BUSH: The answer to your question is—and what you’re trying to get me to do is to express the will of the people of South Carolina—
WILLIAMS: No, I’m asking you about your personal opinion—
BUSH: The people of South Carolina, Brian, I believe the people of South Carolina can figure out what to do with this flag issue. It’s the people of South Carolina—
WILLIAMS: If I may—
BUSH: I don’t believe it’s the role of someone from outside South Carolina and someone running for president to come into this state and tell the people of South Carolina what to do with their business when it comes to the flag.
WILLIAMS: As an American citizen, do you have a visceral reaction to seeing the Confederate flag—
BUSH: As an American citizen, I trust the people of South Carolina to make the decision for South Carolina.18
In a breathtaking bit of legerdemain, John Edwards once said of the Confederate flag: “I had such a strong reaction to seeing it there, the first time.”19 Strong–good, or strong-bad? Journalists didn’t ask. Oh, to run for president as a Democrat.
The Confederate flag is a totally synthetic issue that liberals use to slander southerners and insult blacks. Liberals take sadistic pleasure in telling blacks that everyone hates them—except themselves. Trust no one but a liberal, the truest, most loyal friend anyone has ever had.
The Confederate flag is a reflection of the South’s warrior ethic that black Americans share more than white New Yorkers. Despite the media’s obsessive claims that the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism, in 2001 about 30 percent of blacks in Mississippi voted to keep the 1894 state flag, which displays the Confederate flag in the upper left corner.
What is commonly known as the Confederate flag—by Vermonters, for example—is the Southern Cross, the battle flag Confederate troops carried into the field. It was not the official flag of the Confederacy and never flew over any Confederate buildings. It was the flag of the Confederate Army.
Confederate soldiers fought because they lived in the South—not because they held a brief for slavery. As the historian Shelby Foote described it: “You have to understand that the raggedy Confederate soldier who owned no slaves and probably couldn’t even read the Constitution, let alone understand it, when he was captured by Union soldiers and asked, What are you fighting for? replied, I’m fighting because you’re down here.”20
At an abstract level, of course, the war was about slavery, but that’s not why the soldiers fought. They didn’t own slaves—their honor is really inviolate. And they were spectacular soldiers.
The Confederate battle flag is a symbol of military valor, not racism. Although the South was outnumbered by the North in men of military age 4.4 to 1, was outgunned in firearms production 32 to 1, and had only one-third the wealth of the North, “the south was superior to the north in the intensity of its warrior ethic,” as David Hackett Fischer says in Albion’s Seed. In 1852, there was one militia officer for every 216 men in Massachusetts; there was one officer for every sixteen men in North Carolina.21
The Confederate soldiers also fought for Robert E. Lee, who was as much a symbol of the South as the battle flag. Lee opposed slavery and had freed all his slaves. He fought on the Confederate side because Virginia was his home. His men, many of them hungry and barefoot, followed him because of his personal qualities of honor and because they lived in the South, too. When General George Pickett rallied his men before their history-making charge at Gettysburg, all he needed to say was: “Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia.”
A small number of blacks served in the Confederate army, presumably for reasons other than their support of slavery. In February 2003, a Confederate funeral was held for Richard Quarls, a slave who had served in the Confederate States Army alongside his master’s son and fought in several battles. Quarls’s great-granddaughter said he was proud to be the only black person from Tarpon Springs to attend the 1916 National Convention of the United Confederate Veterans in Washington, DC, where he saw the president. He drew a Confederate soldier’s pension, which his wife continued receiving until her death in 1951. When he was freed, after the war, Quarls changed his name to Christopher Columbus.
The 2003 memorial service was organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy after Quarls’s unmarked grave was discovered. Though Quarls had died in 1925, the service was packed, with about a hundred fifty people attending, including Quarls’s descendants, community leaders, Civil War reenactors and Confederate daughters. Also attending was Quarls’s great-great-great-grandson, Michael Brown, an enlisted man in the U.S. Air Force. They sang “Dixie.” Quarls’s great-granddaughter told the newspapers: “He was a proud man and would have been honored to see this.”22
It is the proud military heritage of the South that the Confederate flag represents—a heritage that belongs to all southerners, black and white. The whole country’s military history is shot through with southerners. Obviously boys from all over fought in this country’s wars, and fought bravely, but it is simply a fact that southerners are overrepresented in this country’s heroic annals.
Among the sons of the South are: Sergeant Alvin York, who received the Medal of Honor in WWI for leading seven men to capture a hundred twenty-eight Germans, including four officers (Tennessee); Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of WWII (Texas); General Lucius Clay, commander of the Berlin Airlift (Georgia); Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Pacific commander in chief of the navy during World War II (Texas); General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded Allied forces in WWII in the Southwest Pacific (Arkansas); General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam (South Carolina); Lieutenant General Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, considered by many to be the greatest marine ever and the only one to be awarded the Navy Cross five times for heroism and gallantry in combat (Virginia); and Tommy Franks, who led the attack on the Taliban (Texas).
The large number of blacks in the military is a reflection of the disproportionate number of southerners in the military.
Freddie Stowers, the only African American to receive the Medal of Honor for his service in World War I, was from South Carolina. After his commanding officers had been killed, Stowers led his combat unit up a hill occupied by the Germans. Stowers and his men took out a German machine gun nest and were advancing toward a second German trench when Stowers was hit by machine gun fire. He kept going. Then he was hit a second time. As he lay dying, he ordered his men to continue. They did, and drove the Germans from the hill. Seventy-three years later, President George H. W. Bush awarded the medal posthumously to Stowers in a White House ceremony attended by Stowers’s sisters.
Five black marines were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for their service in Vietnam for diving on exploding enemy grenades to protect their comrades. Three of the five were from the South.
The majority of military bases in the continental United States are named after Confederate officers—Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Fort Hood, Fort Polk, Fort Rucker. Former senator and secretary of the navy James Webb describes southern soldiers in his military novels whispering “and for the South,” under their breath when reciting their duty to their country. They go to war not for Old Glory, he writes, “but for this vestige of lost hope called the South.” This is a shared cultural ethic among all southerners, not just the “Sons of the Confederacy.”23
It is pride in the South’s military history—encompassing both races—that the Confederate battle flag represents, a pride in values that exist independently of the institution of slavery. The American flag could just as well be said to symbolize slavery: Slavery was legal in the United States for far longer than the Confederate flag ever flew.
Northern liberals and race demagogues try to turn the Confederate flag into a badge of shame, in the process spitting on America’s gallant warrior class. As with desegregation, Republicans could have used some of this Democratic dudgeon back when the war was being foug
ht.
SOUTH CAROLINA—MCCAIN—2000
The alleged smearing of “the McCain family” in South Carolina was a total hoax. According to the myth, before the 2000 South Carolina primary, the Bush campaign made phone calls to voters implying that McCain had an illegitimate black child. As Linda Wertheimer reported on National Public Radio: “Mysterious callers posing as pollsters asked voters how they felt about John McCain’s black child.”24
That never happened. After a massive investigation by the media into Bush’s mudslinging against their then-heartthrob McCain, they turned up nothing. Bush even took the unusual step of ordering the release of all phone scripts being used in the robocalls. Still nothing. And that was with hundreds of thousands of these calls being made, thousands of which should have ended up on answering machines throughout the state.
The closest anyone came was one single email sent by a Bob Jones professor, Richard Hand, to a dozen of his friends, claiming McCain had fathered two children with his first wife before marrying her. Hand did not claim that the children were black. He had no connection to the Bush campaign. McCain had, in fact, adopted his first wife’s children from a prior marriage, which Hand simply assumed were fathered by McCain. Hand discovered his error and apologized for his incorrect email before any votes were cast.25
It’s always the same jumble of fact-free invective repeated to the point of delirium. Liberals say conservatives speak in code to communicate with bigots, but they’re the ones with code words for their racist myths—southern strategy, McCain in South Carolina, Bob Jones, Trent Lott, dog whistles, Goldwater, Reagan’s kickoff speech, Strom Thurmond’s birthday party, the “other,” white fear, white picket fences, and on and on. (Also, when liberals say they have gone “duck-hunting,” that’s code for “antiquing.”)
CODE WORDS—LAW AND ORDER, WELFARE
Liberals claim Republicans speak in racist code words for the simple reason that Republicans aren’t saying anything that’s objectively racist. The idea of looking past people’s words and actions to discover some secret motive comes straight from the communist playbook. The kulaks are bad; the proletariat, good. But wait! Some proletariat don’t listen to us—they’re bad! They’re “lumpen proletariat.” Facts aren’t important, it’s what is in your hearts. As determined by liberals.
On the Charlie Rose Show in 2007, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed that “race is central to how the conservative movement got where it is in America today.” He said Ronald Reagan’s political career “was largely based on tacit race-baiting.”26 Even Charlie Rose took exception to such inanity, and suggested that anticommunism was somewhat more central to Reagan’s worldview.
“Well, Okay. If you want,” Krugman allowed. “There was some of that.” But he barged on, saying Reagan “had passion on two things, communism and welfare cheats. And he didn’t have to say what color the welfare cheats were. It just always got through.”
That was remarkably stupid, even for Paul Krugman. For those of us who know something about Reagan, his big issues were anticommunism, tax cuts, abortion and small government. Even when he did talk about welfare, it was to criticize government bureaucrats who kept people dependent on government for their own interests.
Thus, for example, in Reagan’s famed speech at the Neshoba County fair, he said he didn’t believe people were on welfare “simply because they prefer to be there.” Rather, he said, it was the welfare bureaucrats who kept them “so economically trapped that there’s no way they can get away. And they’re trapped because that bureaucracy needs them as a clientele to preserve the jobs of the bureaucrats themselves.”27
To be fair to liberals, even Charlie Rose was perplexed by Krugman’s claim, noting that distaste for welfare might have some rationale other than hatred of black people.
The other big “dog whistle” proving the Republicans’ “southern strategy” is any mention of law and order. Why must Republicans prattle on so about crime? It’s one thing to talk about crime a little bit. But if you start talking about it too much, you’re a racist. (Which is hard to square with liberals’ stalwart refusal to acknowledge an inordinately high crime rate among young black men.)
In Newsweek, Jon Meacham said that when Nixon “talked about ‘law and order,’ it was not hard to figure out what he meant.” 28 I’m not certain, but I think he meant: law and order.
In the 1960s crime was exploding, the courts were issuing criminal-law decisions to warm an ACLUer’s heart and the colleges were exploding with violent student protests. Only a race-obsessed neurotic could think the public’s concern about crime was really about racism.
But the “concern-about-crime-is-racist” thesis kept popping up as a statement of raw, irrefutable fact. A few years later, Jonathan Alter wrote—also in Newsweek—in case its readers missed it the first twenty-seven times—“In 1968, Richard Nixon used code words like ‘law and order’ to exploit racial fears as part of his ‘southern strategy.’”29
So welfare and crime it is! Those are the ground-zero code words, the dog whistles, the irrefutable proof of racism in Republican hearts. We’re all agreed on that, yes?
Those also happen to be the two issues liberals tout as Clinton’s major policy triumphs. At the end of the Clinton administration, an article in the New York Times gushed that he had “co-opted the Republicans’ longstanding political advantage on issues from crime to the economy to welfare.” It was one of his “striking strengths,” the Times said.30
Why was it racist when Republicans talked about crime and welfare but brilliant policy making when a Democrat “co-opted” those issues?
Two years later the Times ran a column by Joe Klein also praising Clinton for being “candid about crime in the inner cities, about the disastrous consequences of out-of-wedlock births and the need for welfare reform.”31 But when a Republican is candid about crime or welfare, it’s racist.
There was no new twist to Clinton’s crime and welfare policies. As a “third-way,” Democratic Leadership Council–admiring, triangulating Democrat, Clinton had merely claimed credit for Republican policies. When Democrats were losing politically on welfare and crime, they accused Republicans of racism. When Clinton capitulated to Republicans on those issues, he was hailed as a genius.
Clinton’s sole contribution to the Republicans’ welfare bill—besides claiming credit for it—was to sign it, kicking and screaming, and only at the point when it would have been too embarrassing for him not to, having specifically campaigned on reforming welfare.
As for law and order, Clinton’s contribution was to harass and stymie the one man most responsible for declining crime rates: New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. By virtually abolishing crime in one of the nation’s largest cities, he brought down the national crime rate. And the entire time he was doing it, Giuliani was hounded by liberals for being…guess what? Yes, racist.
In Giuliani’s first three years as mayor, the drop in crime in New York City alone was responsible for 35 percent of the reduction in crime nationally. As even the New York Times admitted in 1996, Giuliani “has already done as much to re-elect [Clinton] as any Democratic mayor” by lowering New York’s crime rate “so dramatically that it has driven down those of the country.”32 Soon other cities were emulating New York’s crime fighting practices, multiplying the effects of tough-on-crime policies that began in the mid-1990s under Giuliani.
And how did Clinton help this project? As Giuliani was implementing novel policing techniques that would change the nation, the Clinton administration denounced him as a racist. Democratic attacks on Giuliani’s crime policies kicked into high gear in 1999, just as Hillary Clinton was preparing to run for the Senate from New York. In order to dirty up Giuliani, her then-probable opponent, President Clinton unleashed the Justice Department, two U.S. attorneys and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Giuliani’s police.
The accidental shooting of a black man by four New York policemen in early 1999 gave the Clintons an opening. The c
ops had shot Haitian immigrant Amadou Diallo when he reached for his wallet and they thought he was reaching for a gun. One cop flinched, lost his balance and fell backwards, leading the others to believe he had been shot by Diallo, so they started firing. In response, the entire Democratic establishment wanted New York City put under federal monitors.
A footnote to the Diallo case that has been wiped from the record is that the cops had stopped Diallo because they were looking for a black man who had beaten and raped more than fifty black and Hispanic women in the previous six years, beginning in the Dinkins administration. Two months after the Diallo shooting, the cops caught the actual rapist, Isaac Jones, who looked strikingly similar to Diallo, lived a mile from where Diallo was shot and was heavily armed. The police found a cache of weapons in Jones’s car, including a 9mm MAC 11, a .380 semiautomatic pistol and a .22 caliber rifle.
The New York Times published more than two hundred articles on the Diallo shooting between the time he was killed in February 1999 and when Jones was apprehended a few months later. In the coming months, there would be hundreds more articles on Diallo. That’s almost as many as it published on Mitt Romney’s dog. But the Times saw fit to mention Isaac Jones—a vicious rapist who had been terrorizing black and Hispanic women until Giuliani’s police stopped him—in only one solitary article on page B-4.33
Immediately after the Diallo shooting, President Clinton used a presidential radio address to say that he was “deeply disturbed” by allegations of “continued racial profiling.”34 Racial profiling? Black women had identified a black man as their rapist. Hillary piped in with her deep concerns, too—even going so far as to accuse the four officers of “murder.” All four were later acquitted by a jury that included four black women.