Revising History by Bob Herbert

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What an amazing bunch of crock this new article by Bob Herbert is.  Full of revisionist history, half-truths and innuendo’s.

The G.O.P. has spent the last 40 years insulting, disenfranchising and otherwise stomping on the interests of black Americans. Last week, the residents of Washington, D.C., with its majority black population, came remarkably close to realizing a goal they have sought for decades — a voting member of Congress to represent them.

A majority in Congress favored the move, and the House had already approved it. But the Republican minority in the Senate — with the enthusiastic support of President Bush — rose up on Tuesday and said: “No way, baby.”

At least 57 senators favored the bill, a solid majority. But the Republicans prevented a key motion on the measure from receiving the 60 votes necessary to move it forward in the Senate. The bill died.

Your damn right the bill died, as it should have seeing as how the Constitution clearly states that representation will be apportioned among the states.  DC is NOT a State.  I mean this is high school civics kind of stuff but I’m sure Herbert knows this.  He knows the Constitution needs to be amended to allow DC to get representation but he ignores it and instead attempts to gin up some outrage all in the cause of smacktalking the GOP.

At the same time that the Republicans were killing Congressional representation for D.C. residents, the major G.O.P. candidates for president were offering a collective slap in the face to black voters nationally by refusing to participate in a long-scheduled, nationally televised debate focusing on issues important to minorities.

The radio and television personality Tavis Smiley worked for a year to have a pair of these debates televised on PBS, one for the Democratic candidates and the other for the Republicans. The Democratic debate was held in June, and all the major candidates participated.

The Republican debate is scheduled for Thursday. But Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson have all told Mr. Smiley: “No way, baby.”

They won’t be there. They can’t be bothered debating issues that might be of interest to black Americans. After all, they’re Republicans.

Oh really?  So the Democrats showed up for this debate then?

the top Democratic presidential contenders pulled out of a debate sponsored by Fox News.  Though the debate was co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, whose 43 members are all Democrats, netroots activists made it clear that they did not want Democrats to participate.

This was also a "long scheduled" and "nationally televised" debate which was to focus on issues important to minority voters.  The Democrats never showed up.  No calls for their heads from Herbert here because they had "real" reasons not to show up.  The Republicans did not apparently.  Just some good ole’ boys who hate dem some blacks.

Sigh….

Republicans improperly threw black voters off the rolls in Florida in the contested presidential election of 2000, and sent Florida state troopers into the homes of black voters to intimidate them in 2004.

Oh come on, now he spins myth as fact:

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigated over a six-month period beginning in January of 2001. Its 200-page majority report, "Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election," excoriates Florida’s election officials for various acts of misfeasance. But the conclusions drawn by the report often bore little relationship to the facts contained therein. And media descriptions of the report did little to dispel the widespread belief among the black electorate that blacks had been systematically targeted for harassment, intimidation and disenfranchisement.

Of course, very few actually read the report. But the handful that did (especially the incisive dissent authored by Commissioners Abigail Thernstrom and Russell Redenbaugh) discovered the astonishing mendacity underlying the myth.

There’s absolutely no evidence that a single person was intimidated, harassed, or prevented from voting by Florida law enforcement. Despite claims of rampant police intimidation and harassment, the only evidence of law-enforcement "misconduct" consisted of just two witnesses who described their perceptions regarding the actions of the Florida Highway Patrol. One of these witnesses testified that he thought it was "unusual" to see an empty patrol car parked outside a polling place. There was no evidence that sight of the vehicle somehow intimidated the witness or any other voters from casting ballots. There was no evidence that the erstwhile occupant of the vehicle harassed voters. There was no evidence that the empty vehicle was there for the purpose of somehow disenfranchising anyone assigned to vote at that location.

The second witness had filed a highly publicized complaint with the NAACP regarding a police motor-vehicle checkpoint. In the hysterical recount period following the election the complaint took on a life of its own and apparently became part of the basis for the legend that legions of cops were harassing thousands of black voters throughout Florida.

The evidence, however, shows that the checkpoint in question was two miles from the polling place. Moreover, it was not even on the same road as the polling facility. During the checkpoint’s approximately ninety minutes of operation, citations for faulty equipment were issued to 16 individuals, 12 of whom were white. The uncontroverted evidence shows that no one was delayed or prohibited from voting due to the lone checkpoint.

And:

John Lott, an economist and statistician from the Yale Law School now with the American Enterprise Institute, studied spoilage rates in Florida by county in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 presidential elections and compared them with demographic changes in county populations. He concluded that "the percent of voters in different race or ethnic categories is never statistically related to ballot spoilage."

Lott found that among the 25 Florida counties with the greatest rate of vote spoilage, 24 had Democratic election officers in charge of counting the votes. He concluded that "having Democratic officials in charge [of county elections] increases ballot spoilage rates significantly, but the effect is stronger when that official is an African-American."

Finally Herbert ends his dishonest editorial with this sentence:

Blacks have been remarkably quiet about this sustained mistreatment by the Republican Party, which says a great deal about the quality of black leadership in the U.S. It’s time for that passive, masochistic posture to end.

Sustained mistreatment of blacks by the Republican party.  Riiiiight.  Here is Deroy Murdoch at the National Review: (h/t Gateway Pundit)

Republicans also have supported legislation favorable to blacks, often against intense Democratic headwinds:

In 1865, Congressional Republicans unanimously backed the 13th Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional. Among Democrats, 63 percent of senators and 78 percent of House members voted: "No."

In 1866, 94 percent of GOP senators and 96 percent of GOP House members approved the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing all Americans equal protection of the law. Every congressional Democrat voted: "No."

February 28, 1871: The GOP Congress passed the Enforcement Act, giving black voters federal protection.

February 8, 1894: Democratic President Grover Cleveland and a Democratic Congress repealed the GOP’s Enforcement Act, denying black voters federal protection.

January 26, 1922: The U.S. House adopted Rep. Leonidas Dyer’s (R., Mo.) bill making lynching a federal crime. Filibustering Senate Democrats killed the measure.

May 17, 1954: As chief justice, former three-term governor Earl Warren (R., Calif.) led the U.S. Supreme Court’s desegregation of government schools via the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. GOP President Dwight Eisenhower’s Justice Department argued for Topeka, Kansas’s black school children. Democrat John W. Davis, who lost a presidential bid to incumbent Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924, defended "separate but equal" classrooms.

September 24, 1957: Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to desegregate Little Rock’s government schools over the strenuous resistance of Governor Orval Faubus (D., Ark.).

May 6, 1960: Eisenhower signs the GOP’s 1960 Civil Rights Act after it survived a five-day, five-hour filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats.

July 2, 1964: Democratic President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former Klansman Robert Byrd’s 14-hour filibuster and the votes of 22 other Senate Democrats (including Tennessee’s Al Gore, Sr.) failed to scuttle the measure. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen rallied 26 GOP senators and 44 Democrats to invoke cloture and allow the bill’s passage. According to John Fonte in the January 9, 2003, National Review, 82 percent of Republicans so voted, versus only 66 percent of Democrats.

True, Senator Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) opposed this bill the very year he became the GOP’s presidential standard-bearer. However, Goldwater supported the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts and called for integrating Arizona’s National Guard two years before Truman desegregated the military. Goldwater feared the 1964 Act would limit freedom of association in the private sector, a controversial but principled libertarian objection rooted in the First Amendment rather than racial hatred.

June 29, 1982: President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Republican party also is the home of numerous "firsts." Among them:

Until 1935, every black federal legislator was Republican. America’s first black U.S. Representative, South Carolina’s Joseph Rainey, and our first black senator, Mississippi’s Hiram Revels, both reached Capitol Hill in 1870. On December 9, 1872, Louisiana Republican Pinckney Benton Stewart "P.B.S." Pinchback became America’s first black governor.

August 8, 1878: GOP supply-siders may hate to admit it, but America’s first black Collector of Internal Revenue was former U.S. Rep. James Rapier (R., Ala.).

October 16, 1901: GOP President Theodore Roosevelt invited to the White House as its first black dinner guest Republican educator Booker T. Washington. The pro-Democrat Richmond Times newspaper warned that consequently, "White women may receive attentions from Negro men." As Toni Marshall wrote in the November 9, 1995, Washington Times, when Roosevelt sought reelection in 1904, Democrats produced a button that showed their presidential nominee, Alton Parker, beside a white couple while Roosevelt posed with a white bride and black groom. The button read: "The Choice Is Yours."

GOP presidents Gerald Ford in 1975 and Ronald Reagan in 1982 promoted Daniel James and Roscoe Robinson to become, respectively, the Air Force’s and Army’s first black four-star generals.

November 2, 1983: President Reagan established Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday, the first such honor for a black American.

President Reagan named Colin Powell America’s first black national-security adviser while GOP President George W. Bush appointed him our first black secretary of state.

President G.W. Bush named Condoleezza Rice America’s first black female NSC chief, then our second (consecutive) black secretary of State. Just last month, one-time Klansman Robert Byrd and other Senate Democrats stalled Rice’s confirmation for a week. Amid unanimous GOP support, 12 Democrats and Vermont Independent James Jeffords opposed Rice — the most "No" votes for a State designee since 14 senators frowned on Henry Clay in 1825.

"The first Republican I knew was my father, and he is still the Republican I most admire," Rice has said. "He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I."

Herbert, as usual, conveniently forgets all these facts and the fact that southern segregationists were almost all Democrats. 

Surprised?  Well how can you be.  Bob Herbert has to be one of the biggest racists writing in any  of the newspaper across the land.

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Interesting how two constitutional scholars can disagree on this issue. You and Kenneth W. Starr.

Just who do you think you are kidding? Do you think your readers are so stupid as to not understand that the MODERN Republican party is built on the foundation of the Southern Democrats who left the Democratic party, starting in the sixties, because the Democrats embraced civil rights?

Everyone, I presume, knows perfectly well that the Democratic party was the party of Southern segregation, and the Republicans were the party of Lincoln. Until the Dems embraced civil rights, and the southern whites moved to the GOP.

This is just so mind-numbingly dishonest of you.

But maybe you can find some study from the American Enterprise Institute that could argue that somehow up is down, or black is white. They pretty good at that…

What an idiotic argument. So basically your saying that the Republican party was the party of freedom and desegregation and that party was the party the racist democrats chose to go to when civil right movement started….wtf!

Why in the world would racists go to a party that had been the exact opposite of what they believed in for 150 years?

Wow….

Perhaps KOS would be better suited for someone with so few braincells.

It’s so amazing that in addition to being traitors, Libs are such hypocrites.

Funny how people (Libs) that supposedly espouse such free-thinking and open-mindedness are just the opposite, unless you agree with them.

But you can’t be rational with irrational people.

I don’t care too much for Michael Savage, but I think he’s absolutely correct when he says “Liberalism is a mental disorder”.

Why do you have to keep quoting ancient history to try to point to the “black support” of the GOP? I think one of your own points it out the best. As Captain Ed points out, the passing from office of the last black GOP house member, J.C. Watts, has hardly been noted and no serious effort has been made to replace him.

Reference link: http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/013720.php

Some of Herbert’s claims are a bit much, but the eye-opener was just what a scumbag Reagan was.

I would have gone to all the “special interest debates” with the same line:

“I want to be the president of all Americans. If you are an American, I’ll be your president. I will be working hard to do what I believe is best for ALL Americans. If this runs afoul of the desires of one specific segment of Americans who believe that the issues that are important to them are different than issues important to ALL Americans, I just can’t help that.”

I much prefer if I’m going to offend someone, I do it actively, not passively. 🙂

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