Submitted by Kevin T. Keith, Oct 10, 2007 16:57

1) Krugman's book is entitled The Conscience of a Liberal, not, as you twice refer to it, "The Conscience of a Conservative". Barry Goldwater used that title in 1961; John Dean later published the more aptly named Conservatives Without Conscience.

2) It's telling that almost all your stories of Democratic perfidy, and of Republican righteousness, in both cases pre-date the Civil Rights Movement. That was the watershed for both parties. It was the time at which Nixon embraced the "Southern Strategy", later reiterated by Ronald Reagan's celebration of "states' rights" in his official campaign kickoff speech delivered on the site of the murders of three civil rights martyrs, again by George H. W. Bush and "Willie Horton", and by George W. Bush's active disenfranchisement of Southern black voters and his complacent gawking as they drowned in New Orleans. It was the time at which the reviled Lyndon Johnson knowingly and deliberately "lost the South for a generation" through his prinicpled embrace of the Great Society and civil rights. It was the time at which Republicans learned to speak code ("I believe the Confederate flag is a symbol of heritage"), while Democrats spoke at civil rights leaders' memorials ("let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world"). It was the time at which Strom Thurmon resigned the Democratic party in disgust at its platform of racial tolerance, ran for President on an explicitly segregationist platform, and was eagerly and forever embraced by the Republican party that same year - the party whose sitting Senate Majority Leader and one-time Presidential aspirant said publicly, more than 50 years later, that that platform would have avoided "all these problems over all these years".

Both parties have much to be ashamed of. But for the Democrats, that is largely in a past they have worked to overcome. For the Republicans, it is the present and future they have knowlingly chosen and openly embrace today.

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