Howard Kurtz is really wrong about Haley Barbour

At the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz seems to think that the blowup about Haley Barbour's comments about the Concerned Citizens Councils represents unwarranted digging into Barbour's attitudes from 1962, saying the brouhaha is the press getting "worked into a lather over what Barbour did and thought when he was a teenager."

When you contemplate running for president, your life becomes an open book. Barbour should certainly be held accountable for the insensitive way he talked about the bad old days of officially sanctioned racial prejudice. His statement today is an acknowledgement of how badly he bobbled the question. But at some point you have to ask: Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on this stuff?

But nobody's getting mad at Barbour for being a Mississippian in 1962. They're getting mad at his contemporary adult understanding and presentation of what that era was like. He suggested in December 2010 -- despite decades of historical research based on accounts of the time -- that the CCCs were benign community groups when, in reallity, they were working in the service of white supremacy. I don't blame Barbour for his youth. I do blame him for whitewashing racism as an adult. The statute of limitations has barely even started on that stuff. 

 

Jonah Goldberg does that thing where he pretends that words don't have plain meanings so that he can pretend liberals are confusing things

Jonah Goldberg defends Stanley Kurtz's new book about President Obama's socialism-drenched past. A couple of paragraphs need some attention:

Here’s my problem. Socialism isn’t the scare word Weigel and others (David Frum comes to mind) say it is. I will be honest and admit that I wish it was more of a scare word than it is, but it’s really not one. I don’t think Americans think of gulags, bread lines and Red Dawn when they hear the word “socialist.”  They think of those things when they hear the word “Communist,” which is a different thing than socialism (or at least that’s what every book on the subject and every sincere democratic socialist I’ve ever spoken to says).

This is an example of Goldberg being hyperliteral when he chooses to be. Yes, socialism is different from communism -- even if the two are related. But as used by much of the right, the "socialist" charge against Obama is clearly, unambiguous effort to conflate the two concepts and paint the president as a bit of a stealth Stalinist. That's why if you do a Google image search for "Obama socialism" you end up with lots and lots and lots of pictures like this. It's not liberals who are making those pictures, so Goldberg is being either A) naive to the point of stupidity or B) willfully disingenuous when he suggests that the conflation of socialism and communism, with regard to Obama, is because of liberal misunderstandings.

But now things are a bit mixed up. So even though leading liberals have talked openly about the possibility that Obama is a “liberal socialist” or might usher in a socialist era, when conservatives take these arguments at face value or make similar ones themselves, it isliberals like Weigel who insist that socialism must be seen as synonymous with Communism, the gulag, Red Dawn etc.

Er... which leading liberals have talked openly about the possibility of Obama being a "liberal socialist"? I'm open to the possibility it's happened, though I'd be surprised. I just want to know Goldberg's documentation for that assertion. But here's the capper:

For example, I’ve just been dipping in and out of Stan’s book, but nowhere I’ve seen does he call Obama a Communist. I’m sure Dave understands the distinction and he might have simply found the word-play irresistible, but it’s worth noting that the Hammer and Sickle are not symbols of socialism but of Communism.

Who is seeing Hammer and Sickles everywhere now?

Ladies and gentlemen: I give you the cover of Stanley Kurtz's book:

Right. Now, granted, there's no "hammer and sickle" on the front of Kurtz's book, but a red star is generally accepted as the next-best symbol of Soviet-style communism.  And granted, a book cover isn't a book's argument. What's more, I understand this book is well-researched, even if its arguments fall flat. But for Goldberg to suggest that there's no red-baiting going on by conservatives who charge Obama with socialism, well, that's literally unbelievable.

Yup.

Deep Thought

Dems have been (finally) moving major legislation so well during the lame duck session that perhaps we'd all benefit if they lost by historic margins in every election. Losing is apparently the only way to motivate them. Health care wasn't passed until Scott Brown won Kennedy's seat, after all.

Coffee and an ebook

Taken at Almaz Cafe

More on Haley Barbour and race revisionism

Like I said, Barbour is not dumb. If he's being a revisionist about race in Mississippi, he's not alone, and he's fighting back against a media standard that all conservatives hate -- this idea that Southerners and conservatives can never stop atoning for Jim Crow. Why should he have to apologize for this, after all? He wasn't in a Citizens Council. With the exception of some people, like Howell Raines -- who covered Barbour's 1986 Senate bid -- how many of these reporters know what they're talking about, anyway? And there are few things conservative voters hate more than being told they were on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement.

Dave Weigel, via slate.com

I for one don't need Southerners to continually atone for Jim Crow. If Haley Barbour doesn't want to have to apologize for Citizens Councils because he wasn't in one, then the best thing he can do is ... keep quiet about Citizens Councils. Publicly reimagining them as a race-neutral instrument of civic stability keeps culture wars alive, because it tells minorities and white liberals that *Southern Whites* haven't moved beyond fighting the battles of the Civil Rights era.

But I think Weigel, in his last sentence, gets at what's going on. "There are few things conservative voters hate more than being told they were on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement." But they were! Barbour's way of telling the Citizens Council story, though, lets them feel like *they're* the real (and misunderstood) victims of racism in America -- and that's a lie.

If Republicans don't want to be tagged as racist, they shouldn't praise racist stuff

I know a number of conservatives and Republicans who get -- I think -- genuinely angry when Republicans and conservatives get smeared as racists. They tend to chalk it up as "race hustling" -- as though anybody who still complains about racism and its ongoing pernicious effects in our society is another Al Sharpton trying to make fresh hay over yesterday's grievances.

There's possibly an element of truth to that, on occasion. But if Republicans don't want to be tagged as racists, maybe a former RNC chairman, current Mississippi governor and possible presidential candidate like Haley Barbour shouldn't praise stuff that everybody knows was racist:

As Barbour recalls it in a new profile in The Weekly Standard, things weren't so bad in his hometown of Yazoo City, which took until 1970 to integrate its schools (though the final event itself is said to have gone on peacefully). For example, Barbour says that there was no problem of Ku Klux Klan activity in the town -- thanks to the Citizens Council movement, an organization that was founded on the basis of resistance to integration and the promotion of white supremacy.

"You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK," said Barbour. "Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."

The White Citizens Council movement was founded in Mississippi in 1954, shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated public schools, and was dedicated to political activities opposing civil rights -- notably boycotts of pro-civil rights individuals in Barbour's hometown, as opposed to Barbour's recollection of actions against the Klan. It was distinguished from the Klan by the public self-identification of its members, and its image of suits and ties as opposed to white robes and nooses.

Maybe there's an upside to Barbour's, er, whitewashing of history. Nobody wants to have been on the side of racists, so the racist aspects of their actions -- and their forebears' actions -- are recast into something more benign so that everybody gets to be on the side of history's winners. That reinforces our modern societal norm that racism is wrong. So that's good. 

But maybe it's also bad, because it's a lie, and everybody knows it. Mississippi didn't burn because white businessmen were running the KKK out of town during the 1950s and 1960s. The violence and anger that consumed the state came about because black people wanted civil rights and white people didn't want black people to have them. The white people who worked against those civil rights are the villain of the story, period. It doesn't matter that, perhaps, they were well-meaning community leaders who loved their families and were simply raised and indoctrinated in a different era -- because they were wrong, and in their wrongness show us how banal evil really can be. There's nothing complicated about this.