I
just did name names -- it's directly above, echoing itself at the end. And where did I ever say "every" racist Southern Democrat? Generalize much? And... 'you guys'? Who the **** do you think is writing this post with me? Some kind of committee?
And where did I say anything like this then?
Is that Strawman, like, living in your house or what? Do you have any idea what debate is?
Your strawman has apparently found hisself a Strawwoman and they's ******* like bunnies.
So let's see, your homework would be...
Link/quote to my claim tht "every" Southern Democrat ..... did anything monolithically;
Link/quote to my posts that the Tea Party.... are anything monolithically;
Link/quote to my posts about HIllary Clinton ... even running for office?
Jesus Christ in a handbasket, it's like tribbles on the Enterprise...
You named four, which a can't agree with. Lott wasn't a racist. Jessie Helms was an old cracker. He was first a Democrat from old school politics. He didn't represent the true Republican party. He never ran for national office as a Democrat. Reagan was a better example of what a true Republican was. One that was fed up with the Democratic Party. Still, you're using a Strawman argument, claiming a cast of thousands without evidence. I want to see thousands of names from you or everything you said was Bullshit.
Cherrypicking. If, say, Jesse Helms "didn't represent the true Republican Party" then you can't turn around and make blanket statements about other people when the party changes. The rule is either true of both, or it's true of neither. You can't have it both ways.
One could as easily observe the racists in the South never represented the true Democratic Party either, that they were a sui generis anomaly of a certain regional conservative at bitter odds with their fellow party members in the Other Region. That's still true; only the chosen party has changed. Because again, as noted at the beginning,
the prupose of a political party is to acquire power, not to represent any ideology. And that means the David Dukes, the Jesse Helmses, the Strom Thurmonds, the KKKs, when they want power, are going to use the Democratic Party when it gets results, and the Republican Party when
it gets results. As I've demonstrated profusely in these last few posts. And if some third party starts up that's willing to take on this kind of bipolar hysteria to play both sides the same way, they'll go to that one.
So you're trying to have it both ways in this desperate flailing attempt to dumb down what is clearly a cultural-regional-geograhic aspect into some kind of political football scoreboard in an imaginary comic book world where political parties actually dictate personality in this grand bodacious Fallacy of Composition --- with its own on/off switch.
And that, sir, is insane.
Trying to lump the KKK in with a segregationist like Stromberg Thurmond is a bit of a stretch. Robert Byrd was an official member of the KKK but Democrats accepted him and kept him around even when he began babbling like a retard. I believe there are racists in the Democratic Party today. One of them sits in the Whitehouse. His Attorney General was another.
Oh, a map doesn't prove which party a voter is. There is no way of telling exactly which party a voter belongs to because it's a blind ballot. You can suggest trends but nothing specific. Sometimes a Republican will vote for a Democrat and vice-verse, but the polarization of the electorate is making that less and less common.
Robert Byrd quit the Klan before he ever even ran for office, let alone held one, so that's more of the same guilt-by-association generalization malarkey at the wheel of a time machine. David Vitter paid a call girl to dress him up in diapers -- does that mean all "Republicans" -- or all "Louisianans" or all "Metairieans" or all "guys named David" do it? I don't think it does but you go ahead and make that case.
As far as these maps and the party shift, I'm talking there about behavior -- not party
registration. Party registration is meaningless. You can register for a party (as many do) so that they can vote in their state's primary for that party or so that they can have a voice in the local government structure. But voting trends show where the
support lies.
As do these -- 1948:
(Yellow = Strom Thurmond, after walking out of the DP convention and starting his own party)
1968:
(Yellow = George Wallace, after tiring of "liberals" and starting
his own party)
1860:
(The Democrat Douglas is here represented in
dark blue. One state, Missouri. The
medium blue is Breckenridge and the yellow, Bell -- after the South completely disrupted the DP convention and started
two other parties)
Stop me when you see pattern...
Your turning point is here -- 1964, two months after Thurmond went to the RP and four months after Goldwater voted against the CRA:
A picture says a thousand words -- this from July 12, 1964:
(from the
Library of Congress)
"I like Barry Goldwater. I believe what he believes in. I think the same way he thinks."
-- Robert Creel, Alabama KKK Grand Dragon, 1964
But there's no party shift going on. Riiight. Did you know George Wallace wanted to be his running mate and Goldwater had to talk him out of running on his own in '64 (as he did on the next two rounds)?
I think the reason summa y'all object to this being pointed out is somehow you imagine your reader is going to traffic in the same fallacies of Composition and Guilt by Association that you tried to ride in on. That's not the case; a fallacy is a fallacy, period. The fact that KKK and/or racists may be attracted to the RP in 1964 and beyond no more makes the RP "racist" than their gravitation to the DP before that point made
that a "racist" organization. You're just going to have to abandon those fallacies. That's all there is to it.
Nor, I should add, does it make Goldwater a racist. BG had his own reasons, truly conservative in spirit, for opposing the CRA that had nothing to do with race, and to his eternal credit rejected playing up the race issue, even declaring the CRA, which he had voted against, should be given a chance to work once it was the law of the land. There's no indication, as far as I know, that Goldwater was a racist or anything less than a man of solid principle, and the simple fact of support
from racists -- who may desire a common goal for completely different reasons-- doesn't change that. It would be just as fallacious to infer that through the logical back door, and I mean 'back door' in both senses.
So this point was about behavior patterns -- illustrated by vote. My grandfather used to tell this story of counting votes in the 1940 election, in southern Mississippi:
"Roosevelt"...
"Roosevelt"...
"Roosevelt"...
"Wilkie"...
"Roosevelt"...
"Wilkie -- aw shoot, we gotta throw the ballot out. Some damn fool voted twice!"
As always the humor is based on a reality -- that being that voting for or associating with the party of Lincoln in the South was, for 99 years, unthinkable. The maps above clearly show exactly when that reversed itself.
And yet that anecdote took place in
Lincoln County, Mississippi.
It is not a simple, straightforward, dichotomous cops-and-robbers, good guys vs. bad guys world we live in. Those who try to portray it as such
::Lush:: cough ::Rimjob: are using Eliminationist tactics to polarize the gullible. History is complex, Political parties are
not some kind of static fixed point in space, and they are
not defined by anyone associated with them that we cherrypick for the occasion. That kind of bullshit is not argument. It's cheapass rhetorical fluff, verbal cotton candy -- all air and no substance.
We can do better than that.