Haley Barbour’s Ridiculous Story


Eugene Robinson latest column is Haley Barbour’s Ridiculous Story.

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. [Emphasis added by me.]

I know a few people who are old enough to know better, but who would probably fall for Barbour’s story.  Then we have the people who are too young to know better.

I am one who is old enough to know better.  I appreciate Eugene Robinson’s laying out the time line to make it perfectly clear what a load of bull Barbour’s claims are. Without this reminder even I might be tempted to give Barbour credit for one or two words of truth in his perverted story.

If the mainstream media actually start selling this revisionism, then you know the world has gone mad.  Faux Noise doesn’t count because you know this propaganda is right up their alley.

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