-By Michael Zak
Today, Steve Kornacki, news editor at Salon, published a lengthy denounciation of the Republican Party, and of Rush Limbaugh specifically, on the subject of civil rights The title of the article is Dittoheads, race and denial. Kornacki makes a pretense of setting the record straight about the civil rights movement, but instead he imparts his own lefty spin. Rather than go through the article point by point, I’ll let just a few observations serve to illustrate the overall duplicity.
The very image atop his article is a lie. It portrays a Republican, Rush Limbaugh, on the Confederate flag despite the fact that the Confederates were Democrats.
Hey, Steve! How about speaking some Truth to Power? Your article should have admitted the fact that the Confederates were Democrats. You could also admit the fact that you, as a Democrat, are a member of the Party of Slavery, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan.
The historical argument he makes is based on another lie:
“When Rutherford B. Hayes, convinced that these whites would be more cooperative if they were left to control their own affairs, ended Reconstruction in 1877, one Republican state government after another fell.”
This is false. In fact, by 1877, Reconstruction had already ended — that is, Democrats were back in charge — in eight of the eleven former Confederate states. Only in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were there Republican governors. Their administrations fell to Democrat mobs when President Hayes agreed to withdraw soldiers who had been guarding the Capitol buildings in those three states. Of course, if Samuel Tilden had been president, this would have happened anyway.
Also, despite decades of Democrat distortions, the true hero of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was not Lyndon Johnson, but a Republican Senator, Everett Dirksen. Just as importantly, the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not appear out of thin air. It was based on the GOP’s 1960 Civil Rights Act, which was based on the GOP’s 1957 Civil Rights Act, which was based on the GOP’s 1875 Civil Rights Act.
To quote page 7 of my history of the GOP, Back to Basics for the Republican Party: “Republicans owe their muddled message and inability to battle the Democrats effectively to their own ignorance about the Reconstruction era.” We cannot win a debate by accepting Democrat lies as the truth. Knowledge is Power!
The theme of Back to Basics for the Republican Party and my www.grandoldpartisan.com blog is that Republicans would benefit tremendously from appreciating the heritage of our Grand Old Party. It’s a message I’ve been preaching ever since writing the book.
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Michael Zak is a popular speaker to Republican organizations around the nation, showing office-holders and candidates and activists how they would benefit tremendously from appreciating the heritage of our Grand Old Party. Back to Basics for the Republican Party is his acclaimed history of the GOP, cited by Clarence Thomas in a Supreme Court decision. His Grand Old Partisan blog celebrates more than fifteen decades of Republican heroes and heroics. See www.RepublicanBasics.com for more information.