It was all just an innocent mistake

Go read Paul Krugman on Reagan's racism and the Southern strategy. Unusually snarky for Mr. Krugman, and right on the money.

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

Several accounts of Reagan's innocent mistakes follow. I don't feel a bit sorry for that bastard, either.

Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.

PS: It has been pointed out to me that Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, giving in only when Congress passed a law creating the holiday by a veto-proof majority. But he really didn’t mean to disrespect the civil rights movement - it was just an innocent mistake.

The Repugs just love that senile, now thankfully dead, old sonofabitch, and they'll keep making those innocent mistakes until there ain't a person of color allowed to vote.