ANDY MARTIN: In defense of Governor Haley Barbour
Conservative columnist Andy Martin strikes back at liberal lies about the civil rights era and brands the Washington Post’s Gene Robinson a resident “Racist-in-Chief.” Martin says efforts by the mainstream media to demonize Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour are part of a relentless attack on Republicans and Conservatives. Andy says “Gene Robinson’s ‘Big Lie’ shall not pass.” Liberals are not going to be allowed to rewrite the history of the civil rights revolution and the Republican Party’s leading role in that great moral crusade.
Internet Powerhouse Andy Martin says the liberal media are lying about the civil rights era
Martin says racist journalists at the Washington Post are trying to rewrite history and demonize Governor Haley Barbour
ContrarianCommentary.com
“The Internet Powerhouse”
Andy Martin
Executive Editor
“Factually Correct, Not Politically Correct”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Andy Martin says “reporting” by Washington Post writers is nothing less than the “Big Lie” and a blatant attempt to rewrite history
Martin accuses the Washington Post’s Gene Robinson of becoming become the newspaper’s resident “Racist-in-Chief”
Andy says Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is the victim of a liberal smear campaign
(NEW YORK)(December 2, 2010) It’s “holiday" time for some (for me Christmas). While most people have good cheer in their hearts, the relentless disinformation and racist smears of the mainstream media are going full blast to demonize Governor Haley Barbour and Republicans in general. As someone with actual knowledge and experience of the civil rights era, the media and the Republican Party, I rise unhesitatingly to stand up to and condemn the Washington Post’s resident Racist-in-Chief, Gene Robinson, and to condemn efforts to demonize Barbour. I have no links of any sort to Governor Haley Barbour.
The origins of the latest controversy are an article in the Weekly Standard in which Barbour discusses in passing the civil rights era from his perspective. (link below) The gist of Barbour’s view is that as the civil rights era unfolded, different communities reacted differently. Out of this tiny acorn the Washington Post has created a mighty oak of lies, more lies and damn lies. The Post’s Gene Robinson is the prime orchestrator of this despicable behavior.
The Post began by reporting Barbour’s comments as though the governor was a racist. (links blow). Then the Washington Post’s latest “conservative writer” Jennifer Rubin buried Barbour’s presidential campaign before it was even announced (link below). The Washington Post always keeps a liberal-Democrat-as-“conservative” on its staff. Rubin is the Post’s latest liberal “conservative.” Rubin’s “conservative” predecessor, Dave Weigel, was fired by the Post when he was outed as a liberal: Weigel promptly became a flack on Keith Olbermann’s nightly left-wing tirade. Some “conservative.” [Full disclosure: Weigel has also written lies about me.]
Younger Post writers trying to make sense of the attacks on Barbour looked back to Gene Robinson’s despicable earlier attack on Barbour that had slipped by unnoticed during the heat of the recent campaign (link below).
Robison’s Big Lie: that Republicans in the South were racists during the civil rights civil war, and that Barbour’s claim that Republicans led the civil rights era is nonsense. Gene Robinson is a bald-faced liar.
Robinson’s distortion and disinformation of Barbour’s views: “He [Barbour] has the gall to try to portray Southern Republicans as having been enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement all along.” (link below)
Here are the facts:
1. Slaves were emancipated by a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. In gratitude, from the end of the Civil War well into the 20th Century most African-Americans were Republicans, not Democrats. Jim Crow racism was a creation of Democrats, not Republicans.
2. During the years when the “solid South” was a bulwark of the Democratic Party, the most vicious racists were all Democrats.
3. The only federal civil rights advocates were Republican judges. Due to segregation, the actual Republican Party in the racist south was skeletal. But the handful of southern Republicans had one powerful trump card: they controlled federal patronage during periods of Republican presidents. When Dwight Eisenhower took office as a Republican president in 1953 he began to appoint “Republican judges” to the Court of Appeals in New Orleans and the federal district courts in the south. Republican appointees to the Court of Appeals Elbert Tuttle, John Minor Wisdom and John R. Brown were the men who captained the assault on Jim Crow and segregation.
4. The most illustrious federal judge of the civil rights era was probably Frank M. Johnson, a Republican who was appointed by President Eisenhower in 1955. Johnson was at the center of the desegregation wars, constantly battling Alabama Governor George Wallace.
5. In 1960 Presidential candidate John F. Kenney weakened the lingering support of African-Americans for the Republican Party by reaching out to civil rights advocates such as Reverend Martin Luther King.
6. But once elected, Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy renewed the Democratic Party’s practice of appointing racist judges to the federal courts in the South.
7. More Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.
8. In the 1964 presidential election the South switched from Democrat to Republican. Southern voters backed conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. But Goldwater was no racist. Goldwater was as decent a man as ever served in the senate. Goldwater had a conservative vision that saw an excessively limited role for the federal government; his vision, when followed to its logical conclusion, was wrong on the issue of civil rights. If anyone believed in 1964 they were voting for a racist in backing Goldwater, they were mistaken.
9. In 1968 President Richard Nixon crafted the “Southern Strategy” to appeal to conservative white voters. The wisdom of that approach is open to debate. But by 1968 the climate had also shifted in the North. Bitter civil rights disputes had broken out in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley clubbed and arrested civil rights advocates (I was there). Angry Whites had already stoned Reverend Martin Luther King in Chicago in 1967.
10. Boston, home of the Kennedy dynasty, was also the scene of vicious civil rights resistance.
11. To say that Republicans had a monopoly on the growing resistance the civil rights agenda is demonstrably false. History, not even morally correct history such as the civil rights revolution, does not always move in a straight line.
The bottom line:
1. Segregation in the south was entirely a construction of the Democratic Party.
2. For decades almost all of the southerners fighting to maintain Jim Crow and segregation were Democrats. Most leading advocates of civil rights reform were Republicans.
3. Without Republican federal judges the civil rights revolution would have been stymied.
I know. I was there and saw it unfold before my eyes.
One closing observation about media lies and modern media mythology:
Today we are flooded with media contacts and images. We have cable TV bobbleheads, news, opinion, blogs, the Internet. We even have “dead tree media” (national newspapers). There is a daily avalanche of information. That was not the world in which Haley Barbour and I grew up.
The evening news was still 15 minutes going into the 60’s. “National” newspapers did not exist. Actual information and “news” was scarce. Almost all of our daily news came from local papers and the odd radio news report; they in turn were dominated by clipped wire service journalism.
Looking back half a century from today’s perspective, we instinctively and unconsciously compress years of civil rights activity into a few dramatic moments and a linear narrative. But that was not the way the civil rights revolution actually unfolded and took place day-by-day in the earlier media age.
There was scant “news” coverage, except for reporting on the occasional dramatic demonstration (Bull Conner in Birmingham or Governor George Wallace barring the door) and most people in Illinois, as well as those in Yazoo City, Mississippi, were only peripherally aware of the civil rights maelstrom taking place beyond the horizon.
Gene Robinson wants to rewrite history to paint Republicans as racists. That is a Big Lie. Robinson has sadly become the Washington Post’s resident “Racist-in-Chief.” For shame, Mr. Robinson.
P. S. Resident liberal “conservative” Jennifer Rubin has the Barbour-as-a-racist brouhaha backwards. The fact that the Barbour controversy is being ventilated now, before the governor even announces, means the issue of media lies is out in the open to be confronted and deconstructed.
WATCH FOR A DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT BY ANDY MARTIN DECEMBER 29TH.
--------------------------------
LINKS TO THIS COLUMN:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/
boy-yazoo-city_523551.html
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/
44/2010/12/the-fix-called-attention-this.html
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/
barbour-seeks-to-clarify-comments-on-civil-rights-era/?scp=3&sq=Barbour&st=cse
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/us/
politics/21barbour.html?scp=2&sq=Barbour&st=cse
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/12/does_haley_barbour_have_a_
bubb.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-turn/2010/12/beware_of_conservative_
magazin.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2010/09/06/AR2010090602959.html
----------------------------------
ABOUT ANDY: Chicago Public Radio calls Andy Martin a “boisterous Internet activist.” Andy is the legendary New York and Chicago-based muckraker, author, Internet columnist, radio talk show host, broadcaster and media critic. He has over forty years of background in radio and television and is the dean of Illinois media and communications. He promotes his best-selling book, “Obama: The Man Behind The Mask” and his Internet movie "Obama: The Hawai'i years." Martin has been a leading corruption fighter in Illinois for over forty years. He is currently sponsoring www.AmericaisReadyforReform.com
Andy is the Executive Editor and publisher of the “Internet Powerhouse,” http://www.contrariancommentary.com/. He comments on regional, national and world events with more than four decades of investigative and analytical experience. He holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Illinois College of Law and is a former adjunct professor of law at the City University of New York (LaGuardia CC, Bronx CC).
UPDATES: www.twitter.com/AndyMartinUSAwww.Facebook.com/AndyMartin Andy's columns are also posted at ContrarianCommentary.blogspot.com; ContrarianCommentary.wordpress.com.
ContrarianCommentary.typepad.com[NOTE: We try to correct any typographical errors in this story on our blogs; find our latest edition there.]
MEDIA CONTACT: (866) 706-2639 or CELL (917) 664-9329E-MAIL: AndyMart20@aol.com
© Copyright by Andy Martin 2010
Conservative columnist Andy Martin strikes back at liberal lies about the civil rights era and brands the Washington Post’s Gene Robinson a resident “Racist-in-Chief.” Martin says efforts by the mainstream media to demonize Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour are part of a relentless attack on Republicans and Conservatives. Andy says “Gene Robinson’s ‘Big Lie’ shall not pass.” Liberals are not going to be allowed to rewrite the history of the civil rights revolution and the Republican Party’s leading role in that great moral crusade.
Internet Powerhouse Andy Martin says the liberal media are lying about the civil rights era
Martin says racist journalists at the Washington Post are trying to rewrite history and demonize Governor Haley Barbour
ContrarianCommentary.com
“The Internet Powerhouse”
Andy Martin
Executive Editor
“Factually Correct, Not Politically Correct”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Andy Martin says “reporting” by Washington Post writers is nothing less than the “Big Lie” and a blatant attempt to rewrite history
Martin accuses the Washington Post’s Gene Robinson of becoming become the newspaper’s resident “Racist-in-Chief”
Andy says Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is the victim of a liberal smear campaign
(NEW YORK)(December 2, 2010) It’s “holiday" time for some (for me Christmas). While most people have good cheer in their hearts, the relentless disinformation and racist smears of the mainstream media are going full blast to demonize Governor Haley Barbour and Republicans in general. As someone with actual knowledge and experience of the civil rights era, the media and the Republican Party, I rise unhesitatingly to stand up to and condemn the Washington Post’s resident Racist-in-Chief, Gene Robinson, and to condemn efforts to demonize Barbour. I have no links of any sort to Governor Haley Barbour.
The origins of the latest controversy are an article in the Weekly Standard in which Barbour discusses in passing the civil rights era from his perspective. (link below) The gist of Barbour’s view is that as the civil rights era unfolded, different communities reacted differently. Out of this tiny acorn the Washington Post has created a mighty oak of lies, more lies and damn lies. The Post’s Gene Robinson is the prime orchestrator of this despicable behavior.
The Post began by reporting Barbour’s comments as though the governor was a racist. (links blow). Then the Washington Post’s latest “conservative writer” Jennifer Rubin buried Barbour’s presidential campaign before it was even announced (link below). The Washington Post always keeps a liberal-Democrat-as-“conservative” on its staff. Rubin is the Post’s latest liberal “conservative.” Rubin’s “conservative” predecessor, Dave Weigel, was fired by the Post when he was outed as a liberal: Weigel promptly became a flack on Keith Olbermann’s nightly left-wing tirade. Some “conservative.” [Full disclosure: Weigel has also written lies about me.]
Younger Post writers trying to make sense of the attacks on Barbour looked back to Gene Robinson’s despicable earlier attack on Barbour that had slipped by unnoticed during the heat of the recent campaign (link below).
Robison’s Big Lie: that Republicans in the South were racists during the civil rights civil war, and that Barbour’s claim that Republicans led the civil rights era is nonsense. Gene Robinson is a bald-faced liar.
Robinson’s distortion and disinformation of Barbour’s views: “He [Barbour] has the gall to try to portray Southern Republicans as having been enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement all along.” (link below)
Here are the facts:
1. Slaves were emancipated by a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. In gratitude, from the end of the Civil War well into the 20th Century most African-Americans were Republicans, not Democrats. Jim Crow racism was a creation of Democrats, not Republicans.
2. During the years when the “solid South” was a bulwark of the Democratic Party, the most vicious racists were all Democrats.
3. The only federal civil rights advocates were Republican judges. Due to segregation, the actual Republican Party in the racist south was skeletal. But the handful of southern Republicans had one powerful trump card: they controlled federal patronage during periods of Republican presidents. When Dwight Eisenhower took office as a Republican president in 1953 he began to appoint “Republican judges” to the Court of Appeals in New Orleans and the federal district courts in the south. Republican appointees to the Court of Appeals Elbert Tuttle, John Minor Wisdom and John R. Brown were the men who captained the assault on Jim Crow and segregation.
4. The most illustrious federal judge of the civil rights era was probably Frank M. Johnson, a Republican who was appointed by President Eisenhower in 1955. Johnson was at the center of the desegregation wars, constantly battling Alabama Governor George Wallace.
5. In 1960 Presidential candidate John F. Kenney weakened the lingering support of African-Americans for the Republican Party by reaching out to civil rights advocates such as Reverend Martin Luther King.
6. But once elected, Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy renewed the Democratic Party’s practice of appointing racist judges to the federal courts in the South.
7. More Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.
8. In the 1964 presidential election the South switched from Democrat to Republican. Southern voters backed conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. But Goldwater was no racist. Goldwater was as decent a man as ever served in the senate. Goldwater had a conservative vision that saw an excessively limited role for the federal government; his vision, when followed to its logical conclusion, was wrong on the issue of civil rights. If anyone believed in 1964 they were voting for a racist in backing Goldwater, they were mistaken.
9. In 1968 President Richard Nixon crafted the “Southern Strategy” to appeal to conservative white voters. The wisdom of that approach is open to debate. But by 1968 the climate had also shifted in the North. Bitter civil rights disputes had broken out in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley clubbed and arrested civil rights advocates (I was there). Angry Whites had already stoned Reverend Martin Luther King in Chicago in 1967.
10. Boston, home of the Kennedy dynasty, was also the scene of vicious civil rights resistance.
11. To say that Republicans had a monopoly on the growing resistance the civil rights agenda is demonstrably false. History, not even morally correct history such as the civil rights revolution, does not always move in a straight line.
The bottom line:
1. Segregation in the south was entirely a construction of the Democratic Party.
2. For decades almost all of the southerners fighting to maintain Jim Crow and segregation were Democrats. Most leading advocates of civil rights reform were Republicans.
3. Without Republican federal judges the civil rights revolution would have been stymied.
I know. I was there and saw it unfold before my eyes.
One closing observation about media lies and modern media mythology:
Today we are flooded with media contacts and images. We have cable TV bobbleheads, news, opinion, blogs, the Internet. We even have “dead tree media” (national newspapers). There is a daily avalanche of information. That was not the world in which Haley Barbour and I grew up.
The evening news was still 15 minutes going into the 60’s. “National” newspapers did not exist. Actual information and “news” was scarce. Almost all of our daily news came from local papers and the odd radio news report; they in turn were dominated by clipped wire service journalism.
Looking back half a century from today’s perspective, we instinctively and unconsciously compress years of civil rights activity into a few dramatic moments and a linear narrative. But that was not the way the civil rights revolution actually unfolded and took place day-by-day in the earlier media age.
There was scant “news” coverage, except for reporting on the occasional dramatic demonstration (Bull Conner in Birmingham or Governor George Wallace barring the door) and most people in Illinois, as well as those in Yazoo City, Mississippi, were only peripherally aware of the civil rights maelstrom taking place beyond the horizon.
Gene Robinson wants to rewrite history to paint Republicans as racists. That is a Big Lie. Robinson has sadly become the Washington Post’s resident “Racist-in-Chief.” For shame, Mr. Robinson.
P. S. Resident liberal “conservative” Jennifer Rubin has the Barbour-as-a-racist brouhaha backwards. The fact that the Barbour controversy is being ventilated now, before the governor even announces, means the issue of media lies is out in the open to be confronted and deconstructed.
WATCH FOR A DRAMATIC ANNOUNCEMENT BY ANDY MARTIN DECEMBER 29TH.
--------------------------------
LINKS TO THIS COLUMN:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/
boy-yazoo-city_523551.html
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/
44/2010/12/the-fix-called-attention-this.html
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/
barbour-seeks-to-clarify-comments-on-civil-rights-era/?scp=3&sq=Barbour&st=cse
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/us/
politics/21barbour.html?scp=2&sq=Barbour&st=cse
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/12/does_haley_barbour_have_a_
bubb.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-turn/2010/12/beware_of_conservative_
magazin.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2010/09/06/AR2010090602959.html
----------------------------------
ABOUT ANDY: Chicago Public Radio calls Andy Martin a “boisterous Internet activist.” Andy is the legendary New York and Chicago-based muckraker, author, Internet columnist, radio talk show host, broadcaster and media critic. He has over forty years of background in radio and television and is the dean of Illinois media and communications. He promotes his best-selling book, “Obama: The Man Behind The Mask” and his Internet movie "Obama: The Hawai'i years." Martin has been a leading corruption fighter in Illinois for over forty years. He is currently sponsoring www.AmericaisReadyforReform.com
Andy is the Executive Editor and publisher of the “Internet Powerhouse,” http://www.contrariancommentary.com/. He comments on regional, national and world events with more than four decades of investigative and analytical experience. He holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Illinois College of Law and is a former adjunct professor of law at the City University of New York (LaGuardia CC, Bronx CC).
UPDATES: www.twitter.com/AndyMartinUSAwww.Facebook.com/AndyMartin Andy's columns are also posted at ContrarianCommentary.blogspot.com; ContrarianCommentary.wordpress.com.
ContrarianCommentary.typepad.com[NOTE: We try to correct any typographical errors in this story on our blogs; find our latest edition there.]
MEDIA CONTACT: (866) 706-2639 or CELL (917) 664-9329E-MAIL: AndyMart20@aol.com
© Copyright by Andy Martin 2010
Labels: Andy Martin, civil rights, Dave Weigel, Frank M. Johnson, Gene Robinson, Haley Barbour, Jennifer Rubin, Mississippi, Washington Post, Weekly Standard, Yazoo City
posted by Andy Martin | 12:22 PM
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