The GOPs Moment of Truth-Speak Up or Be Judged

[babylonsister]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gops-moment-of-truthspeak-up-or-be-judged

The GOP’s Moment of Truth—Speak Up or Be Judged
Denouncing bigotry is easy. That isn’t what needs denouncing now. What needs denouncing is white supremacy, and a president who doesn’t go out of his way to avoid denouncing it.
Michael Tomasky
08.14.17 1:00 AM ET


The 1920s were one of the bleakest periods in the history of the Democratic Party. It was shut out of the White House for the entire decade, yes. But that’s not what I mean.

The party was infested with racists and white supremacists and their apologists. It had been for decades; since the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s, when the Democrats started to return African Americans to conditions of near-servitude and impose Jim Crow laws. By the 1920s, this kind of footsie-playing—and worse—with racist elements had reached a crisis point. The Ku Klux Klan was up to 4 million members, its peak.

There were enough Democrats, from the urban machines of the North, who hated all this and wanted their party to have no part of these people. But the South was the party’s base. What to do? The Northerners forced a fight at the 1924 convention, introducing a resolution to denounce the Klan. It was one of those Moments by which a party becomes known.

Charlottesville is one of those Moments for the GOP. Now, it’s the Republican Party that has spent 40 or 50 years of playing footsie with racists, to the point that their voters finally got the message that it was perfectly OK to nominate an openly racist candidate as president of the United States. Donald Trump’s candidacy didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of the Southern Strategy and Lee Atwater and Jesse Helms’ “hands” ad and talk radio and shrieks of “amnesty” and laws to stop “voter fraud” and a hundred other things I could mention but you know them as well as I do.

The Republican Party created Trump. But elected Republicans at the federal level are not Trump. They’re not openly racist (well, with a couple of exceptions of the Steve King-Louie Gohmert variety). They know better these days—or, let’s hope, they actually aren’t that way in their hearts, which I assume most of them aren’t.


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http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gops-moment-of-truthspeak-up-or-be-judged

[Cary]

1. That moment passed long ago.

[handmade34]

2. long ago....

Republicans have had so many chances over the decades to speak up and they have failed miserably.... now would be a good time, during Obama's presidency would have been a good time.... so many chances, so many failures