Always Improving

(Continued from Page 3B) the legacy he cites regarding former Vietnam era — and bigtime “hawk” Senate minority leader, the late Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

A 33rd degree Freemason and 50s era reality show figure — not unlike tfg, (Vose’s idol) — “Wizard of Ooze,” Dirksen was often ridiculed for changing his mind like the weather in Maine. In one such cartwheel, he decided to — as Vose accurately mentions — support then President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964, a big initiative championed by MLK Jr., as well as the war in Southeast Asia, which the Reverend definitely vehemently opposed. Where Mr. Vose goes then in his trite and flawed history revision regarding the oft claimed Republican argument that it was the Democrats and not his party that crucified MLK Jr. is classic. We’ve heard it many times, although the flipping of party sensibilities regarding race since Dirksen’s tenure and the advent of the GOP’s “Southern strategy” he conveniently neglects to mention.

The Southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among an aggrieved barely literate white voting block (then primarily Democrats) in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans. As the Civil Rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South, who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped to push

S.V. Freshet

the Republican Party much more to the right relative to the 1950s, got Reagan elected twice and brought about the later further mass brainwashing of the aforementioned via Fox “News,” and talk radio hatemonger jocks like the late Rush Limbaugh, who for his efforts was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by tfg for his legacy of misogyny and racial enmity and the coining of disparaging terms like “Feminazi,” and the myth of the “liberal media.”

In my humble opinion, the good Dr. Laven is owed an apology not just from Vose for his ad hominem letter, but by the editors as well for publishing such vitriol. For the life of me, exactly what is the connection between “white supremacy” and shibboleths anyways?

Jon St. Laurent Lovell