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Guess it depends on which year you look at because the previous year he was ranked at 55% and the following year he was ranked at 20%, so much for cherrypicking, but nice try. It still doesn't help your case because technically West Virginia would classify as a northern state therefore make Byrd a northern Democrat. One that I would hardly say represented all of the Democrats, north or south.
Well it is good to know wikipedia considers him to be a Southern Democrat, even though West Virginia was a part of the North after seceding from the rest of the state of Virginia in the Civil War....regardless, I can't tell you why the idiots in West Virginia kept reelecting Byrd.
You see this meme come up time and time again. In the recent thread by Trace, no less than 3 liberal posters said that the Democratic segregationists were conservatives. This is a myth.
In her excellent book Mugged: racial demagoguery from the seventies to Obama, Ann Coulter
Oh geez, I missed the Ann Coulter part, if there is a heaven and hell, that woman is a descendant of a demon from hell and probably should be sent back to where she came from.
Location: The Land Mass Between NOLA and Mobile, AL
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Quote:
Originally Posted by urbanlife78
You just heard of the term Blue Dog? Heck, the coalition for the Blue Dogs was formed in 1995, it even has a Wikipedia page, was your Google broken?
Byrd is whatever right wingers want Byrd to be, personally I don't care, idiots in West Virginia kept electing him.
This. I started reading about Blue Dog Dems when I moved to TX in 1998; this is not a new thing. These arguments are to a large extent pointless because as labels, party affiliations and "liberal" and "conservative" have been so overladen with meaning and over-determined as to become almost meaningless. Did Dixiecrats in the 1950s and 1960s want to "conserve" the so-called southern way of life and thus behaved as social conservatives? Certainly--read McMillen's The Citizens' Council if you have any doubt of that. Did they at the same time pursue graft for their states? Of course; what else would one do as elected officials of relatively poor states? Theodore Bilbo is a prime early example of that in MS; he was wildly popular in the poorest parts of white MS for decades through 1947 when he died in Poplarville in the Pine Belt region, though he was a rabid race-baiter. (See Redneck Liberal or his own Take Your Choice for more. Did they defect en masse for the Republican Party in the 1960s? You can't really make the argument that they did not with a straight face; just look at Strom Thurmond's 1957 and 1964 filibuster efforts and subsequent move to the Republican camp and then at Trent Lott's career as a MS Rep and Sen.
The same Eisenhower-sponsored big-government programs that underwrote, say, the Interstate highway system benefited rural states just as much and arguably more than their urban counterparts, as did (and do) agricultural subsidies.
The reality of shifting southern and northern and racial dynamics is and was much more complicated in terms of party affiliation and relative levels of what we now might label "conservative" or "liberal" positions than parts of this conversation would suggest. Wouldn't it serve us better to move beyond historical quibbling, labeling, and name-calling, and to talk about solutions to problems we face us as a shared society? Wouldn't it be better to think about what best benefits our polity in terms of policy and not childish points-scored antics? If we're all always trying to claim the moral and intellectual high ground, then we are all stranded.
What democrats in 2015 are denying that democrats used to be segregationist, pro-slavery or were the party of the KKK?? What democrats are saying is that the parties switched after the civil rights movement.
What I said is that Democrats in 2015 often claim that the segregationist Democrats of the 50's-60's era were conservative. If you doubt that, read through the thread by Trace. There are at least 3 instances of it in the thread.
As I stated in post#1, there were a small number of Democratic segregationists who could be called conservative, but the overwhelming majority were statist, pro-tax-and-spenders, or in today's vernacular, liberals.
Oh geez, I missed the Ann Coulter part, if there is a heaven and hell, that woman is a descendant of a demon from hell and probably should be sent back to where she came from.
And the fabricated quote, another favorite tactic from the left.
Yes. But we managed to rid the party of segregationists and took a stand against racism . The republican base needs to consider a similar shift in policy.
So which current Republicans would you consider as segregationist?
As far as the Confederate flag goes, the Democrats put it up, and the Republicans took it down. That is a historical fact that no honest person will try to deny.
Very well put. And in fact it was Sen. Fritz Hollings (D, SC) one of the people on my list in post #1, who was instrumental in putting the flag up at that SC Capitol building.
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