Mugged

MUGGED

SENTINEL

MUGGED

RACIAL DEMAGOGUERY FROM
THE SEVENTIES TO OBAMA

ANN COULTER

SENTINEL

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

For the freest black man in America

The Democrats’ slogan during the Bush years was: “Dissent is patriotic.” Under Obama, it’s: “Dissent is racist.”

Liberals luxuriate in calling other people “racists” out of pure moral preening. They seem to imagine that in African American households throughout the land you’ll find mantel portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and Keith Olbermann. (More likely, those mantels would have portraits of Bernie Goetz.)

Beginning in the seventies, there was constant racial turmoil in this country, stirred up by the media, academia and Hollywood to promote their fantasy of America as “Mississippi Burning.”

This was madness. There had been a real fight over civil rights for a century, especially in the previous two decades, but by the end of the sixties, it was over. Segregationist violence was gone, and all public places integrated. But in their minds, liberals lived in a heroic past, where they were the ones manning the barricades and marching against segregation. Liberals were hallucinating—about the present and the past.

Contrary to the myth Democrats told about themselves—that they were hairy-chested warriors for equal rights—the entire history of civil rights consists of Republicans battling Democrats to guarantee the constitutional rights of black people.

Not all Democrats were segregationists, but all segregationists were Democrats and there were enough of them to demand compliance from the rest of the party, just as today’s Democrats submit to the demands of the proabortion feminists. The civil rights protests brought attention to injustice, and voters needed to know what was happening in the Democratic South. But the hoopla was unnecessary.

What really made the Democrats sit up and take notice was that blacks began voting, and would soon outnumber the Democrats’ segregationist wing. That was accomplished by Thurgood Marshall winning cases in the Supreme Court, Republicans in Congress passing civil rights laws and Republicans in the White House enforcing both the court rulings and the laws—sometimes at the end of a gun.

Despite lingering hard feelings over the Civil War, Republican Dwight Eisenhower snatched large parts of the South from the Democrats in the 1952 presidential election.
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Boosted by his war record in the patriotic, military-admiring South, this Republican candidate carried Tennessee, Virginia, Florida and Texas—and he nearly won Kentucky, North Carolina and West Virginia, losing Kentucky by a microscopic .07 percent. The Democrats’ dream team that year was Adlai Stevenson—and Alabama segregationist John Sparkman.

(Eisenhower started a trend, but as far back as the 1920s Republicans were sporadically winning southern states. In 1920, Warren Harding won Tennessee and in 1928 Herbert Hoover won Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Texas. Between Hoover and Eisenhower, Republicans didn’t win a single presidential election, much less the South. The Hoover/Eisenhower southern states were the same states Nixon and Reagan would do best in—not the states Barry Goldwater carried in 1964. More on that to come.)

Eisenhower put a slew of blacks into prominent positions in his administration—unlike Barack Obama he chose competent ones—and quickly moved to desegregate the military, something President Harry Truman had announced, but failed to fully implement.
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It took a lifelong soldier who had smashed the Nazi war machine to compel total racial integration in the military. Eisenhower may have felt as his fellow Republican and soldier Senator Charles Potter did when he stood on crutches in the well of the Senate—he lost both legs in World War II—and denounced the Democrats for refusing to pass a civil rights bill. “I fought beside Negroes in the war,” Potter said. “I saw them die for us. For the Senate of the United States to repay these valiant men…by a watered-down version of this legislation would make a mockery of the democratic concept we hold so dear.”
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When Eisenhower ran for reelection in 1956, the Republican Party platform endorsed the recent Supreme Court ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education
desegregating public schools. The Democratic platform did not. Indeed, a number of Democratic governors proceeded to ignore the landmark
decision. Ike responded by sending in the 101st Airborne to walk black children to school.

In his second term, Eisenhower pushed through two major civil rights laws and created the Civil Rights Commission—over the stubborn objections of Democrats. Senator Lyndon Johnson warned his fellow segregationist Democrats, “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again.” Liberal hero, Senator Sam Ervin told his fellow segregationists, “I’m on your side, not theirs,” adding ruefully, “we’ve got to give the goddamned niggers something.”
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Vice President Richard Nixon pulled some procedural tricks as president of the Senate to get the 1957 bill passed, for which he was personally thanked by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But LBJ had stripped the first bill of enforcement provisions, so Eisenhower introduced another, stronger civil rights bill in 1960. All eighteen votes against both bills were by Democrats. Democratic opposition to civil rights was becoming what we call “a pattern.”

Unfortunately for the cause of equality, Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election and there wasn’t much enthusiasm for aggressively enforcing civil rights laws in either the Kennedy or Johnson administrations. That would have to wait for Nixon’s return.

But with the electoral tide turning—thanks in large part to Eisenhower’s civil rights laws and Thurgood Marshall’s lawsuits—LBJ did a complete turnaround as president and suddenly decided to push through a dramatic civil rights bill. Black people were voting in large enough numbers that Democrats were either going to have to abandon the segregationists or never win another national election, so Johnson switched sides out of a sincere commitment to civil rights. (Northern blacks had begun moving to the Democratic Party with President Franklin Roosevelt’s usual enticement of government largesse.)

Even with a Democratic president behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a far larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for it. Eminent Democratic luminaries voted against it, including Senators Ernest Hollings, Richard Russell, Sam Ervin, Albert Gore Sr., J. William Fulbright (Bill Clinton’s mentor) and of course, Robert Byrd. Overall, 82 percent of Senate Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, compared to only 66 percent of Democrats. In the House, 80 percent of Republicans voted for it, while only 63 percent of Democrats did.

Crediting Democrats for finally coming on board with Republican civil rights policies by supporting the 1964 act would be nearly as absurd as giving the Democrats all the glory for Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts—which
passed with the support of 99 percent of Republicans but only 29 percent of Democrats.
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Nixon launched his national comeback with a 1966 column bashing Democrats as “the party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace” trying “to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.” One can see why Democrats would later be desperate to impeach him, especially Sam Ervin, a major segregationist who headed the Senate Watergate panel.

One of the main reasons Nixon chose a rookie like Spiro Agnew as his vice presidential nominee was Agnew’s sterling civil rights record. Agnew had passed some of the first bans on racial discrimination in public housing in the nation—before the federal laws—and then beaten segregationist George Mahoney for governor of Maryland in 1966. That was the Mahoney in “Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace.”

With the segregationist vote split between Democrat Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election,
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Nixon won. In his inaugural address, he said, “No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not. To go forward at all is to go forward together. This means black and white together, as one nation, not two. The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to ensure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man.”

President Nixon proceeded to desegregate the public schools with lightning speed. Just within Nixon’s first two years, black students attending segregated schools in the South declined from nearly 70 percent to 18.4 percent.
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There was more desegregation of American schools in Nixon’s first term than in any historical period before or since.

During the campaign, Nixon had said, “people in the ghetto have to have more than an equal chance. They should be given a dividend.” As president, he followed through by imposing formal racial quotas and timelines on the building trades. The construction industry got a lot of business from the federal government and yet had doggedly refused to hire blacks. They had been given long enough do so voluntarily. Nixon was fed up with the union’s foot dragging and demanded results.