Haley Barbour Wants a Piece of That 2012 Segregationist Money

The gay liberal atheist yankee media types who disgrace this fine, white nation are up in arms today over comments Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour made to The Weekly Standard , about how the time when black people didn't have civil rights wasn't "that bad" and how white-people Citizens Councils made integration go nice and smooth, like a muskrat pissing a finely brewed sweet tea. Except this is a very revisionist point of view, as the South during the civil rights fight wasn't exactly peaceful, and Citizens Councils were actually anti-integration organizations that tried to block blacks from exercising their civil rights. But none of this is important. What's important is that Barbour may run for president, and he just opened the whiskey-soaked wallets of old conservative Southerners for himself and closed them off to Mike Huckabee. You snooze on racism, you lose on racism, Huck!

Barbour's glossed-over remembrance is a direct appeal to conservative Southerners who were old enough to oppose civil rights for blacks. Barbour didn't speak highly of the KKK, he spoke highly of a more moderate form of white people wanting to keep things the way they were, which seems pretty fair, in retrospect, compared to lynching non-whites.

It's a message best delivered from a rocking chair between shots to the spittoon, but a weekly conservative magazine will have to do.

One thing Obama's presidential campaign showed -- in addition to the fact that we can't trust Kenyan communist men who suddenly show up on stages in local sports arenas -- is that people like to feel good during a presidential campaign. For certain voters, it's the prospect of true, attainable progress. For certain other voters -- deep-walleted, with nothing left but to live in the past and sigh at those negruhs dancing in the end-zone in the footbahlll game on the teevee -- it's a chance to relive, and remember with fondness, the days of yore.

And this is why Barbour may prove to be a shrewder politician than Huckabee, and ultimately outflank him on his core groups of supporters. Yes We Can Sort-of-Racism! Barbour 2012! [ Weekly Standard ]