Mississippi Politics: Howard Dean, Ronald Reagan and the Confederate Battle Flag

Salon.com is running a column by Sid Blumenthal where he makes a clever but also sensible link between Howard Dean's flag-in-mouth problem and CBS' decision to cave to Republican Party pressure over the Reagan TV-movie. He also talks about Mississippi politics in connection with both Dean and Reagan.

After the Republican Convention in 1980, Reagan traveled to the
county fair in Neshoba, Miss., where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been
slain by the Ku Klux Klan. His appearance there was urged and planned by a young
congressman named Trent Lott, who had switched from the Democratic to the
Republican Party. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan
declared, "I believe in states' rights" -- the code words that were used in the
Civil War to justify slavery and the secession of the Southern states from the
Union. These words are at the center of the bloody conflict through American
history over the essential idea of the United States. ...

Consider yet another scene: On the day before Dean's last
apology, Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee
and the third biggest lobbyist in Washington, was elected governor of
Mississippi. He had campaigned at an event sponsored by the Council of Concerned
Conservatives, an overtly racist group and successor organization to the White
Citizens' Council that led opposition to civil rights in the 1960s. In his lapel
Barbour wore a pin of the Mississippi state flag, a matter of controversy
because of its incorporation of the Confederate flag. On election night, even
before he was announced as the winner, Barbour received a congratulatory
telephone call from George W. Bush. Look away, Dixieland.

As the great novelist William Faulkner, of Mississippi, wrote:
"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."

It's a very good piece, although Blumenthal is also a little fuzzy on this states-rights and the Civil War business.

Also, "great novelist" is a bit too mild to describe Faulkner. "Incomparable novelist" would have been closer.