The Chris Moeller Archives

Haley Barbour's rebel yell

There will be a doublewide-trailer-load of visiting dipshits in Iowa during 2011 with cameras and reporters following them around recording their every word and movement. It's called the Iowa Caucuses and one such dipshit will certainly be Mississippi governor Jefferson Davis Hogg, er, Haley Barbour, as big an historical revisionist as walks our streets. Just before Christmas, Barbour told The Weekly Standard: "You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. 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."

For those unfamiliar, the White Citizens Council, in Yazoo City and elsewhere, was responsible for a unique brand of racism, acting as the South's most segregationist organization operating in the open-- the Klan in tailored seersucker, rather than bedsheet cotton. If the Ku Klux Klan wasn't at the forefront of fighting school integration in Yazoo City, it's only because the White Citizens Council had already done such a good job of squashing it through intimidation-- first, publishing a list of signatories to a petition supporting integration, then threatening economic boycott, not on white-owned businesses, as Barbour boldly fibs, but in efforts to keep away the NAACP. It was a charter member of the White Citizens Council of Greenwood, Mississippi, Byron de la Beckwith, that shot and killed Medger Evers in 1963, and then the White Citizens Council that came to the killer's legal defense. This all transpired when Barbour was in high school in Yazoo City so he's either a liar or the most ig'nent public official in all'a Dixie.

Barbour wears on his lapel, and flies in his office, a flag that symbolizes-- and is intended to symbolize-- the Confederate army, a band of terrorists fighting for the establishment of a republic founded on the principles of white supremacy. His actions and comments would seem to question his fitness for the job he currently has, let alone a higher political office. As Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author linked twice in the previous paragraph, points out, "Of all the United States, Mississippi has the highest percentage of African-Americans. Haley Barbour, evidently, knows very little of their history. Indeed, there may not be a governor more ignorant of his constituents in all this great land."

But when Barbour arrives in Iowa, the Des Moines Register and the local television stations will treat him as a viable candidate for the Republican nomination for president because that's where the American Republican party is today. Barbour has already been at the top of the party as chairman of its National Committee (in the late '90s), and less than two years ago, he was named the chairman of the party's Governors Association. The Washington Post, earlier this year, called him the most influential member of the Republican Party today. Indeed, Southern reactionary racists are one of the tent poles of the GOP coalition, as they have been ever since candidate Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi (where three civil rights workers had been murdered by the local government in 1964), making a clearly-coded speech declaring "I believe in state's rights," and promising to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them." ("State's rights" was still a dog whistle for Southern whites in 1980.) Barbour carries the disgraceful legacy of Reagan with him today, but it's evolved now into something more polite and palatable to the voting public. The message of racial intolerance is implicit, and no longer considered crude. Indeed, calling someone a racist is now the worst offense that one can commit in a public debate. It devolves the discussion into one of personal prejudice and discredits the argument.

Is Barbour a racist? He's the worst kind. He wants you to believe racism doesn't exist.

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The Justice Department's investigation of Bradley Manning is stinking up the countryside. While the Army Private accused of leaking government secrets to Julian Assange is getting the Guantanamo treatment in military prison in Virginia, his accusers are making absurd claims against him and covering up, the traditional media outlets are behaving like government lapdogs, and Osama bin Laden will probably be in United States government custody long before Manning is given his Constitutionally-mandated day in court. How vital is WikiLeaks to the future of our democracy? We need a WikiLeaks to make public the crimes and overreaches of the WikiLeaks investigation.

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All you need to know about American media (and maybe America as a whole): Al Jezeera, operating in one of the most restrictive journalistic environments in the world, picks Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as Newsmaker of the Year. Time magazine chose Mark Zuckerberg.

posted by CM @ 5:34 PM