A history makeover by Haley.

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I have no problem when folks go through a "Pauline Conversion", I really don't. Some people have their road to Damascus moment in life a little later than others. But what I don't like is a liar. Someone who tries to twist history and facts as we all know them to suit their own selfish purpose.

So anyway, I read the Salon article that someone sent to me about Haley Barbour, (h/t Greg Fuller) and the author nailed it. He broke down the "Southern Strategy" which has been perfected by the republican party, and by doing so he exposed Barbour for the fraud that he is:

"Almost 50 years ago, the Republican Party made a decision to embrace the backlash generated by civil rights among white Southerners.

Traditionally, they had been staunch Democrats, but they were also culturally conservative, and as Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party embraced civil rights once and for all, they were up for grabs. The Republican Party offered them a home, a steady, decades-long realignment ensued, and today conservative Southern whites comprise the heart of the GOP -- just as culturally liberal Northerners, who called the GOP home before civil rights, have migrated to the Democratic Party.

There's nothing new about this story. In fact, it's the story LBJ himself predicted when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and supposedly mused, "There goes the South for a generation."

But it's an inconvenient story for today's Republican Party, which still relies on cultural, racial and ethnic wedge issues to keep its base in line -- but which also needs to win over less conservative suburbanites across the country to compete in national elections. And it's a particularly inconvenient story for Haley Barbour, the 62-year-old Mississippi governor who aspires to run as the Republican nominee against the nation's first black president.

So Barbour has invented his own sanitized, suburb-friendly version of history -- an account that paints the South's shift to the GOP as the product of young, racially inclusive conservatives who had reasons completely separate and apart from racial politics for abandoning their forebears' partisan allegiances. In an interview with Human Events that was posted on Wednesday, Barbour insists that "the people who led the change of parties in the South ... was my generation. My generation who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college -- never thought twice about it." Segregationists in the South, in his telling, were "old Democrats," but "by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't gonna be that way anymore. So the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.'" [Article]

You have got to be kidding me! By his time people realized it was the past? Yeah, OK, and I have a wonderful antique bell in my hometown to sell anyone who would like to make me an offer. It has a slight crack on the side but it would make a lovely lawn ornament.

And, speaking of lawn ornaments; I really have to wonder how some of you black conservatives can continue to support this party. Do you really believe that they have all become Paul of Tarsus all of a sudden? Do you really believe, that in their hearts, they view you as equals? If you do believe that please keep jigging along. Don't worry, we are so used to it that we hardly notice you anymore.

Haley will keep lying, and folks will continue to expose him. But, A-merry-ca won't notice. He will run for President and he just might get elected. Hey, America elected a black man, why not a good ole boy from Mississippi?

* Pic lifted from Salon.