A tad racist perhaps?

Oh, Thank God! I was beginning to think all of these guys were in Oklahoma.

Well, I'd say he's no less an embarrassment to the GOP than would be Robert Byrd to The Dems, were they as a group in fact capable of embarrassment.

I think your perception "they do it worse" is a matter of perspective, doglover, and of partisanship. You oughtta look into the Dixiecrats ... or George Wallace. Both parties are staffed by that damnably unpredictable, fallible, imperfect critter called "Human" in pretty much equal proportion.

Wow what a nutcase. If he were to pop up at my door I might jsut have to test that bullet proof vest of his...

When we speed things forward to todays world, I believe that its conservatives (GOP) who still embrace racism. The only difference is, they wrap it in a prettier package.

Challenging the Racist Democrats

By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 5, 2003


Everybody knows -- but no one wants to say -- that the Democratic Party has become the party of special interest bigots and racial dividers. It runs the one-party state that controls public services in every major inner city, including the corrupt and failing school systems in which half the students -- mainly African American and Hispanic -- are denied a shot at the American dream. It is the party of race preferences which separate American citizens on the basis of skin color providing privileges to a handful of ethnic and racial groups in a nation of nearly a thousand. The Democratic Party has shown that it will go to the wall to preserve the racist laws which enforce these preferences, and to defend the racist school systems that destroy the lives of millions of children every year.

On the other side of the aisle, the Republican Party has shown itself to be tongue-tied and lame-brained when it comes to opposing this racist stain on American life. Republicans rarely mention the millions of young victims claimed by the Democrats' racist school policies every year. They are too cowardly to openly challenge race preferences that constitute a true American apartheid. Consequently, for nearly a decade it has been left to one man and those he inspires to take on these injustices and he is doing so again in the upcoming California recall election.

Ward Connerly has placed Proposition 54 - - the Racial Privacy Initiative -- on the October California ballot. The new law would bar the government from inquiring into a citizen's racial identity. The Constitution does not mention race or use the words "black" and "white" to describe its citizens. The census was devised by the founders to set the number of congressional districts, not to balkanize America into racial categories. Democrats have turned it into a system to define Americans by skin color. Every Democrat legislator and every so-called "liberal" spokesperson is opposed to Connerly's proposition because it would threaten their apartheid programs. The time has come to challenge this system and set Americans -- particularly African and Hispanic Americans who its prime victims -- free.

[The following editorial appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 4]:

The Color of California

As if the unprecedented effort to recall California Governor Gray Davis isn't enough excitement for one special election, the campaign promises some racial fireworks as well.

Sharing ballot space on October 7 with Mr. Davis's would-be successors will be Proposition 54, also known as the Racial Privacy Initiative. The measure prohibits state and local government entities from collecting and using racial data. It reads, in part: "The state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment." For champions of identity politics, and the media are certainly among them, these are fighting words.

The main proponent of Prop. 54 is Ward Connerly, the University of California Regent behind the state's successful Prop. 209, which banned public-sector racial discrimination in 1996 and prompted copycat initiatives elsewhere in the country, most recently in Michigan.

Mr. Connerly has said the goal of his current initiative is to get the state government "out of the racial classification business" and move us one step closer to a colorblind government. The backers of Prop. 54, he says, "seek a California that is free from government racism and race-conscious decision making."

That sounds like a core American aspiration, or at least it was until racial preferences became a political industry. Mr. Connerly can take comfort in the fact that many of his current critics -- educators, civil rights groups, Democratic public officials, liberal journalists -- also predicted catastrophe if Prop. 209 passed. They claimed, for instance, that minority enrollment at state
universities would plummet without racial preferences. It didn't happen. Both minority enrollment and, more importantly, minority graduation rates, have increased.

Now these same folks are claiming that if Californians aren't forced to check off some hyphenated-American box on a government form, medical research will suffer and anti-discrimination laws will go unenforced.

Not true. The Racial Privacy Initiative makes exceptions for data collection in both areas. If black mothers in Oakland are suffering uniquely high infant-mortality rates, nothing in Mr. Connerly's measure would prevent a proper response. Nor would it have any bearing on the large body of federal law -- the Voting Rights Act or the No Child Left Behind Act -- that require the collection
of racial data for enforcement purposes.

Some of our friends (scholars James Q. Wilson and John McWhorter) object to Prop. 54 on the grounds that racial statistics are essential to social scientists like themselves. They have a valid point that statistics showing racial progress can rebut political demagogues.

But that must be measured against the damage done by explicit state endorsement of racial categorization. As for the statistics, Prop. 54 affects only state entities. Reams of racial data would continue to flow from federal agencies -- like the Census Bureau and the Education Department -- or any nongovernment sources in California wishing to provide such information.

It is true that these limitations make Mr. Connerly's crusade largely symbolic. Still, the reaffirmation by American voters that racial distinctions should be irrelevant to government policy would be welcome right about now. All the more so given the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold racial discrimination at the University of Michigan. The decision effectively requires the
nation to view itself (at least for another 25 years) through a racial prism that many Americans already find obsolete. In the name of "diversity," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has cast her lot with the grievance groups who profit from racial balkanization.

As opposed to legal and business elites, average Americans are showing an increasing uneasiness with traditional racial categories. The demographic trends are illustrative. According to Joel Kotkin of Pepperdine University, nearly a third of second-generation Asians and Hispanics -- the largest ethnic minority -- marry out of their ethnic group.

In 1997, one in seven babies born in California were to parents of different races. The 2000 Census offered 63 different ways to self-identify and found that 40% of people under 25 belong to a racial or ethnic category other than "non-Hispanic white." What box does Tiger Woods check, and why should he have to check one?

A nonpartisan Field Poll released last month shows California voters supporting Prop. 54 by 50% to 29%, though it is hard to know how its presence on the Gray Davis recall ballot will affect it. Mr. Davis opposes it, and people who think he's been a splendid governor tend to be Prop. 54's strongest opponents.

It seems to us that there's little danger from a public endorsement of a proposition that seeks to make America less racially self-conscious. The opposite danger is far more troublesome, especially as we become a more racially polyglot nation. Down the path of the Supreme Court's recent Michigan decision lies a nation divided by race, not united in common principle.

Prop. 54's success would be a fitting rebuke to the Supreme Court (all the more potent because it would come from the nation's largest and most racially diverse state) and a public reaffirmation of the Constitution's colorblind commitment to equal protection under the law.

The significance of Carol Moseley Braun

January 18, 2004

Carol Moseley Braun, who ended her presidential campaign this week, is frequently and accurately described as the only African-American woman ever to serve in the United States Senate.

But, assiduous newsreader though I am, I have never seen her identified by the following descriptor, which in addition to being equally accurate is vastly more remarkable:

Carol Moseley Braun is the only African-American Democrat ever to serve in the United States Senate.

Isn't that really astonishing? A political party that for the past seventy years has claimed the allegiance of as many as ninety per cent of the black voters of this country has elected precisely one of them to the Senate. And the only way Moseley Braun won was by challenging and defeating the Illinois Democratic Party's anointed and endorsed candidate - incumbent Senator Alan J. Dixon in 1992.

I paused in mid column just now and did some rough math, which suggests that somewhere between a quarter and a third of all Democrats are African-Americans. So if we applied the concept of affirmative action quotas to the Democratic Senate membership, there should be approximately twelve black Democratic Senators in the current Congress. But in fact, there are none. There weren't any in the last Congress either, or the one before that. Except for Moseley Braun's single six-year term, there have never been any black Democratic Senators.

There have been three black Republican Senators: Hiram Revels, Blanche Kelso Bruce and Edward Brooke.

Oh, Democrats will let African-Americans serve in the House of Representatives, but only after carefully carving out black-majority, which is to say segregated, districts for them. Well, you can't expect white Democrats to vote for one of them, can you?

So the Democratic Party's policy, throughout the modern, post-World War II era has been to create separate-but-equal congressional districts. Keep blacks in the ghetto - the urban plantation. The handful of African-American Republican members of Congress, by contrast, have come from suburban and rural areas, where they have been, often enthusiastically, supported by Republican voters. Moreover, whenever the Republican Party has attempted to run black candidates in black areas, they lose overwhelmingly, and this pattern holds for other offices, too.

White Republicans have no problem whatsoever voting for black Republicans, when they can find one to vote for. Black Democrats won't vote for a black Republican. White Democrats won't vote for a black Democrat. Which is the racist party?

Yet when President Bush laid a wreath at the tomb of Martin Luther King this week, a group of several hundred demonstrators booed him. The demonstration itself is not important - any liberal organization that can't produce on a given occasion five hundred or so sign-waving demonstrators just isn't trying. But the fact that such an event has credibility, particularly with many African-Americans, is important, and it is through such public relations techniques that the animus of blacks toward Republicans continues, generation after generation.

When, the next day, the President appointed Charles Pickering to a seat on the Federal Appeals Court, leading Democrats trotted out their invective again, feeding the myth of Republican racism by charging, wholly irresponsibly, that Pickering is a bigot - this on the unimpeachable evidence that he is a Mississippi Republican (as were, by the way former Senators Revels and Bruce). The Pickering appointment, Vermont's Howard Dean sneered, was the "ultimate hypocrisy" by Bush.

Nonsense. The ultimate hypocrisy is that the Democratic Party pretends to be the party of civil rights. It is not, to which the lonely career of Carol Moseley Braun stands as the perfect rule-proving exception.

If Democrats are eager to play the race card against white, particularly southern white, Republicans, they positively slam the card down on the table when it comes to black Republicans. Before Clarence Thomas, there was Massachusetts' Brooke, who was defeated in his bid for a third Senate term in a vicious, slanderous, politics-of- personal destruction campaign run by the Kennedys for the benefit of Paul Tsongas in 1978.

Today, Colin Powell is insulted as a "house nigger," California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown's nomination to the Federal bench is filibustered by the same hypocrites who claim Pickering is a racist and even Condoleezza Rice is pilloried for the apostasy of having strayed off the plantation and joined the Republicans.

The massahs were Democrats. The whip-toting overseers were Democrats. The Klansmen were Democrats. The filibusterers of the Civil Rights bills in the 1960's were Democrats. The liberals whose welfare-state policies destroyed families in post- Great Society inner cities were Democrats. That such a party gets to claim the allegiance of so many African-American voters is one of the great con jobs of all time.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE DIXIECRATS
By Frances Rice: Contributor to LHI

For decades the Democratic Party has tried to hide its racist past by throwing up a smoke screen using the "Dixiecrat" mantra. Well, its time to clear away the smoke and look at the racist Democrats behind the smoke screen. It is an article of faith for Democratic Party activists and their liberal university professor supporters that all of the anti-black Southern Democrats found a home in the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party gladly got rid of them based on principle. History shows that the Democratic Party's "article of faith" is untrue.

The Dixiecrats were a group of Southern Democrats who, in the 1948 national election, ran a third party ticket that supported continued racial segregation. Even so, they continued to consider themselves to be Democrats for all local and state elections, as well as for all future national elections. Since the Republican Party was founded as the anti-slavery party, Southern Democrats declared that they would rather vote for a "yellow dog" than vote for a Republican.

With very few exceptions, the Dixiecrats and their supporters continue their political careers as Democrats today. The most notable examples are Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia who is well known for having been a "Keagle" in the Ku Klux Klan, and Democratic Senator Ernest Hollings who put up the Confederate flag over the state capitol when he was the governor of South Carolina.

Recently, Senator Dodd praised Senator Byrd as someone who would have been "a great senator for any moment," including the Civil War. Democrats who denounced Senator Trent Lott for his remarks about Senator Strom Thurmond have remained silent about Senator Dodd's racist remarks. Mr. Thurmond was never a member of the Klan and he defended blacks against the poll tax and lynching. If Mr. Byrd and Mr. Thurmond were alive during the Civil War and Byrd had his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.

Yes, it's true that Democratic President Harry S. Truman brought an end to racial segregation in the military, but he did so because Republicans pressed the issue. Acting as typical racist Democrats, President Truman and President Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected anti-lynching laws and efforts to establish a permanent Civil Rights Commission. After President Roosevelt received the vote of blacks who were swayed by the "New Deal" government handout program, he banned black newspapers from the military shortly after taking office because he was convinced the newspapers were communists.

The South did not begin the switch to the Republican Party until the late 1970s. Georgia did not switch until 2002. Southern Democrats who switched to the Republican Party did so because they got over their dislike for the Republican Party as the anti-slavery Party and adopted the Republican Party's core values: lower taxes, limited government, personal responsibility and equal opportunities for all Americans. In addition to championing equality of opportunity for all, the Republican Party opposes the soft bigotry of low expectations championed by the Democratic Party.

Democrats cause great harm to the black community, yet blacks vote overwhelmingly for Democrats because blacks believe that the Democratic Party has been historically the friend of Civil Rights and the party of black voters. The book entitled Unfounded Loyalty: An in-depth look into the love affair between blacks and the Democrats by Dr. Wayne Perryman documents that the opposite has been true since the pre-Civil War period. It is an eye opener to those who have voted against their own best interests and compromised their cultural Christian values for party loyalty.

Well, I'd say he's no less an embarrassment to the GOP than would be Robert Byrd to The Dems, were they as a group in fact capable of embarrassment.

This post by Asherman is probably the finest I have ever seen on A2K.