DEMOCRATS POSSESS THEIR OWN UNIQUE VERSION OF HISTORY…

By now I’m quite sure that after having been lectured to by our esteemed president, most of you have probably now seen fit to dismount from what he described as being, your high horse.  Because as Barry “Almighty’ recently reminded all of us, while it is bad that the Islamic State, which apparently has no connection to Islam whatsoever, runs around busily lopping off the heads of anyone who has the misfortune of getting in their way here in 2015, it was Christians who also did very bad things back in 1215.  A connection that, I must admit, I’m having more than a little trouble with.

And for those of you for whom Barry’s little history lesson wasn’t enough, well then, maybe you are in need of staying after class for some much needed remedial training on the topic so that you can be made to better understand the point that Barry was trying so hard to make.  And your volunteer instructor on that very topic is some moron by the name of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who, I’m told, writes for ‘The Atlantic’.  You see, Mr. Coates also has pointed out that Christianity was often invoked in defense of slavery, segregation and even white supremacy for a large part of American history.

This imbecile said, “The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power.”  He then went on to say, “That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion’s share of American history.”  Personally, what I think it is that this little twerp might actually be up to is nothing more than another attempt by the left to re-write history so as to justify, in some warped way, the idiotic position maintained by most Democrats, including Barry, when it comes to Islam.

But his comments got me to wondering.  You see I found myself wondering what the odds might be that when next some Republican says something stupid about race, that our Democrat friends would apply the same sort of logic and say something like: “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other party, remember that from its founding until the 1960s, people committed terrible deeds in the name of the Democrat Party.  In our own party, slavery and Jim Crow all too often were justified in the Democrat platform.”  I venture to say the odds are pretty slim.

For instance, it was Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, quite possibly the first grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, who spoke at the 1868 Democrat National Convention.  And despite Democrat claims, it also a very well-known fact that most Klansmen were, and for that matter still are, Democrats.  And something else worth noting when it comes to the Klan and the Democrat Party, is the fact that the party refused to condemn the Klan as late as its 1924 convention, a gathering that many newspapers at the time referred to as a "Klanbake."

And then we have Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat, a devout racist as well as someone who was a white supremacist and a president who re-segregated the federal workforce.  And those who know history as it actually occurred and not how Democrats would like us all to believe that it did, segregationists were also part of the New Deal coalition and were running mates even to liberal Democrat presidential candidates into the 1950s.  And it was in 1956 that 99 of the 101 politicians who signed the racist “Southern Manifesto” were also, in fact, Democrats.

The major civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s were supported by a much lower percentage of Democrat members of Congress than Republicans. This included J. William Fulbright, who was a mentor to ‘Slick Willie’ Clinton, Al Gore Sr., who was father of the future vice president, and Robert ‘KKK’ Byrd, an ex-Klansmen who would become the Senate Democrat floor leader until 1989 and was an elected Democrat until he finally died in 2010.  And it was George Wallace, Bull Connor and Lester Maddox who also were all Democrats.  By now I’m sure you get the point. 

We don’t need to ask whether liberals think any of this history is relevant to the Democrat Party today. They’ve told us repeatedly that it’s in no way relevant.  And it was back in 2009 that Bruce Bartlett wrote a book, ‘Wrong on Race’, about the Democrats’ past racism, which was promptly dismissed by the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen as being “cheap and silly.”  Benen said, “If history ended in 1965, Bartlett may have a legitimate point.”  So once again, it would seem that the ONLY version of history we’re to believe is the version concocted by Democrats.

Or as Matthew Yglesias, another liberal eager to make excuses when it comes to the shady history of the Democrat Party, put it, “that was all quite a long time ago.”  But really no longer ago than the history Barry and Mr. Coates cite in comparing Christian supporters of slavery and segregation in the 19th and 20th centuries to ISIS today. And what Coates very conveniently leaves out is the extent to which Christianity also played a role in abolishing slavery and segregation.  It’s all much more recent than the Crusades or the Inquisition.  Such comparisons make no sense to me.

If we’re talking about Christians or Americans, there is always a direct link between the distant past and today.  But if we’re talking about Democrats, well then, it’s all just ancient history that can very easily be discounted.  It’s almost like saying that bringing up the weather to argue against global warming is stupid but bringing up the weather to argue for it is really smart and sophisticated.  All analogies break down somewhere. There’s obviously less continuity between the Democrat platforms of 1860 and 2012 than Christian doctrines from the early church to today.

If you ask most Democrats they’ll say that whatever sins were committed by Democrats in the past, simply don’t matter, that what’s relevant is where the party stands today.  But, oddly enough, that same rule seems to apply only to Democrats.  The same is true for Barry’s supposed history lesson, in that whatever sins have historically been committed in the name of Christianity remain relevant today for comparison purposes.  ISIS goes about the setting of people on fire and lopping off the heads of people, and the United States abolished slavery in 1865, while ISIS still practices it.