Joe Conason: Joe Wilson’s Confederate Cronies

[babylonsister]

Joe Wilson’s Confederate Cronies

Posted on Sep 16, 2009

By Joe Conason


The stupid misconduct of entertainer Kanye West and politician Joe Wilson demonstrated, if any fresh proof is necessary, that thoughtless rudeness isn’t confined by ethnicity, ideology or background.

snip//

As a staunch defender of the antebellum way of life, he has advocated displaying Confederate symbols on public property and opposed the Martin Luther King holiday, and sought to restore the reputation of slave owners.

His magazine used to market T-shirts denigrating Abraham Lincoln that displayed a portrait of Lincoln above the slogan “Sic Semper Tyrannis”—the phrase shouted by John Wilkes Booth after he shot the Civil War president. No doubt Quinn considered the assassination, too, to be an expression of “patriotism,” although not to the United States of America.

It is not accidental that Wilson is a client of the Quinn firm (which has also represented John McCain, much to the Arizona senator’s shame). The South Carolina congressman is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, once a relatively harmless organization of nostalgic Southerners that has been transformed into a virulently racist outfit in recent years.

Before his election to Congress, Wilson was among the tiny minority of state legislators in South Carolina who fought to the bitter end for the right to fly a Confederate flag over the Statehouse—a campaign in which those die-hards enjoyed the support of Quinn’s fundraising and publicity apparatus.

This is the ugly underside of the farthest right-wing elements of the Republican Party. Promoting Joe Wilson as a symbol of the GOP is a dangerous game, but it is nothing new for a political leadership that has been flirting with the neo-Confederates for decades now. Ever since Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party in 1948, what was once the party of Lincoln has veered closer and closer to the ideology of his assassin.

Even now, Republican leaders in Washington—presumably including the black chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele—make common cause with the neo-Confederates. They pretend not to notice the Dixie flags, the habitual expressions of racism and bigotry or the poisonous attitude toward Lincoln, King and the other saviors of the nation. And they pretend that the politicians who stoke these smoldering hatreds are loyal to the same ideals as the rest of us.

more...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090916_joe_wilsons_dixie_partisans/

[jeffbr]

1. White president would never hear 'You lie!'

http://www.suntimes.com/news/mitchell/1775458,CST-NWS-mitch17.article

[LuvNewcastle]

2. The antebellum way of life wasn't

just about mint juleps on the veranda. It was about keeping 90% of the population in poverty through slavery and subsistence farming. People who glorify the antebellum South conveniently forget that the vast majority of whites were not a lot better off than slaves. The upper classes played the poor whites against the blacks to keep them from finding common cause and overthrowing the predatory plantation system. The Republican Party is still doing this today.

[lumpy]

3. Yea verily.

Some scenarios never change. The wealthy upper class (corporate capitalists) are still using the under-educated, working class to continue the modern predatory 'plantation' system.

[imdjh]

5. As a rule, farming isn't about drinking gin on the porch.

People who glorify life in the South or the North of the time haven't done their homework. Most of them have watched TV shows or had some teacher tell him what he thinks on the subject. The most astounding stuff is attributed to "my professor". Oddly, I have never read a history book which footnotes census, church, and land records. That doesn't give me a lot of confidence in those books, even if I enjoy the story.

If you go through the 1850/1860 census records, church, and land records of Virginia and the Carolinas you don't find any "plantation system". A plantation is nothing but a farm- some are big and some are small. A "mansion house" is simply where the farm owner lives, as opposed to the various other dwellings and special purpose buildings; most often it was a plain single story or "cape cod" type house. Some people were rich, some people were poor, and a whole bunch were somewhere in between.

[Faygo Kid]

4. This is tremendously underreported. Wilson is a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans.

That alone isn't enough, but add his whole history up (worked for Thurmond, his earlier statements and votes, etc.) - and remember, he grew up when drinking fountatins were labeled, "colored" - and Maureen Dowd was absolutely right. It wasn't just "You Lie," it was "You Lie, Boy!" Limbaugh has also crossed the line here, but the media is so scared to death of him they won't call him out on it.

Sadly, Wilson's racism probably mirrors that of the voters in his district. Cold day in Hell when I spend a dime of my money in South Carolina.