White supremacists at CPAC

I thought I'd post this, not just because it's kind of funny, but because I hear a lot of this kind of thing, myself.

Yes, it's a "short political memory" - or a complete ignorance of history - and political opportunism, both. Certainly, today's Democratic Party is not the party of 100 years ago, let alone the party of 150 years ago!

I often talk about the Republican Party's 'Southern strategy,' because it's so important in understanding why the GOP has become what it has. After all, the South (white Southerners, at least) had been solidly Democratic for more than a century, though increasingly unhappy with that.

Heck, in 1948, the Dixiecrats ran Strom Thurmond as their own segregationist candidate for president and almost cost Harry S. Truman the election - not because he took many states, but because all of those electoral college votes would have normally been a lock for the Democratic candidate. Republicans had no power at all in the South.

That's completely upside down now. After the Democratic Party decided to support equal rights for racial minorities - doing the right thing, even when it was going to hurt them politically - the Republican Party deliberately set out to woo racists and took the entire South for themselves. The South went from being solidly Democratic to solidly Republican, just like that.

African Americans, who used to support "the party of Lincoln" (when they were allowed to vote at all), left the GOP in droves. Well, what else would you expect? But the idea that 90-some percent of African Americans support the "KKK party" is just asinine. I mean, how could you even imagine something so stupid?

Oh, well. The Republican Party wooed racists just like they wooed Christian fundamentalists (often the same people) and for the same reason: political power. They wanted to use those people in order to give tax cuts to the rich. But those people became the GOP base, and they weren't willing to settle for rhetoric.

Well, now that America is changing, Republican leaders want to do the same thing with Hispanics (in particular) and other racial minorities. They don't want to change their policies, of course. They just want to persuade them to vote Republican, so the GOP can get the political power to continue supporting the wealthy.

After all, they're pretty shaken up. In the last election, they discovered that money is not a complete substitute for votes.