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Leftwing journalist slimes US conservatives on civil rights
Gerard Jackson
Geoff Elliott, Washington correspondent for Murdoch’s Australian just cannot reign in his hatred of conservatives. It seems that every ‘news story’ he writes is heavily slanted against them. This time he used illegal immigration to bash conservatives as being “reactionary” (Bush fails to quell fears over migrants, 17 May 2006). So it appears that in Elliott’s scheme of things Americans should just sit aback and abandon their borders. If America was to do such a thing it wouldn’t be America for very long. Perhaps that’s why Elliott likes the idea.
According to Elliott the Democrats has always been the “traditional supporters of minorities ”. This is pretty rich as well as being lousy history when one considers that the Republican Party was the Party of abolition, its central policy plank, while the Democrats were the Party of slavery, secession, Jim Crow laws, lynching, literacy tests and poll taxes on blacks. In fact, the Democrats strongly opposed over a dozen anti-lynching provisions — and this was just in the last century.
Elliott also overlooked, he overlooks quite a lot when it comes to Democrats, that it was the Democrats who opposed the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection and that Fifteenth Amendment that guaranteed voting rights. All of these amendments were carried out by the Republican Party.
These are facts that the ideologically motivated Elliott deliberately ignored. It is evident that if the facts do not fit into Elliott’s leftwing template then they cease to be facts. (Perhaps he had post-modernist lecturers). History, though not most historians, is on the side of Republicans and reveals that their record on civil rights is exemplary while the Democrats’ record is despicable.
There were some 26 major civil rights votes after 1933. These votes reveal the Republican record as splendid with Republicans favouring civil rights in nearly 100 per cent of the votes. On and the hand, Democrats opposed civil rights for blacks in over 80 per cent of the votes.
In 1957 President Eisenhower — a Republican president , not a Democrat — became the first president to order troops into the South since President Ulysses S. Grant. 101st Airborne to help integrate a school in Little Rock. The governor who tried to block the way was a Democrat, just Bull O’Connor was. It was a Republican judge, Earl Warren who was an Eisenhower appointee, who confronted the South’s who finally brought about the full emancipation of all of America's blacks. And it was a Republican president who supported him.
I’ll allow that not all Democrats were tainted. In 1957 Lyndon Johnson pushed 1957 Civil Rights Act, the one that J. F. Kennedy tried to avoid, that only passed with the support of Republicans. Evan a casual reading of history reveals that , 82 percent of Republican Senators voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Acts as against 69 per cent of Democrats. The contrast in the House of Representatives was even more striking. 80 percent of the Republicans voted for the Act while 61 per cent of Democrats voted against it, one of whom was Al Gore’s racist father.
In the light of the Democrats’ sordid history of opposing civil rights for blacks how can we assume that Elliott’s claim that the Democrats have been the “traditional supporters of minorities” was made in good faith? I myself cannot help but conclude that this is a sly attempt to paint conservatives as bigoted and intolerant. What else can it be when he ignored the fact that some Democrats are also concerned with the illegal immigration situation For example, Bill Richardson the New Mexico governor stated that the Bush administration “is failing at border security”.
There is something very wrong with journalism when leading reporters like Elliott feel free to continually lie and libel those whose politics they despise. Making it worse is their shocking is their ignorance economic history and basic economics.
More exposés of Elliot’s bigotry:
Journalist smears President Bush over Mary McCarthy’s treason
Murdoch journalists smear President Bush over NSA spying program
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 29 May 2006