An interesting read here.
Money Quote:
For some reason it does not say that Eisenhower said that his appointment of liberal justices Warren and Brennan were his “two biggest mistakes.” According to Warren, Eisenhower told him prior to Brown, “These [Southerners] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”
Opposing activist judges like the ones Eisenhower regrettably nominated continues to elect Republicans to this day. In fact “Courts”—unlike immigration or affirmative action—are one of the six defining issues for the Party on GOP.com.
How about Lincoln? Nowhere does GOP.com even mention that he saved the Union and won the Civil War—or for that matter that he believed he had, “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.” Instead, his accomplishments are reduced to his support for the abolition of Slavery.
Save Ronald Reagan, the only heroic Republicans are ones who base their career solely on uplifting African Americans.
The new GOP.com also provides an extended timeline of the Republican Party’s greatest accomplishments. Below are every single of one of the Party’s pre-1960 actions:
Republicans Established the Transcontinental Railroad
Republicans Passed the Land-Grant College Act
The Highest Point in Washington, DC [This refers to the addition of the Freedom Statue atop the Capital, however, they somehow made this entry about the Emancipation of Slavery in DC]
The First Hispanic Governor was a Republican Republicans Freed the Slaves
Republicans Passed the 14th Amendment
Republicans Established the Buffalo Soldiers
Republicans Established Howard University
Memorial DayRepublicans Passed the 15th Amendment
Republican Opposition to Plessy v. Ferguson
The First African-American Senator was a Republican
Republicans Outlawed the Ku Klux Klan
Yellowstone National Park
Republicans Passed the 1875 Civil Rights Act
A Republican Wrote the 19th Amendment
A Former Slave Chaired the 1884 Republican National Convention
First Women Mayors in the United States
A Republican President Appointed the First Jewish Cabinet Secretary [Only true, if you exclude Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin]
Republicans Passed the Indian Citizenship Act
The First Hispanic U.S. Senator was a Republican
The First Asian-American U.S. Senator was a Republican
The Republican Party First Called for Ending Racial Segregation in the Military
A Republican Integrated the University of Mississippi
A Republican Wrote the Brown v. Board of Education decision [Again, Earl Warren, the first Judicial Activist]
Republicans Established the Federal Highway System
Republicans Passed the 1957 Civil Rights Act
Republicans Ended Racial Segregation in Little Rock.
So, of the Republicans 28 greatest accomplishments during its first 100 years, only five do not involve helping women or minorities.
Trust Busting? Peaceful resolution of the Korean War? The Taft-Hartley Act—or for that matter, the 1924 Immigration Act? All are deemed unimportant.
Interestingly enough, just as none of the post-1960 Republican heroes are minorities, none of the nine post-1957 accomplishments of the GOP involved uplifting blacks?
What happened? Those evil Southern Democrats, whom the GOP.com derides, started voting for the GOP because they were fed up with the increasingly liberal Democrats. Beginning with the Dixiecrat walk out to support Strom Thurmond—who later became a Republican—in 1948, the South slowly left the Democrats and eventually voted en bloc for Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.
In fact, many major Southern Democratic politicians—starting with Thurmond but continuing on through Mills E. Godwin, Jesse Helms, Phil Graham, Richard Shelby, and Virgil Goode—switched parties.
If someone attended the Five Minutes University on postwar electoral politics, the lesson would be: “Southerners voted Democratic. Blacks voted Republican. They switched parties.”
If they spent a few more minutes, they’d learn that because Southerners and then working class ethnic whites who were upset with the left wing racial, feminist, and cultural policies left the Democratic Party, the New Deal Coalition that kept the GOP out of power for nearly forty years collapsed and the Republicans dominated politics from 1968 until the election of Obama.
In the process, the GOP became less attractive to minorities, while the Democrats became the party of Willie Horton and Jeremiah Wright.
I hate to say it; but he is right.