Jim rants:

> I would love to meet a democrat that believes in states rights.

As someone who grew up in the South, I know (and probably you do too) that
"states rights" is merely a code phrase for a Southerner's claim to bigotry,
racism, segregation, prejudice, ignorance and intolerance. "Put God back in our
classroom and get the niggers out!" (My uncle Dewey, long after he moved from
Houston to San Diego, still carried a pistol in the glove compartment of his
car "to shoot niggers.")

I certainly hope that no Democrat believes in "states rights." I wish the
Republicans didn't either, but the appeal to these people was the centerpiece of
Nixon's "Southern Strategy."

Prior to Nixon, the Republican Party was the still hated party of the Lincoln
Reconstructionists -- and no good white Southerner would be caught dead
calling himself a Republican. But all of that changed during the Nixon
administration. The segregationist, intolerant, bible-thumping Dixiecrats bolted from the
Democratic Party en masse, to no one in the Democratic Party's dismay, in
great part because of the civil rights advances foisted on them first by
Eisenhower but most especially later by Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and they
have formed the basis of the "Solid South" on which the Republican Party has so
heavily depended ever since.

Wirt Atmar

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