This post is just astonishing to me. I saw a blurb run across the TV during the Republican convention that said the GOP was created to end slavery and was just floored. I’ve been meaning to do the research but hadn’t gotten there yet. I appreciate your pic and typing the words on that plaque, ew. How sad for anyone who claims to be a part of the original party that has to be. I hope Obama can prove that arm of the GOP wrong once and for all. I’d like race not to be such a hard wired issue in this country. Could we all just please evolve? I understand that it’s taught in Cuba and other places overseas that the US is a very racist country. TAUGHT! to kids and other students.
Taught openly. Contrary to what I was taught in public education here all my life.
Excellent post! Thank you.

Ahhhh, the sweet irony of it all. Thanks for your great post, Marcy. It sure is a hell of a surprise to me that they were an anti-slavery bunch originally. Maybe that is what attracted Clarence Thomas to the party. Heh!

May the Midwest once again lead the country away from its terrible legacy of slavery and racism. AMEN, Marcy

Kerry’s (and Kerrey’s) remarks are the sentiments that threw Ohio to the Blackwellian criminals in 2004. The world and America suffers through another four years of the Bush administration because it was too much trouble to question if the election had been rigged; too risky to determine how fragile the system is; too frightening to admit there are Americans of ill will. We are finding it out now…too late for thousands of lives and does any care?

MadDog asked an interesting question, perhaps some of the morphing of the new Republican party occurred when Gingrich decided the way forward was without a Department of Education, no Dept of Energy; modern Republicanism lost some vitality when the media began humoring Reagan jingoism based on the photogenicity of projectiles flying into Beirut; the equality early Republicans were determined to foster in their ranks endured a lame vitiation when George Bush Sr. introduced his family at his nominating convention designating the individuals sorted by their admix of race; then there were the secret prisons in the Baltic states Republicans accepted as their conduit to victory in a theopolitical war, the thousand signing statement revocations of law Charlie Savage documented at boston.com and in his book; the turning of the office of the vice president against the intell community by revealing the identity of one of theirs who was standing in the way of hype about her specialty, the international effort to suppress and work to eliminate entirely weapons intended for obliteration of civil populations. But the remnants of their party which survived were cherished by Josh Bolten, Hariet Miers, and Karl Rove, by Hans von Spakovsky, John Yoo, and Jay Bybee, and the frontier lady governor Palin. Mehlman can laugh because the line jamming equipment whose NH ops he oversaw is still legal. Theresa Payton can chuckle because hundreds of days of emails were ‘lost’. There are lots of Republicans who made it thru the eight years of Bush two, to start their party anew. Sara Taylor and Monica Goodling are available to help the Republican party see a new dawn and plan for a new administration. But McCain alone helped wreck the part of the old Republican party that tried to end comity in the senate by forcing judge nomination consideration by plurality vote without a cloture pressure valve, the so-called nuclear option. Bush remade Scotus sufficiently that Exxon just reported the most profitable quarter and series of quarters, ever, in the balance sheet of any US company, thanks to token cleanup penalties for the wreck of the Valdez long ago in the oiling of AK beaches. Reggie Walton helped salvage some respect for the remnants of the Republican Party. But, after the get out the vote campaigns have completed their work in the mid size cities of MI and OH and elsewhere, there will be need for regrouping if the Republican party is to have a truly modern configuration. Then there is the fun time Connell is likely to have today in TN, explaining why he rerouted the canvassing computer tallies in OH 2004 to his server farm for reshaping. Evidently, Connell is scheduled for deposition today November 3. I suppose JAshcroft will vote gladly today for more of the same, as will Thor Hearne and MMukasey, but what they miss is the structural changes their party has undergone, that their roots have become tangled in problems they solved by preabolition methods which would have been unjustifiable to their own party’s founders. The moderns are living a risky fiction, however, as it would be pretty lonely for subsequent generations to recognize what has come undone, that Bush has withdrawn from arms control, denied global warming science, fostered third world government exploitation of resources for the benefit of first world companies and negotiated away paths to the middle class for minorities in those obscure nations. Much of this is within character for the modern Republican party, even if stretched to new bounds of irrelevance; I will wait to hear the neoPhoenix Republicans proclaim great fervor and zeal based upon the inspiration of their new visions post election this cycle, but they have a long way to go to prove their neocon elitism is something other than a mutant party more infavorable to minorities than their founders ever imagined, whether within the US or in other countries.