June 28^th

Mona Charen is writing a little revisionist history in her column today; she claims that the Democrats opposed civil rights legislation which the Republicans enthusiastically supported. She points to the “Southern Manifesto” which allowed members of Congress to express their opposition to Brown vs Board of Education, a SCOTUS decision desegregating public schools. Almost all of the southern members of the House and the Senate voted for this manifesto and against desegregation. The signatories of this document were indeed Democrats but Mona doesn’t tell us that they would soon become Republicans. Desegregation had been championed by Democrats so the segregationists deserted the Democratic Party and went over to the Republican Party. Not all southerners voted for bigotry; Lyndon Johnson, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr. didn’t vote for this manifesto. Two years after this attempt to roll back the SCOTUS decision, Lyndon Baines Johnson was President of the United States and not long after that his address to the Congress contained this:

"No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law."

President Johnson also recognized that his action had lost the south for the Democratic Party, and he said so. Of course he was right; the “Solid South” is now solidly Republican and it’s because Democrats supported civil rights. Mona skips this part.

Mona Charen takes Bill Clinton to task for his eulogy of J. William Fulbright. Fulbright was a long serving Senator from Arkansas, Clinton’s home state. She claims that Fulbright was a racist; he was certainly a segregationist and possibly a racist as well. Of course so were most of the founding fathers. Jefferson and Washington both owned large numbers of slaves. It is interesting that Charen seeks out Fulbright since he revealed some serious currency manipulation between American contributors to Israel and that country’s sending the funds back here to buy favorable propaganda toward Israel. Here is some of Fulbright’s thinking forty-one years after his resignation from the Senate:

“Throughout our nation’s history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But…when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our Puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.”

“Harsh and angry moralism;” --which party’s candidates fit  that characterization?