How did the Washington Post commemorate the surrender of the Confederacy and the end of the Civil War? The paper on Thursday featured columnist Harold Meyerson to sneer that "today’s GOP is the party of Jefferson Davis, not of Lincoln."
Meyerson derided, "Fueled by the mega-donations of the mega-rich, today’s Republican Party is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis." The writer slimed:
It suppresses black voting; it opposes federal efforts to mitigate poverty; it objects to federal investment in infrastructure and education just as the antebellum South opposed internal improvements and rejected public education; it scorns compromise.
Meyerson concluded of the GOP: "It is nearly all white. It is the lineal descendant of Lee’s army, and the descendants of Grant’s have yet to subdue it."
This tired attack is hardly new. On December 23, 2009, MSNBC's Chris Matthews insisted that the Republican Party has become the party of the Confederacy.
By February 13, 2014, the MSNBC anchor slimed: The GOP was "the party of Jefferson Davis."
According to Jesse Jackson, in a conversation with MSNBC's Ed Schultz, the Tea party is the "resurrection of the Confederacy."
Of course, it was the Democratic Party who, as recent as 2010, had a former Ku Klux Klan member as a senator. As for the Democratic attempt to reverse the positions of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was no liberal. As the National Review's Rich Lowry pointed out:
As I recount in my new book, Lincoln Unbound, he was a proponent of free markets, individual achievement, and personal responsibility. He embraced economic dynamism and development. He rejected populist demagoguery directed at corporations and banks. He warned against class warfare and made working for your own living — and not living off the work of others — one of his bedrock principles. He considered property rights sacrosanct and called patent law one of the greatest inventions of all time. He revered the Founders. All these elements of his politics were at play in his struggle to end the rural backwardness in which he had grown up and — more importantly — to end slavery, which as “unrequited toil” offended his sense of basic justice and natural rights.
