-By Warner Todd Huston
To illustrate an article about racism in the Republican Party, Politico dipped into American history and oddly dug up a photo of Democrat segregationist George Wallace.
Claiming that “the seeds of America’s dysfunction were planted 50 years ago,” and going on to say that “the ugly politics of race had everything to do with it,” Doug McAdam and Karen Kloos indulged the decades old liberal claim that the political parties have somehow switched places from 50 years ago. Now the GOP is the racist party and the Democrats are the accepting ones, the authors contend.
Despite that George Wallace was an unreconstructed Democrat segregationist and so were his followers, Politico tars the GOP with the racists and Dixiecrats of the 1960s.
“In fact, it’s impossible to understand the modern Republican Party without understanding the white backlash of the 1960s,” Politico writes. “One of the central sources of continuity linking the Republican Party that emerged under Nixon in the late ’60s and early ’70s with the GOP of today is a sustained politics of racial reaction.”
The GOP became a party fueled by a hate of “the assertiveness of black protesters,” the Politico writers insisted.
The pair concludes that the GOP is an “extreme” party filled with white racists and that the Democrats are just your average American political party.
So, to prove its claim that the Republican Party is racist, the news outlet used a photo of the Democrat racemonger George Wallace to illustrate its story.
The photo is one of the more famous photos showing Wallace standing before schoolhouse doors refusing to allow any African Americans to attend school in is native Alabama. The life long Democrat was never a Republican.
It was a move that Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds said was “historyfail.”
This isn’t the first Internet outlet to want to remake George Wallace into a Republican. Only but a few weeks ago Salon.com tried the same trick linking the racist Wallace to Ronald Reagan and claiming that racism is how “Republicans win elections.”
So, why did Politico do this? Surely they know that George Wallace is a Democrat, don’t they? Yes, they do. But this isn’t about facts, or history, or reality. This is about politics. Politico’s goal is not to give useful, true political or historical analysis. It is about helping Democrats in the 2014 midterms.
After all it is no accident that the election is only a month away after Politico publishes a story assuring America that all Republicans are racists. It’s no accident at all.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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