On the house floor yesterday, Rep. Virginia Foxx (Wingnut-NC), noted for her contention that the murder of Matthew Shepard was a hoax and not a hate crime and that health care reform is a bigger threat than terrorism, proclaimed:
Actually, the GOP has been the leader in starting good environmental programs in this country. Just as we were the people who passed the civil rights bills back in the ’60s without very much help from our colleagues across the aisle. They love to engage in revisionist history.
Project much, Virginia?
As for the latter, the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was begun under a Democratic President, John F. Kennedy, and after votes by an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, and signed into law by a Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson
The only basis for Foxx’s claim is that, although they produced fewer aggregate votes than the Dems, they did produce a greater percentage of intra-party votes. This was due to the demographic breakdown of the Democratic Party at the time, which owed its congressional dominance in large part to its “Southern Bloc.” Said Bloc had racism written into their political DNA, the determining factor in their overwhelmingly vote against the bill; insufficient, however, to prevent its ultimate passage.
LBJ predicted that pushing civil rights legislation would result in the loss to the Dems of its Southern Bloc for a generation. Disenfranchised from their cherished racism, defecting Southern Dems subsequently formed the basis of the “Reagan Democrats” that brought the Rethugs to power in 1981.
LBJ was willing to sacrifice his own party’s political fortunes for the greater good of the nation. Fat chance we’ll ever see a sacrifice like that from Foxx and her ilk.
Because I’m incredibly lazy, I just cut and pasted this same comment I left over at Hysterical Raisins. lol.
The GOP has always fought against legislation designed for the social advancement of the marginalized, by first, denying there is even a problem, then second, when the facts overwhelm it, it says that one can’t legislate morality or force people do things they don’t want to do, then third, in the face of the inevitable implimentation of these progressive policies, it calls them failures before giving any of them a chance to work, and finally, after enough time has gone by and the policies have actually suceeded, the GOP claims them as its own. This is the case with every progressive social policy.
If you were “incredibly lazy” Zirg, you wouldn’t be cut’n and paste’n all the way over here from nonnie’s. I hear you, though; when I was a kid there was a bumper sticker: “Lobotomies for Republicans— It’s The LAW”— so why do we let them continue to breed and vote?
“Yellow Dog Democrats” was also a term I remember. Just looked it up on Wikipedia:
“Yellow Dog Democrats was a term applied to U.S. Southern voters who voted solely for Democratic candidates, with the term commencing in the late 19th century. Due to Republican president Abraham Lincoln’s leading the Union against the Confederacy, these voters would allegedly “vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican”. Currently, the term is now more generally applied to refer to any Democrat who will vote a straight Party ticket under any circumstances. ”
It should also be noted that all 10 of the southern Rethugs voted against the bill as well.
“Project much, Virginia?”
That’s all that any GOPer is good at anymore. Projection and lying. And they lie about shit that doesn’t even need to be lied about.
One thing. The so-called Democrats were really what we always referred to as Dixiecrat’s. I was a kid during LBJ’s term in office, but I remember a bit about the Civil Rights Legislation. My Mom was really into politics and made us pay attention to what was going on, how badly the southerners treated the Blacks. I’ll never forget watching the fire hoses being sprayed at children and the beatings. As I was so young, I just couldn’t understand why the color of someones skin made them any different than you or me. I really still don’t understand.
But Mom, being a life long Liberal Democrat, always singled out the worst of them as Dixiecrat’s.