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Photos by Craig Hudson. A big thanks to Karoli for making them into a video.

Charleston, South Carolina is filled with beautiful people. When strangers walk past each other on the sidewalk they say hello. Men hold doors for women. At a crowded Starbucks the two most common words were "please" and "excuse me."

But that Southern decorum is contrasted by Charleston’s dark side. This is where at Fort Sumter the Civil War started. Even today, it can resemble a segregated city.

This dichotomy makes it a fitting place for a Republican party to showcase candidates as they struggle to find one that is presentable to the general public on the outside, but not too sinister on the inside.

On Friday, every contender for the Republican presidential nomination made a speech near Charleston, South Carolina. They’re competing for the state that has picked the eventual Republican nominee since 1980.

On Friday morning, Newt Gingrich was holding a slim lead over Mitt Romney. He had fought hard in the debate on Thursday to overcome allegations he had asked his second wife for an open marriage. And Romney’s decision not to release his tax returns until April gave even Rick Santorum and Ron Paul the feeling they had an opportunity to win South Carolina.

At 10 am on Friday at a large, hangar at the Charleston airport, Ron Paul came out from behind a curtain to a young woman’s cheer of “You’re the greatest!” The small crowd made the space feel empty.

“Quite frankly I feel pretty good about last night,” said Paul, on his debate performance. During his speech he bashed entitlement programs, promised a trillion in cuts to the federal budget and proclaimed the current government is “murdering our civil liberties.”

As he was leaving I asked him why he wasn’t running as a Libertarian, as he did in 1988, he snarled, “I’m a Republican.”

I left the hangar and headed downtown for the Stephen Colbert and Herman Cain rally at the College of Charleston. Colbert is a native son of Charleston.

A crowd of over 1,000 people had turned out to the shady courtyard dotted with oaks covered in Spanish moss. Colbert had a marching band and a gospel choir introduce him.

“It’s good to be back home,” said Colbert, “I hope this doesn’t turn into an occupation, but if it does, you’ll all be pepper sprayed very politely. We are in Charleston.”

He welcomed “the most beautiful people in the world” and then Herman Cain, “the man we’ve all gathered here to introduce me.” Cain was in top form. He has become a character of the character he created. He quoted Pokemon, sang, and endorsed we the people for president.

Colbert said to vote for Cain, because “Cain is me.”

After the rally, Dominique Awis, a College of Charleston student, said she was helping to mobilize students to vote for Cain tomorrow. She said most of the people she knew were going to vote for Cain.

Colbert drew easily the largest crowd of the day. He brought Cain because Cain will be on the ballot, while Colbert missed the window to register as a candidate.

“He’s making a whole mockery of the system,” said Ryan “The Bull” Johnson, a Charleston resident. “No one cares about the actual process, but throw a celebrity in and people want to be a part of it.”

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Writing in Salon, Rick Perlstein examines "what Haley Barbour's amnesia tells us" about Southern conservatives' historical revisionism. But largely lost in the imbroglio over Barbour's literal white-washing of the Jim Crow era is that the Mississippi Governor and would-have-been 2012 White House hopeful has plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican Party. From flying the Confederate flag to talking up secession and nullification, Republicans for years have been casually trafficking in antebellum nostalgia.

In May, Texas conservatives approved an overhaul of the state's textbooks which would remove the word "slave" from the term "slave trade." Of course, that omission was in keeping with two others, as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and Mississippi's Barbour celebrated Confederate History Month in their respective states, each without mentioning slavery. As Barbour put it:

"To me it's a sort of feeling that it's just a nit. That it is not significant. It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly."

As for Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee, they apparently considered "nits" like the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to Constitution unnecessary, at least judging from the RNC's May memo attacking Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan:

"Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?"

As the health care reform debate reached its climax in March, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia was among those longing for the days of the ante bellum South. Missing the irony that health care is worst in those reddest of Southern states where Republicans poll best, Broun took to the House floor to show that he was still fighting the Civil War:

"If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States -- the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

If you thought you had heard that outdated term of Dixie revisionist history recently, you did. In February 2009, Missouri Republican Bryan Stevenson took exception to President Obama's support for the Freedom of Choice Act, legislation which would codify the reproductive rights protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide:

"What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression."

That expression was also a favorite of former Senate Majority Leader and later Minority Whip (really, you can't make this up) Trent Lott. Lott was a speaker in 1992 at an event of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a successor to the White Citizens' Councils of Jim Crow days. Among its offerings in seething racial hatred is a "Wanted" poster of Abraham Lincoln. Lott's also offered his rebel yell in the virulently neo-Confederate Southern Partisan, where in 1984 he called the Civil War "the war of aggression." That was years before he lauded the legendary racist and 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond:

"I want to say this about my state: when Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

As Americans learned this week, Trent Lott is not the only Mississippi Republican to support groups like the CCC and honor the Confederate flag. Former Republican National Committee Chairman and now Governor Haley Barbour wore a lapel pin with the image during his 2002 campaigns for the state house - and to keep the CSA emblem flying over it. And as the photographs show, Barbour literally broke bread with CCC racists at a barbeque in 2003.

Another neocon (that is, neo-Confederate) is former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

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You know, if these Republicans really resent Godwin references (at least, in reference to themselves), it might be easier to avoid them if they didn't open themselves up by hiring someone like Fred Malek:

Bob McDonnell's choice for Chairman of [the Governor's Commission on Government Reform and Restructuring], Fred Malek, is kind of scary on the topic of government restructuring:

"Malek is best known in political circles for resigning in 1988 as George Bush's hand-picked deputy chairman for the Republican National Committee after the Post's Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward reported that 17 years earlier, Malek had, at Richard Nixon's request, counted the number of Jews then working for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Thirteen, if you must know, though Malek only looked at 35 of the bureau's 50 top employees.) "

Some people might ask- what is the statute of limitations on a mistake someone made like this 40 years ago? I don't think such a thing exists when you are talking about identifying and counting the number of Jews in government positions less than 30 years after the Holocaust. It's petrifying that this could have happened in this country.

If you're interested in delving into this nasty business of Nixon's anti-Semitic paranoia, Slate has the full story. Of course, the man who thinks we should have a Confederate History Month and that working women are a threat to the family and contraception should be illegal cannot be accused of having the sensitivity to realize what a disgusting man Malek is. Because Republicans forgive all sins except not being conservative enough in their perception or being willing to work with Democrats (Sorry, Bob Bennett), it should come as no surprise that Malek also worked on McCain's campaign, and by the looks of his personal blog, has worked up a nice career as a TV talking head.

Sigh. It just goes to show you that old bigots never fade away in the GOP, they just keep getting hired again and again. The Not Larry Sabato blog has a statement from a Virginia state delegate:

UPDATE: Statement from Delegate David Englin:

While I support the effort to create a top-level commission to recommend policies to reform government, it is deeply disturbing that Governor McDonnell would appoint as its chair Fred Malek, whose history in "reforming" government includes creating lists of Jews serving in government to track and remove from government service. Was there really no more qualified individual in Virginia to lead this panel? Has he done anything to disavow and make amends for his previous anti-Semitism? Otherwise, it's one more slap in the face from McDonnell to Jewish state employees, coming right on the heels of allowing uniformed state police chaplains to proselytize to Jewish troopers and their families. These continued missteps from the McDonnell Administration are distractions from the competent and effective governing Virginians expect and deserve.

On Friday, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post proclaimed Mississippi Governor and former RNC chairman Haley Barbour "the most influential Republican in the country." If so, that dubious title is a reflection of the sad state of the GOP and the nation. After all, just days after Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's Confederate History Month proclamation highlighted his party's nostalgia for the antebellum South, Barbour on Sunday insisted its omission of slavery "doesn't matter for diddly." And as it turns out, Haley Barbour is just the latest neo-Confederate face of the GOP.

Just four days after proudly proclaiming that he is a "fat redneck" with "an accent," Barbour defended the slavery-free commemorations of the Confederacy in Virginia, Georgia and Mississippi. As he suggested to CNN's Candy Crowley, for people outside of Dixie the old times there should be forgotten. Asked if McConnell's omission was a mistake, Barbour responded:

"Well, I don't think so...I don't know what you would say about slavery, but anyone who thinks that you have to explain to people that slavery is a bad thing -- I think it goes without saying...

To me it's a sort of feeling that it's just a nit. That it is not significant. It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly."

A nit, that is, to Haley Barbour and the long list of Mississippi Republicans who traffic in neo-Confederate glorification with the likes of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

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A modest proposal: no one displaying the Confederate flag gets to lecture any American about patriotism - ever. Ditto for anyone trafficking in Confederate nostalgia as a political strategy. Of course, that new red, white and blue rule would pose a problem for today's Republican Party. After all, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, the same man who delivered the GOP's response to President Obama's 2010 State of the Union, this week resurrected "Confederate History Month" in Richmond. And to be sure, when it comes to flying the Stars and Bars and talking up secession, nullification and "the war of Yankee aggression," McDonnell has plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican Party.

Exhuming a ritual buried by his Democratic predecessors Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, McDonnell called on Virginians to celebrate the South's failure in the conflict bookended by Sumter and Appomattox, one he deemed "a four year war ... for independence." More shocking still, McDonnell's proclamation ignored the issue of slavery altogether because, he claimed, "I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia." Governor Jim Gilmore's 1999 declaration at least recognized slavery as the cause of the war that killed over 600,000 Americans, a point a humbled General Ulysses Grant made for posterity at Appomattox:

"I felt sad and depressed at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though their cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought."

Sadly, Bob McDonnell is far from alone among Republican leaders past and present reminding Americans that the old times there are not forgotten.

As the health care reform debate reached its climax in March, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia was among those longing for the days of the ante bellum South. Missing the irony that health care is worst in those reddest of Southern states where Republicans poll best, Broun took to the House floor to show that he was still fighting the Civil War:

"If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that's in people's pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States -- the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

If you thought you had heard that outdated term of Dixie revisionist history recently, you did. In February 2009, Missouri Republican Bryan Stevenson took exception to President Obama's support for the Freedom of Choice Act, legislation which codify the reproductive rights protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide:

"What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression."

That expression was also a favorite of former Senate Majority Leader and later Minority Whip (really, you can't make this up) Trent Lott.

Continue reading »

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[[Double take]] Wha-wha-wha????

It sounds silly to bring up less than a week after your election, but some political junkies here in Washington—some very powerful ones—are already saying that you will be on the short list of vice presidential candidates come 2012 for the Republican Party. Do you harbor any national ambitions, sir?

How did Chris Wallace get inside my nightmares? And what the hell is he smoking?

The famous Fox News "some people say" followed by a statement that nobody who really wants to keep the Republican Party vital would actually want? And who is on the "short list" for President? Palin? Wow. Between the two of them, they'd have..what? three years governance experience between them? Brilliant!

The oppo research on this guy is so rich that I almost hope the Republican Party is this stupid. Bring it on, GOP, bring it on.