Disgusting GOP Revisionism

When I was in High School, I was the star of our basketball team. During the summertime, I was a child star at the Goodspeed Opera House, playing lead children’s roles in musicals headed for Broadway.

And, the town in which I grew up was the wealthiest town in Connecticut, with tons of mansions and manicured lawns and expensive shops and fabulous restaurants.

None of the above paragraph is true. I had a bum knee, I was in the audience, not on the stage, at the Goodspeed, and the town in which I grew up has no restaurants, no shops – there is a General Store – and we have no traffic signals.

Yesterday, in an interview at the Hoover Institution, Mississippi’s Governor Haley Barbour said that he attended an integrated high school and “we never thought twice about it,” and blamed the old Democrats for segregation, and seemed to link the rise of the Republican Party in the South with the success of integration, as if there was a cause and effect.

Haley Barbour was born October 22, 1947. Do the Math. He would have gotten to Ole Miss around 1964, just after the entire campus had been engulfed in violence when James Meredith became the first black to enroll at the university. And, the reason the Democrats lost the South was because of their support for racial integration as LBJ predicted when he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Here is Rachel Maddow’s takedown of Barbour’s comments. This is important. Very important. The degree to which people can re-write their own history is the degree to which we, as a people, will believe anything or nothing. Next thing you know, Republicans are going to argue that Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya.