Haley Barbour has taken a bold stand.
He was asked today in Jackson Mississippi if he would denounce the efforts of those seeking to create a license plate honoring Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. Given the choice of fighting for his principals or caving like a coward to political correctness, Barbour demurred.
According to the report in local media, he said he was out of the denouncing business altogether.
"I don't go around denouncing people...That's not going to happen. I don't even denounce the news media."
I just want to be the first to say, "That's awfully mighty white of him." (h/t to Cenobyte for proper colloquialism)
To be fair, it is hard to find a group of people more contemptable than the KKK, so I can understand him struggling with the comparison. But choosing the media? The Westboro Baptist Church doesn't count? I dunno, maybe the guy was having a stroke or something. For his sake, he might want to claim that as his defense. It certainly sounds better than the alternative...
I'm not saying he is a racist. Sure, he was a big supporter of segregationists in the Citizens Council, but as he told the Weekly Standard.
"You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK... Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders."
So... stay with me here... the Citizens Council was ok because they weren't the KKK. The license plate honoring the KKK founder is OK... because ... he wasn't part of the media I guess. Or maybe because the KKK wasn't supported by the Citizens Council. That's the group Barbour recently declared "totally indefensible." I guess it's a new variation on the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing. Of course, that's how folks think in the Middle East and don't expect Barbour to be buddy buddy with a bunch of crazy foreigners. Notice I said "buddy buddy." I didn't say anything about working relationships. After all, Barbour has taken money from the Mexican government to act as a lobbyist in favor of amnesty. But that's a good thing! It proves he's not racist. He's an opportunist. There's a big difference between those two.
In Barbour's defense (gee he seems to need a lot of defending -- but that's a topic we will treat with separate and equal time elsewhere) you can't blame him for taking the Mexican's money He probably figured he could go all Abramoff on the Mexicans because there was no chance that amnesty proposal would become law. That's not crazy, that's consistent. That the same argument Barbour offered to explain why he won't denounce the KKK vanity plates. ""I know there's not a chance it'll become law."
Speaking of things that don't stand a chance... I think Alex Pareene over at Salon pretty much wrote the name of that tune:
Mississippi governor Haley Barbour has somehow convinced himself that he has a shot at being president, despite the fact that he's a caricature of a corpulent, corrupt good ol' boy who continues to cash checks from the powerful lobbying firm he founded.
Unfortunately for this rapacious pugnacious bastard, his "base" is in the Tea Party and while they love their dog whistles, they also love their ideological consistency more than intellectuals love logical consistency -- in other words, you ain't gonna get them to give up their position until you pry their heads from their cold, dead collective ass.
I can't wait to see how he handles the brewing confrontation with the Tea bag crowd when they realize he acted as a paid agent for a foreign government working to promote amnesty for illegal immigrants. Whenever that happens, I pray they don't put it on C-SPAN 2. This could be the (side)show of the (off)season.