Mona Charen:

Here’s what the former president of the United States had to say when he eulogized his mentor, an Arkansas senator:

We come to celebrate and give thanks for the remarkable life of J. William Fulbright, a life that changed our country and our world forever and for the better. … In the work he did, the words he spoke and the life he lived, Bill Fulbright stood against the 20th century’s most destructive forces and fought to advance its brightest hopes.

So spoke President William J. Clinton in 1995 of a man was among the 99 Democrats in Congress to sign the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956. (Two Republicans also signed it.) The Southern Manifesto declared the signatories’ opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and their commitment to segregation forever. Fulbright was also among those who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That filibuster continued for 83 days.

Speaking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, let’s review (since they don’t teach this in schools): The percentage of House Democrats who supported the legislation? 61 percent. House Republicans? 80 percent. In the Senate, 69 percent of Democrats voted yes, compared with 82 percent of Republicans. (Barry Goldwater, a supporter of the NAACP, voted no because he thought it was unconstitutional.)

When he was running for president in 2000, Vice President Al Gore told the NAACP that his father, Senator Al Gore Sr., had lost his Senate seat because he voted for the Civil Rights Act. Uplifting story — except it’s false. Gore Sr. voted against the Civil Rights Act. He lost in 1970 in a race that focused on prayer in public schools, the Vietnam War, and the Supreme Court. Al Gore’s reframing of the relevant history is the story of the Democratic party in microcosm. The party’s history is pockmarked with racism and terror. The Democrats were the party of slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, and that miserable terrorist excrescence, the Ku Klux Klan. Republicans were the party of Lincoln, Reconstruction, anti-lynching laws, and the civil rights acts of 1875, 1957, 1960, and 1964. Were all Republicans models of rectitude on racial matters? Hardly. Were they a heck of a lot better than the Democrats? Without question.

As recently as 2010, the Senate’s president pro tempore was former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.). Rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats have rewritten it.

You may recall that when MSNBC was commemorating the 50th anniversary of segregationist George Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” stunt to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, the network identified Wallace as “R., Alabama.” The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. Their preferred version pretends that all the Democratic racists and segregationists left their party and became Republicans starting in the 1960s. How convenient. If it were true that the South began to turn Republican due to Lyndon Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights Act, you would expect that the Deep South, the states most associated with racism, would have been the first to move. That’s not what happened. The first southern states to trend Republican were on the periphery: North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. (George Wallace lost these voters in his 1968 bid.) The voters who first migrated to the Republican party were suburban, prosperous New South types. The more Republican the South has become, the less racist.

Is it unforgivable that Bill Clinton praised a former segregationist? No. Fulbright renounced his racist past, as did Robert Byrd and Al Gore Sr. It would be immoral and unjust to misrepresent the history.

What is unforgivable is the way Democrats are still using race to foment hatred. Remember what happened to Trent Lott when he uttered a few dumb words about former segregationist Strom Thurmond? He didn’t get the kind of pass Bill Clinton did when praising Fulbright. Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton told a mostly black audience that “what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to another. … Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting.” She was presumably referring to voter-ID laws, which, by the way, 51 percent of black Americans support.

Charen didn’t mention the racist history of Lyndon Johnson; MSNBC did:

In Senate cloakrooms and staff meetings, Johnson was practically a connoisseur of the word. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, Johnson would calibrate his pronunciations by region, using “nigra” with some southern legislators and “negra” with others. Discussing civil rights legislation with men like Mississippi Democrat James Eastland, who committed most of his life to defending white supremacy, he’d simply call it “the n—-r bill.” …

Johnson was a man of his time, and bore those flaws as surely as he sought to lead the country past them. For two decades in Congress he was a reliable member of the Southern bloc, helping to stonewall civil rights legislation. As Caro recalls, Johnson spent the late 1940s railing against the “hordes of barbaric yellow dwarves” in East Asia. Buying into the stereotype that blacks were afraid of snakes (who isn’t afraid of snakes?) he’d drive to gas stations with one in his trunk and try to trick black attendants into opening it. Once, Caro writes, the stunt nearly ended with him being beaten with a tire iron.

Nor was it the kind of immature, frat-boy racism that Johnson eventually jettisoned. Even as president, Johnson’s interpersonal relationships with blacks were marred by his prejudice. As longtime Jet correspondent Simeon Booker wrote in his memoir Shocks the Conscience, early in his presidency, Johnson once lectured Booker after he authored a critical article for Jet Magazine, telling Booker he should “thank” Johnson for all he’d done for black people. In Flawed Giant, Johnson biographer Robert Dallek writes that Johnson explained his decision to nominate Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court rather than a less famous black judge by saying, “when I appoint a n—-r to the bench, I want everybody to know he’s a n—-r.”

According to Caro, Robert Parker, Johnson’s sometime chauffeur, described in his memoir Capitol Hill in Black and White a moment when Johnson asked Parker whether he’d prefer to be referred to by his name rather than “boy,” “n—-r” or “chief.” When Parker said he would, Johnson grew angry and said, “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, n—-r, you just let it roll off your back like water, and you’ll make it. Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”

Johnson also said to two southern governors (who certainly were not Republicans), “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference… I’ll have them n—-rs voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” That word also figured prominently in the daily language of the sainted Democratic president Harry S. Truman.

Various excuse-mongers claim that, hey, that’s how Southerners talked in those days, and look at what Truman and Johnson did for blacks. That is a pass that no Republican or conservative ever gets.

Roger L. Simon adds:

I am uniquely positioned to say this because I spent most of my life on the Left and was a civil rights worker in the South in my early twenties. I was also, to my everlasting regret, a donor to the Black Panther Party in the seventies.

So I have seen this personally from both sides and my conclusion is inescapable. The Left is far, far worse. They are obsessed with race in a manner that does not allow them to see straight. Further, they project racism onto others continually, exacerbating situations, which in most instances weren’t even there in the first place. From Al Sharpton to Hillary Clinton, they all do it.

Barack Obama is one of the worst offenders in this regard. Recently, in reaction to the horrid actions of the deranged, but solitary racist Dylann Root, the president claimed racism is in our DNA.

How could he possibly utter such nonsense and who was he talking about? The majority of Americans are from families that came to this country after slavery existed. Many of those were escaping oppression of their own.  In my case my family was fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Many of the members of my family who stayed behind ended up gassed in Auschwitz or exterminated in Treblinka.

Is Obama telling me that racism is in my DNA? What a wretched and insulting statement. If he means that, he should tell it to me face-to-face.

If he does, I will tell him what I think. The racial situation in this country has gotten decidedly worse since he took office. And he is a great deal to blame. Ever since the beer summit it was obvious he was disingenuous and harmful on the subject of race, seeking to stir the pot when it was actually empty or nearly. His claim that if he had had a son he would look like Travyon Martin was ridiculous and self-serving in the extreme. Barack Obama is a product of the fanciest private school in Hawaii and his children go to Sidwell Friends, the fanciest school in D.C. He takes vacations on Oahu and his wife parties in Switzerland. He had as much in common with Trayvon as I do with the queen of Spain.

And speaking of foreign lands, I’ve spent time abroad and speak Spanish and French and if Mr. Obama thinks the U.S. is a racist country, he ought to do a little bit of traveling not on Air Force One. Try sitting at a French dinner table for twenty minutes and listening to the casual conversation if you think America is racist.

The truth is the USA is remarkably un-racist for a country its size.  We weren’t always that way, obviously, but we walked the walk and we are now.  Or were. The Democrat Party and its assorted media hacks are trying to take us backwards. They suffer from nostalgia for racism for the glorious days when they could assert their moral superiority. Sorry, those days are over. The only way to stop remaining racism is to stop it, not talk about it, impute racism to people who don’t have it and generally do everything possible to divide the American people from themselves.

Let’s assume for a moment that racism reveals itself not by what someone says, but by what someone does. In this state, with few exceptions (two being late state Rep. Polly Williams (D–Milwaukee) and former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist), Democrats opposed Milwaukee school choice, the only way anyone has come up with to get inner-city children out of bad Milwaukee Public Schools. The reason, of course, is that school choice is opposed by the teacher unions, proving where the Democrats’ priorities are, and are not. The same forces spiked the creation of a Madison charter school for black students.

Similarly, Democratic Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett and his police chief, Ed Flynn, refuse to support policies that would reduce crime in high-minority-population areas, such as Saturation Area Patrolling. It is racist to assume that non-whites don’t care about being victims of crime. (Barrett, meanwhile, has not lifted a finger to improve MPS. Had he wanted to, he could ask Gov. Scott Walker to get legislative Republicans to pass a law to give the Milwaukee mayor control over MPS, and the Legislature would pass that law in seconds. Barrett hasn’t, and either isn’t interested or is too afraid to take on the education establishment.)

Blacks have higher unemployment rates than whites. So when Democrats support policies such as ObamaCare and minimum wage increases that make employment more costly for employers, Democrats advocate policies that make things worse for blacks.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that he looked forward “to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” That is the only standard worth having.