Lee Atwater on the Southern Strategy

[RandySF]

"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”"


http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy

[gopiscrap]

1. Yeah Atwater, a model republican

[question everything]

2. In 1988 he predicted that Clinton was going to be our nominee

and set the strategy on how to go after him.

Honestly, I was not surprised when I heard he had a sick brain - literally and figuratively - that killed him. Yes, I shocked someone standing next to me at a family dinner buffet with this comment but, hey.

[M.G.]

3. Never Forget.

Never forget.

Historical denial of the degree to which Republicans exploited racism in the late 60's and thereafter to gain national support has, shockingly, become the norm in mainstream conservative discourse. Every now and again one will hear the occasional honest conservative like Newt Gingrich (stopped clock, twice daily) admit that conservatives were on the wrong side of Civil Rights, but the sad truth is that one is much more likely to hear, say, Tea Partiers or conservative ideologues like Dinesh d'Souza claim hardline left-winger Martin Luther as among their ilk.

Yes, back when party lines were more fluid, plenty of Democrats were Southern segregationalists, just as plenty of Republicans in the 50's were on the right side of Civil Rights issues. But even then, the intellectual and political publications of the time that identified as "liberal" were on the right side of the issues, while all organs of conservatism, like the National Review, were on the wrong side.

Never forget that the "Southern Strategy" adopted by the bigot, Richard Nixon, was a strategy whereby the GOP exploited and inflamed White racism for political ends.

Never forget that the modern Republican Party's politics of race is the deliberate heir to Jim Crow. Never forget that so much of their talk of "lazy government parasites" and "welfare queens" is a deliberately crafted use of racially coded language.

Never forget that when a disgusting gasbag like Rush Limbaugh says that [very slight paraphrase] in "Obama's America, Black kids beat up White Kids and get cheered on" he's invoking the rhetoric of a Bull Connor, or a Klan agitator. And never forget that one can use that kind of overt racist rhetoric and remain in very good graces with today's Republican Party. After all, he's saying what they're thinking.

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. This is what's driving Republican politics to this very day.

This is what the fight over funding the ACA is about. This is what resistance to Medicare expansion is about. This is what opposition to immigration reform and amnesty is about. Every single political action of the current GOP, up to and including opposition to abortion and support for banning contraceptives, and their refusal to accept the legitimacy of Obama's presidency, has its ultimate roots in a profoundly frightened racist worldview. These are people who think that white Christians of European ancestry are the only "real" Americans.

[spanone]

5. lee atwater would be a hero in today's tea party....he was some toxic shit