Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

the American Enterprise Institute, believes that Thurmond may have died as long as three
years ago, and that the Republicans have since been pursuing a Weekend at Bernie's strategy
because the governor of South Carolina is a Democrat and the GOP wanted to keep the seat.
Once the controversy had gained momentum, almost no one was willing to defend
Lott's remarks. Some conservative commentators couldn't resist using their de rigueur reprimands
of Lott as a jumping off point for malicious distortions of the history of U.S. racial
politics.
Sean Hannity was the poster boy for this conservative tic. "Segregation is the legacy
of the Democratic Party," Sean would say over and over again. He and his clansmen (including
Ann Coulter) based this on the true but fatuously disingenuous factoid that a higher percentage
of Republican senators voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than Democrats. That's
because racist Southern Democratic senators (like, say, Strom Thurmond) voted against the
historic legislation. Southern Democrats. Dixiecrats. Get it?
Sean knows very well that it was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that ended
segregation. He knows this because he lived in Newt Gingrich's ass from 1994 to 1998, so
Sean had to have heard it when Newt declared, "It was the liberal wing of the Democratic
Party that ended segregation." This was in Newt's historic speech to the House when he first
took the gavel as Speaker.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he is said to have
turned to an aide and remarked, "We have just lost the South for a generation." The Republican
Party became the home to Southern bigots and still is today.
While the Democratic Party lost the South that year, they did gain my dad. A lifelong
Republican who voted for Herbert Hoover and every GOP presidential candidate through
Nixon, Dad switched parties in 1964 because the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, had
voted against the Civil Rights Act. Dad, a card-carrying member of the NAACP, always told
us that Jews couldn't be against civil rights. He never voted Republican again.
Five weeks before Thurmond's birthday party, Georgia's Democratic Governor Roy
Barnes lost his race for reelection. As governor, Barnes had reduced the size of the Confederate
emblem on the state flag, and his opponent Sonny Perdue seized on it as an issue. One
hundred and eighty thousand more rural white voters turned out in 2002 than had in 1998. I
spoke with Max Cleland, who, in addition to being pictured with Osama bin Laden and Sad-