Steve Kornacki: Dittoheads, Race and Denial

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.]

On Tuesday, I learned that there is a circumstance under which right-wingers are happy to align themselves with RINOs: in hindsight over the issue of civil rights.

I discovered this almost by accident, after including in a post about Rush Limbaugh's confused racial paranoia -- he can't seem to decide whether powerful white Democrats are conspiring to stifle the ambitions of their black counterparts or if they've been intimidated by political correctness into excessive deference -- a line in which I characterized the Republican Party as"an overwhelmingly white party that owes its strength to decades of growth in the South, a result of its 1964 decision to reject the Civil Rights Act."...

Through a quick Google search, I discovered that my piece had been linked at Lucianne.com, the right-wing news forum created a decade ago by Lucianne Goldberg (the same woman who infamously prodded Linda Tripp to rat out Monica Lewinsky to Kenneth Starr). The comments, just like the e-mails I was receiving, were filled with reminders of the partisan breakdown of the '64 vote. Who was this guy Kornacki claiming that the modern Republican Party had capitalized on the South's resistance to civil rights?"[T]the Democrats actually filibustered against the law," one typical comment read."Simple fact is that the Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act. Only left wing biased historians keep lying about the facts."...