And the Ku Klux Klan Is the New NAACP
Can you tell that Fox News now runs the Wall Street Journal?
The GOP Is the Party of Civil RightsJohn McCain is scheduled to address the NAACP’s annual convention in Cincinnati, Ohio today. Although he is unlikely to gain many black votes this year, he should use the occasion to increase Republican efforts to reach out to African-Americans. He can start by setting the record straight on the records of the two parties on race.
Everyone knows this, but it’s worth repeating: The Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln and was established in 1854 to block the expansion of slavery. The Democratic Party was the party of slavery: Its two founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, owned large numbers of slaves, and every party platform before the Civil War defended the institution unequivocally.
The article then depends on rather impressively laughable tour of historical cherry-picking to bring it up to date: Republicans McKinley and Harding tried to pass anti-lynching laws which were rebuked by Southern Democrats; Roosevelt & Truman were weak on civil rights, and Johnson only passed strong civil rights laws because Republicans were behind it all–but Nixon was a bigger civil rights champion than Johnson. Ergo, McCain is the new Lincoln and Democrats are all racists.
But really, the foundation, the heart and soul of this claim, and not just in this article, is the whole Lincoln thing–as if today’s Republican Party in any way, shape, or form resembles what Lincoln built more than a century and a half ago. It reminds me of a joke about a man who greatly valued his antique sword; when a friend asked him why it looks so new, the man explained that the hilt wore out and broke apart, so he had it replaced, and that the blade wore down too much, so he had that replaced as well. But it still occupied the same space as the old sword. That’s the Republican Party: it still occupies the same name as the original, but all the parts have been replaced. It is no longer the same institution. Republicans claiming ownership of civil rights because Lincoln ended slavery is like Drew Barrymore claiming she deserves an Oscar for her grandfather’s performances, or like Italy claiming it runs the world because of the might of the Holy Roman Empire.
The racism of southern Democrats the article refers to was inherited by the Republican Party several generations back. Like the Earth’s magnetic pole migrating between north and south over time, progressives and conservatives likewise find new homes in different parties. Ronald Reagan said himself that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left him. While Republicans can claim the name of the party Lincoln built, Democrats now preserve its spirit.
Lincoln of course deserves credit for what he did, but the modern Republican Party claiming that it is a champion of civil rights is so patently absurd, so starkly in contrast to their current policies and programs, that it deserves nothing less than to be laughed off the stage in a definitive display of mock and scorn.
Lincoln as a Republican only makes sense when you realize that he was an attorney for the rail road companies. The Republican business interest wanted free contract and high tarrifs, the South, obviously wanted the opposite. Then, as now, they were plenty good at masking their business interest behind a moral issue.
During the civil war, and the Republicans first tour of power, the corporation was created. Corporations, as an ownership collective, tilted the bargaining playing field that free contract takes place on, in favor of the Rich. From then on, the Republican party was the party undermining the meaning of the American revolution: empowerment of the people.
It took a century for things to come full circle, but eventually, wealthy northerners and bigoted southerners realized they had much in common. “Camp down races, all day long, do da, do da, all the do dah day.”
Fortunately for Americans, Blacks are the least gullible people to Republicans slick salesmanship.
Um… worth noting is that the WSJ has ALWAYS been virulently pro-Republican on the editorial pages, and this isn’t an “article”; it’s an opinion column.
I’m sure they’re going to get worse with NewsCorp owning them, but it’s only relative to being pretty pathetic right now.
My own gig is a great example. They have written some pretty good articles about the problems in the FAA and pointed to the leadership of the agency as a root cause. The articles touch on, but don’t really specifically blame, the change in philosophy from safety-regulator to corporate-profits-enabler. (Said philosophy stems, of course, from the nitwits in the West Wing of the White House.)
But on the editorial pages? They never put two and two together and get four; instead they get “government regulation is bad, small government, screw regulation, bureaucracy sucks, government employees suck, contract it all off to private companies who will do more work in a better way for less money”.
So yeah, the very premise of the article- that the Republicans are the ones who really care about civil rights- is ridiculous. (That premise, after all, is why the Democratic Party has nominated a black dude, while the Republicans have nominated a 70-something rich white guy.)
And in today’s day and age, the Republican Party would have been VEHEMENTLY against Lincoln. They argue “states’ rights” and would have declared that the federal government had no right to mess around with what the Southern states had been managing with just fine for years.
But that doesn’t matter to the WSJ’s op-ed writers. The biggest difference between the WSJ and Fox, up until now, is that the WSJ actually managed to do a decent job of their news operation being about NEWS, instead of opinion. Fox, on the other hand, has thrown any pretense of impartiality to the wind.
Hopefully the WSJ doesn’t do that, but I’m not that optimistic about it.
Fox News and the New York Post aren’t engaged in News. What they do could be called political pornography.
As a publisher, Murdock knows the value of pornography. The advantage of political pornography over sexual pornography is one is the former is largely unregulated and the later is highly regulated.