Badge of Honor: I Win Crooks and Liars ‘Worst Pundit Ever’ Award - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Badge of Honor: I Win Crooks and Liars ‘Worst Pundit Ever’ Award
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Well, gee. Thanks Crooks and Liars!

Over there at one of the worst race-driven, skin-color judging liberal websites in America I have been awarded a “Crookie” for “Worst Pundit Ever.”

As always, the Crooks and Liars rewriting of American history — when not utterly ignoring it altogether — is astounding.

Here’s a sampling from the explanation accompanying their “award” to me, as written by the sites number one apologist for racism, John Amato:

Lord consistently tried to blur the lines of history when he intimated over and over again that today’s Democratic party is the same party of the Deep South during the heyday of the KKK, even claiming on multiple occasions the KKK is a progressive left organization!

He never once tried to clarify that after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1965, all the southern racists joined the Republican party and turned the south into a the most dependable Republican voting bloc in America.

Oh, my. Where to begin? First of all, the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, not 1965. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Apparently Mr. Amato doesn’t even know that basic fact of American history. Typos being typos, I’ll give him a pass.

Here’s something else Crooks and Liars loves to lie about. As noted at this CNN link, 80% of Republicans in Congress in 1964 voted for the bill, compared to just more than 60% of Democrats. To be specific:

153 of 244 Democrats in the House — 63% — voted for the Civil Rights bill
136 of 171 Republicans in the House — 80% — voted for the Civil Rights bill

Over in the Senate?

46 of 67 Democrats in the Senate — 63% — voted for the Civil Rights bill
27 of 33 Republicans in the Senate — 82% — voted for the Civil Rights bill

The real question, however — something Crooks and Liars always tries to brush under the rug — is why the Civil Rights bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were needed in the first place.

The reason is blindingly simple.

The Republican Party passed the following laws to provide civil rights for the newly freed slaves almost a hundred years earlier — slavery the backbone of the political power of the Democratic Party, a party founded and yes, as evidenced to this day on sites like Crooks and Liars, still devoted, to its obsession with race. Those laws were:

  • The Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery.
  • The Fourteenth Amendment giving the former slaves due process
  • The Fifteenth Amendment granting blacks the right to vote
  • The Civil Rights Act of 1866, giving blacks the right to own property, sign contracts, sue and serve as witnesses in legal proceedings
  • The Civil Rights Act of 1870, aka “The Enforcement Act,” giving authority to the federal government to enforce the right of blacks to vote, including giving the President the right to use the army and federal marshals against those who used violence to intimidate black voters from using their suffrage rights. This act was also dubbed the “First Ku Klux Klan Act” because it targeted Klan violence against blacks — a violence perpetrated by the Klan in their role as “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party” (Columbia University historian Eric Foner) or as the “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party” (University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease).
  • The Civil Rights Act of 1875, forbidding discrimination against blacks in public accommodations and public places

Note well that the Democrats opposed every one of these laws in the day, their members of Congress overwhelmingly opposing them. In exactly the fashion their later party descendants — almost 40% in both the House and Senate in 1964 — opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A law that, along with the later Voting Rights Act of 1965, was designed to re-do the legislation that had been enacted by the GOP 100 years earlier.

Note also that the Enforcement Act was repealed by Democratic President Grover Cleveland and a Democrat Congress.

So what do we have here? We have a site that is devoted to obsessing about the skin color of their fellow Americans, a site that proudly defends the Left’s racial obsessions, taking after moi, the supporter of JFK, RFK, Dr. King, Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp — the latter two my bosses.

What Crooks and Liars deliberately ignores is that the Culture of Racism that was at the core of the American Left and the Democratic Party never left the party or the Left. To this day it divides Americans by race, judging Americans not in color blind fashion as Americans but, by skin color. Examples abound.

Here is a Crooks and Liars story headlining “White Male Terrorism.”

Here is another Crooks and Liars liberal taking one Lisa Fritsch (who is black and conservative) to task for reminding a Glenn Beck TC audience that: “The only way black people were ever able to triumph is because of conservative values, which is directly linked to Christianity. Had we been liberals, during the Civil Rights movement, nobody would have done anything!” The C&L writer then falsely states:

Um, Ms. Fritsch, you need to avail yourself some history books too. It was conservatives who argued for maintaining slavery before the Civil War. It was conservatives who insisted after the war that blacks be denied the full rights of citizenship, and who erected the system of Jim Crow, who led rope-bearing lynch mobs that crucified thousands of black people. It was conservatives who erected “No Black After Sundown” signs at the city borders of thousands of American towns.

And most of all, it was conservatives who fought the Civil Rights movement tooth and nail. And it was only from the ceaseless efforts of liberals — many of them indeed Christian liberals — in opposition to conservatives, many of them Christian conservatives — that anything was in fact achieved during that era. Somehow, you’ve managed to get your history completely upside down.

Well, no. C&L is hiding the fact here that it was precisely racism that drove the progressive movement and the Democratic Party. Notably, it was progressive champion Woodrow Wilson who epitomized this progressive-racist tradition. An out and out segregationist who showcased Birth of a Nation, the film celebrating the Klan, at the White House, Wilson was the progressive champion of his time, a pure product of the Left’s Culture of Racism. Indeed, the 1924 Democratic Platform — a platform literally written by the Ku Klux Klan that had so many delegates at the Madison Square Garden convention the Democrats’ quadrennial gathering was known as the “KlanBake” — opened with a tribute to Wilson that reads (bold print supplied):

We, the representatives of the democratic party, in national convention assembled, pay our profound homage to the memory of Woodrow Wilson. Our hearts are filled with gratitude that American democracy should have produced this man, whose spirit and influence will live on through the ages; and that it was our privilege to have co-operated with him in the advancement of ideals of government which will serve as an example and inspiration for this and future generations. We affirm our abiding faith in those ideals and pledge ourselves to take up the standard which he bore and to strive for the full triumph of the principles of democracy to which he dedicated his life.

Thus the Culture of Racism — racism plus progressivism — that is at the core of the Left and Democrats laid bare in explicit terms. What was left out of that 1924 Democratic Party celebration of Wilson and progressives? This from the conservative party — the Republican Party that nominated the conservative champion Calvin Coolidge. Wrote the conservatives in their platform:

We urge the congress to enact at the earliest possible date a federal anti-lynching law so that the full influence of the federal government may be wielded to exterminate this hideous crime.

Simply put, this was anathema to the progressives. Without racism, as the Democratic Party and progressive leaders of the day in Wilson’s time — and as Crooks and Liars repeatedly illustrates today with its full throated support — the Left would have no ability to win elections.

To the contrary, it is the GOP that was born into and maintains today a Culture of Racial Equality. Segregationist Democrat and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond did in fact leave the Democrats for the GOP in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But in fact he was welcomed into a party that had had racial equality as its core value. Thurmond didn’t change the GOP — the GOP culture changed Thurmond. Nowhere is this more symbolically illustrated than with the rise of a young South Carolinian as a top Thurmond aide — that being the black Armstrong Williams, now a close adviser to incoming Trump HUD Secretary — Jack Kemp’s old job — Dr. Ben Carson. Said Williams of Thurmond at the latter’s death: “When you close the door to others, you close the doors to yourself. When people met his heart, they realized he was not the same person. They saw a good man, a nice man.… I knew him. I extended my hand. He extended his.” Say again — Thurmond, exposed to the GOP’s Culture of Racial Equality, was not the same person as the angry man whose original party exemplified its horrific Culture of Racism. By 1982 he was voting for the extension of the Voting Rights Act and the Jack Kemp-sponsored bill that made Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday.

Meanwhile, the Democrats had yielded their party to the Al Sharptons of the world. As demonstrated here at Crooks and Liars with this criticism of Tucker Carlson for calling out Sharpton (and Jesse Jackson) and this swipe at Bill O’Reilly for a similar “offense.” All this in defense of a guy who is on record (and on tape) spouting the n-word (so labeling the then-black mayor of New York, David Dinkins), calling somebody a “punk faggot” (on TV no less) rattling on about “Greek homos” and more. It that culture of the Left that Crooks and Liars defends with regularity.

One could go on. And on.

So, I accept the Crooks and Liars “Worst Pundit” award with pleasure. It is an honor to stand fast for the racial equality principles of Lincoln, Reagan, Jack Kemp and Dr. King. But it would be wrong not to give out my own award as we say goodbye to 2016.

I hereby give the George Wallace-David Duke Award for Racial Division to Crooks and Liars and Mr. John Amato. Acting in the long-held skin-color-judging principles of the progressive movement, Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Party, Crooks and Liars has proven itself worthy of its name and the principles it defends.

Happy New Year!

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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