Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [103]
Sean knows very well that it was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that ended segregation. He knows this because he lived in Newt Gingrich’s ass from 1994 to 1998, so Sean had to have heard it when Newt declared, “It was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that ended segregation.” This was in Newt’s historic speech to the House when he first took the gavel as Speaker.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he is said to have turned to an aide and remarked, “We have just lost the South for a generation.” The Republican Party became the home to Southern bigots and still is today.
While the Democratic Party lost the South that year, they did gain my dad. A lifelong Republican who voted for Herbert Hoover and every GOP presidential candidate through Nixon, Dad switched parties in 1964 because the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, had voted against the Civil Rights Act. Dad, a card-carrying member of the NAACP, always told us that Jews couldn’t be against civil rights. He never voted Republican again.
Five weeks before Thurmond’s birthday party, Georgia’s Democratic Governor Roy Barnes lost his race for reelection. As governor, Barnes had reduced the size of the Confederate emblem on the state flag, and his opponent Sonny Perdue seized on it as an issue. One hundred and eighty thousand more rural white voters turned out in 2002 than had in 1998. I spoke with Max Cleland, who, in addition to being pictured with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, was buried by the racist avalanche in Georgia, and lost his Senate reelection bid. Here’s how Cleland described it:
Basically, when Roy Barnes changed the flag, that was it. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And what happened was, Ralph Reed then took the hatchet and buried us. He took the hatchet that Roy Barnes gave him, by push-polling in the Republican suburbs, and in South Georgia, this question: The Democrats are trying to take away Georgia’s culture. And it came off the charts, especially with white males. . . . And it quickly became a racial issue. And in the South, if all politics are local, all politics are racial in the South.
In January 2003, I gave one of my enormously popular corporate speeches to the South Carolina Bar Association in Charleston, where I learned that the Confederate flag is still a huge issue in the Palmetto State. That same day, I heard someone on Fox News call John Walker Lindh a traitor—which he was. He was a traitor because he fought against soldiers wearing the uniform of the United States of America. Terrible traitor.
You know who were the worst traitors in the history of our country? The Confederates. They took up arms against soldiers wearing the uniform of the United States of America. But they were much, much worse than John Walker Lindh. Because they killed hundreds of thousands of American troops. And for what cause? So they could whip and torture black people. Why would anyone want to put up a flag honoring that?
To give you some idea of just how evil and anti-American the Confederates were, here’s a rough comparison between the American deaths caused by the Confederates and those caused by the most evil of our enemies today.
Osama bin Laden
3,000
Saddam Hussein
512
Jefferson Davis
360,000
How could you possibly claim to be against traitors like John Walker Lindh, yet want to publicly display the battle flag of the most murderous, anti-American betrayers in history? No offense to my Southern readers and fans, but I don’t get it.
I was talking to a Southerner about this the other day, and he said, “The Nazis were bad. But we drive around in Volkswagens.”
I said, “Yeah, but we don’t put a Volkswagen on top of the state capitol.”
Don’t get me wrong. Republicans aren’t just racist in the South. Take California, where earlier this year, the highest-ranking