Rush Limbaugh

Indeed, it’s worth noting that the only people who are really jazzed to reopen the argument about the Civil Rights Act are liberals.

And they have good reason: They won that argument, politically and morally. This is a fact liberals never stop reminding us, and themselves, about. Like a paunchy middle-aged man who scored the winning touchdown in the high school championship, nostalgic liberals don’t need an excuse to bring up their glory days (which were not the Democratic Party’s glory days, by the way). Give them a living, breathing politician who suggests, no matter how imprecisely or grudgingly, that the Civil Rights Act wasn’t perfect, and they’ll talk your ear off like a drunk uncle at a wedding…

What really makes this debate remarkable is that someone has volunteered to be the straw man liberals are always creating.

It’s also proof that conservatives just can’t win. During the Bush years, liberals elevated libertarianism as the “good” right-wing ideology, sanctifying Barry Goldwater as the betrayed founding father of a more noble anti-statist tradition than the one presided over by the crazed apostate George W. Bush (whose racial views happened to be more benign than Goldwater’s).