Taking a direct tactic out of the Marxist Alinsky ‘Rules for Radicals’ playbook to try and push support for his ‘StealthScare’ bill to nationalize and take over 1/6th of the US economy, Dirty Harry pulled out the race card this morning:

Let’s review the history Dirty Harry uses as support for his plan. He talks of filibusters in Congress that belated true civil rights reform, which included emancipating the slaves and then of course the Civil Rights Act of 1964; but he never comes out and tells the truth as to who did the fillibustering.

This is the Democratic Platform of 1864:

1864 Presidential Campaign

By 1864, the Country had grown weary of the long and bloody Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of the countries’ best and bravest young men had fallen on the fields of Bull Run, Antietam, Shiloh, and countless more. Many began to think that the war was not worth it, and the price of freedom too great. The Republican Presidential Candidate Abraham Lincoln (Republican) thought no price was too great for the abolition of slavery and the creation of a society in which a man was not judged by the color of his skin. Unfortunately, after four long years of war, Lincoln’s support was dropping fast, and people were looking for a way out of the war.

With this backdrop, the Democratic Party chose General George McClellan to be their Presidential Candidate at the Chicago National Convention in 1864. The Democratic Party Platform presented a plan of “Compromise with the South”, which became known as “The Chicago Platform”. While on its surface the Chicago Platform was seductive in that it promised an immediate cessation of hostilities, and a restoration of the union. What was unsaid in the platform, but clearly implied, was that the “compromise” would be to agree to make permanent the institution of slavery in exchange for an end to the Civil War and restoration of the Union.  In other words, the Democratic party was ready to “Sell Out” the enslaved, in order to stop further loss of white lives.

The 1864 Democratic Platform began with the words:

Resolved, that in the future, as in the past, we will adhere with unswerving fidelity to the Union under the Constitution, as the only solid foundation of our strength, security, and happiness as a people, and as a framework of government equally conducive to the welfare and prosperity of all the States, both Northern and Southern.

Nast wrapped these words around an image of their true meaning, showing men and dogs hunting down runaway slaves. The image to your left presents this portion of the illustration above.

Nast also points out in this drawing that the “people” referred to were clearly the white people. That returning to the Constitution of that day meant a return to a country where Blacks were property, and had no rights. The “Prosperity of the Southern States” clearly was a Democratic Promise to make slavery a permanent institution in the country, in exchange for an end to the Civil War.

Now via left-wing wikipedia, let’s take a glance at the ‘Civil Rights’ activity of the mid 20th century when the next substantial civil rights legislation came to the table via a Republican president after the Democrats had occupied the White House for 2 decades. Keep in mind that the Democrats had also retained control of Congress for most of this time:

In October 1952, the Eisenhower administration declared racial discrimination a national security issue. In How Free is Free? historian Leon Litwack writes:

The restructuring of race relations took on a new urgency, an importance reserved for matters of national security. White supremacy, at least its most blatant and embarrassing manifestations, had become too costly to defend to sustain. In October 1952, when the Justice Department filed an amicus brief in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, it explained the interest of the president and the executive branch in the eventual decision. Nothing less was at stake than the very credibility of the United States in the international anti-Communist struggle. “It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed… Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.” The brief also cited a response from Secretary of State Dean Acheson affirming the importance of this case in the conduct of foreign relations. “The undeniable existence of racial discrimination, he declared, “gives unfriendly governments the most effective kind of ammunition for their propaganda warfare,… and jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.”

The day after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in which segregated (“separate but equal“) schools were ruled to be unconstitutional, Eisenhower told District of Columbia officials to make Washington a model for the rest of the country in integrating black and white public school children. He proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. Although both Acts were weaker than subsequent civil rights legislation, they constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the Civil Rights Act of 1875, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant (another Republican). The “Little Rock Nine” incident of 1957 involved the refusal by Arkansas to honor a Federal court order to integrate the schools. Under Executive Order 10730, Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into Little Rock Central High School, an all-white public school. The integration did not occur without violence. Eisenhower and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus engaged in tense arguments.

HMMMM…’Dirty’ Harry, it’s time you quit spending so much time in ‘O’ blamo’s office. It is not helping your cause and it cetainly is not boosting your intellect.