From Pine View Farm

But Lying Is What They Do 0

Eugene Robinson dissects Hayley Barbour’s fantastickal tale of growing up integrated. A nugget:

The governor’s assertion that segregation was a relic of the past “by my time” is ludicrous. He was 16, certainly old enough to pay attention, during the Freedom Summer of 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Miss. He was a young adult, on his way to becoming a lawyer, when the public schools were forced to integrate. I’ll bet Barbour could remember those days if he tried a little harder.

Equally wrong — and perhaps deliberately disingenuous — is his made-up narrative of how the South turned Republican. Barbour’s fairy tale doesn’t remotely resemble what really happened.

I am about the same age, perhaps a little older than Mr. Robinson, and a little younger than Mr. Barbour. All three of us grew up in the Jim Crow South, though by law Mr. Robinson and I could not have attended school together. We are old enough to remember . . . .

Barbour is lying. He’s lying to himself, or lying to the rest of us, or some combination thereof.

Whichever it be–whether he’s delusional or mendacious–he reveals himself to be untrustworthy and unqualified for public positions.

Share

Comments are closed.