You may be a Republican, but you still don't get to revise history

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

• Friedrich Nietzsche

One of my Facebook friends, whom I won’t name, put forth the argument recently that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is a “deep thinker”. This assertion got me to thinking, because while I’m no expert on all things Barbour, “deep thinker” is not a description I would ever associate with this Republican Governor. “Revisionist Historian“…now THERE’S an appellation I could get behind, because Barbour has apparently decided to rewrite his own personal history. In his effort to remake himself as a product of a “post-racial” Mississippi, Barbour has forgotten about this little thing I like to call “fact-checking”. I could go into breathless detail about Barbour’s intellectual dishonesty and his willful revision of his own history…but Rachel Maddow and her crack staff have done the research for me.

To be plain, Barbour is a product of Mississippi during the “Mississippi Burning” era, not the “post-racial” MIssissippi he’s convinced himself he hails from. His state was one of the worst offenders when it came to treating Negroes as second-class citizens. While Barbour may consider his upbringing to be post-racial, his assertions simply don’t mesh with the truth. It would be simple to call Barbour a liar…and it would be true, but his deception goes much deeper. It ignores his generation and his home state’s role in one of the darkest periods in our history. That Barbour would whitewash (pun fully intended) his personal history is a disgusting and egregious attempt to shade the truth.

Haley Barbour is a “deep thinker” in the same way in the same way that Ted Bundy was an expert on relationships. To call him a liar wouldn’t begin to do his self-interested prevarications justice, but it’ll have to do for now. Barbour may not currently be a racist, and he may not have been a racist when those around him were racist to their cores, but let’s not paper over the truth. We don’t get to create our own narrative. We don’t get to write our own history…especially these days when “facts” and “truth” can so easily be checked. Would that Barbour and those like him would keep this simple fact in mind. It would save them a good deal of embarrassment and ridicule when people interested only in the truth begin digging.