ploffe on ABC's "This Week," Karl Rove frothed at the mouth and went on a non-stop tirade. Such antics have become less funny and less entertaining.

Republicans have shouted "you lie" and "baby killer" in House chambers, violating every rule of decency and decorum. To steal a phrase from Joe McCarthy, Republican Congressional representatives have become Tea Party "fellow travelers."

For over a year Tea Party protests have attracted increasingly large crowds. They have grown louder, uglier, more threatening and more violent as time has passed. They have shouted racial and homophobic slurs at respected members of Congress and have thrown bricks through their offices - similar to a mini-Kristallnacht in 1938 Germany.

According to Rich, there was heated reaction when Social Security was passed in 1935 and Medicare thirty years later. "When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association."

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill...you have to look to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.... it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer...

The election of a black president and a female House speaker, the appointment of a Latino to the Supreme Court, and a gay Congressional committee chairman "would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play."

In this writer's opinion, the Tea Partiers - just like the Birchers, the patriot groups, and other extremist groups have a serious case of paranoia. And racism - despite social scientists' claims to the contrary. Maybe they should have read the liberal blogs in the early days - especially those written by southerners.

The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935.By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist (Richard) Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

In my very humble opinion the Tea Partiers and Beck and Co. are one thin hair away from being seditious. If we were a police state, as that monumental wonder Beck proclaims, everyone of those thugs would be in jail.

GOP says NO to civility

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said NO to Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine's proposal to write a joint statement condemning threats to members of Congress.

The draft text of the statement says that while Steele and Kaine disagree on the health care bill, they would "together call on elected officials of both parties to set an example of the civility we want to see in our citizenry" and ask "all Americans to respect differences of opinion, to refrain from inappropriate forms of intimidation, to reject violence and vandalism, and to scale back rhetoric that might reasonably be misinterpreted by those prone to such behavior."

Sounds civil to me.

DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse told reporters that Kaine sent the letter to Steele today and then phoned him asking the chairman to release a joint bipartisan statement "condemning the threats and acts of vandalism over the past week, calling for an end to such tactics and urging a more civil tone in our politics." "This afternoon, Chairman Steele, through staff, declined Chairman Kaine's offer," Woodhouse said.

Oops. Stonewalled again.

RNC spokesman Doug Heye whined to TPM, "Gov. Kaine had an opportunity to condemn such activities when he was sitting next to Michael Steele on the set on Meet the Press. He chose not to, and instead decided to use it as an opportunity to raise money,"

Heye added:

Obviously, a large majority of Americans - a broad coalition of Republicans, Democrats and Independent - are upset that President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid pushed through health care legislation that increases premiums and raises taxes and did so through strong-arm tactics, closed door meetings and sweetheart deals. Voters have a right to be angry. Unfortunately, some have chosen to engage in language and actions that go too far.

So that's it. The Republicans are just mad that they didn't get their way and they want to punish the outlaw Democrats. One thing for sure, the right-wing nuts have learned well from their mentors if their blog comments are any indication. SOS. SOS. SOS.

NO, that's not it. How can the party of "you lie" and "baby killer" say YES to civility? Why, they could never be uncivil again! They could not abuse traditional rules of House decorum! Worst of all, they could not encourage the wing-nuts to get down and dirty!

HELL NO, they don't want civility.