Rachel Maddow on White-washing Civil Rights

I recently wrote about "White-washing Civil Rights" — the attempt by Movement Conservatism to take the moral high ground away from progressives and Dems by muddying their race cred.

And progressives have considerable race cred. Unlike any other issue (Social Security, for example), the morals of swinging strange black fruit from trees is, well, black-and-white. You can spin Social Security as "socialist"; you can't spin race-murder as anything but race-murder.

Enter the Big Lie.

And right on time, comes Haley Barbour, climbing the Beckian tree to reshout the Beckian Lie. Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson are on it. This is a thing of beauty:



As I wrote earlier, this Big Lie has legs. And Robinson's right — this isn't an attempt to get black votes; that's beyond their reach with this argument.

No, it's an attempt to give beleaguered white suburbanites — from the out-there racist to the not-at-all racist — a balm to soothe their conscience, or a lie to tell their neighbors, when they vote Republican.

"I'm not racist; I'm actually expanding the Civil Rights movement to white people. Son of Lee Atwater just said so." Amazing how that works.

GP

(By the way, we don't have to be strategy-blind. There are many ways to use the lizard brain, which they have so carefully nourished, to our advantage. Start by considering this VoteVets ad.)