Comment

Maneli Jamal: Morning in Adanac

289
palomino4/21/2012 3:55:40 pm PDT

re: #272 SanFranciscoZionist

I have absolutely no expectations of Mitt Romney’s behavior. Mitt will do whatever the hell he thinks will work. We’ve seen that already.

I’m not even going to tell Obama, should he call me and ask for advice, not to play hard and dirty. This is a national election we’re talking about here.

But that was, oddly enough, my condemnation of the Southern Strategy that you responded to, and you’re also responding negatively to Dark’s statement that it was something Nixon had to do for the sake of the election. What’s the right response here? If the Democrats had kept their old, sick racists somehow, and won on the back of that, would it have been OK?

My stance is ‘there’s shit you shouldn’t do’. Not, ‘you have to be as pure as the driven snow all the time’, but just ‘there’s shit you shouldn’t do’.

No, of course the Dems wouldn’t have been justified if they’d excused the southern reactionaries in their party. But the Dems always had another wing, at least going back to the early 1900’s—a progressive wing that stood for civil rights. Signing the CRA of 1964 was, for all practical purposes, the victory of that progressive wing and, at the same time, a big “fuck you” to southern Dems from their own party. So my point is that now I’m a Dem because they essentially purged the most backward element of the party 40+ years ago.