Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's brief foray into reviving the fundamental myth of the Civil War by eliminating slavery from his Confederate History Month proclamation ended in one of those if-only-I-had-known-everybody-was-so-overly-sensitive apologies that politicians the world over deploy when caught in one of their own snares. Slavery, he eventually said after two days of pummeling, definitely was evil, vicious and led to the war. If only he had known about this history beforehand, he seems to be saying, he would never have left it out of the proclamation in the first place. Uh-huh.
I have to concede that, despite five years of schooling in Georgia where I learned about the "War of Northern Aggression" in segregated classrooms with my black and Indian classmates, I was a little surprised at McDonnell's blundering pander, the clumsiest dog-whistle since Trent Lott said we'd all be better off today if Strom Thurmond had won the Presidency in '48. Lott at least had the excuse that political blogs were new when he stepped in it.
Over at The New Republic, Ed Kilgore has a suggestion for McDonnell that would do a lot more good than his sleazy apology.
[A]s a white southerner old enough to remember the final years of Jim Crow, when every month was Confederate History Month, I have a better idea for McDonnell: Let’s have a Neo-Confederate History Month that draws attention to the endless commemorations of the Lost Cause that have wrought nearly as much damage as the Confederacy itself.
It would be immensely useful for Virginians and southerners generally to spend some time reflecting on the century or so of grinding poverty and cultural isolation that fidelity to the Romance in Gray earned for the entire region, regardless of race. Few Americans from any region know much about the actual history of Reconstruction, capped by the shameful consignment of African Americans to the tender mercies of their former masters, or about the systematic disenfranchisement of black citizens (and in some places, particularly McDonnell’s Virginia, of poor whites) that immediately followed.
A Neo-Confederate History Month could be thoroughly bipartisan. Republicans could enjoy greater exposure to the racism of such progressive icons as William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, not to mention Democratic New Deal crusaders in the South like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo. The capture of the political machinery of Republican and Democratic parties in a number of states, inside and beyond the South, by the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, would be an interesting subject for further study as well.
Most of all, a Neo-Confederate History Month could remind us of the last great effusion of enthusiasm for Davis and Lee and Jackson and all the other avatars of the Confederacy: the white southern fight to maintain racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s when "Dixie" was played as often as the national anthem at most white high school football games in the South; when Confederate regalia were attached to state flags across the region; and when the vast constitutional and political edifice of pre-secession agitprop was brought back to life in the last-ditch effort to make the Second Reconstruction fail like the first.
Bob McDonnell should be particularly responsible, as a former Attorney General of his state, for reminding us all of the "massive resistance" doctrine preached by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd in response to federal judicial rulings and pending civil rights laws, and of the "interposition" theory of nullification spread most notably by Richmond News Leader editor James Jackson Kilpatrick.
Any Neo-Confederate History Month would be incomplete, of course, without reference to the contemporary conservative revival of states’ rights and nullification theories redolent of proto-Confederates, Confederates, and neo-Confederates. ...
So give it up, governor: If you are going to have a Confederate History Month, at least be honest enough to acknowledge that the legacy of the Confederacy didn’t die at Appomattox.
h/t to digby
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:
While the WaPo channels Scott McClellan, let me channel the facts. President Bush did not selectively leak highly classified information to "set the record straight." He wielded his executive power in a partisan, pointed way with a singular purpose: to cover his ass, and to ensure a second term.
It is this simple fact that tends to get lost in the intricate discussions of the Plame scandal. If the President wanted to clear the air, he would have released the NIE in its entirety, to the entire press. Yet the selective leaking allowed Bush to cherry-pick the intelligence (again). This time around, it wasn't done to mislead us into war, but to mislead the nation into believing the President was deserving of a second Bush term.