A brutal mob killing out of pure hate for the Other is supposed to happen in Johannesburg, or East Timor, or in one of Stalin's pogroms, but not here, because we're better than that. And even if we're not, we'd have a nation day of shame and introspection.

In the early sixties when I was a grade schooler my parents took my older sister and I on a vacation driving down to Mississippi to visit relatives. The Mississippi state troopers had roadblocks, "welcome wagons" I think they called them, where they'd pull over cars with out-of-state plates to ascertain your business. At a family barbeque I remember a couple of distant uncles talking with pride about an FBI agent questioning him about a purchase of dynamite for blowing up tree stumps. Apparently, someone had blown up a black church and being suspected of blowing up a church and killing innocent black children was an honor.

First, the recent controversy. David Brooks wrote a stunningly simple-minded column claiming that to call Ronald Reagan a panderer for the votes of racist white Southerners was a "slur" against Reagan. Specifically, he tried to rebut the charge that the smoking gun proving Reagan's intentions was the infamous opening of Reagan's 1980 general election campaign at Mississippi's Neshoba County Fair, just down the road a piece from where Klansmen slaughtered three civil rights workers during Freedom Summer in 1964. Brooks, apparently inspired by the account of Bruce Bartlett, basically exculpates Reagan for the Neshoba appearance--in which he praised "states rights," as in the name of Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist States Rights Party--as an accident of scheduling. Now, however, the man who probably knows more about the rise of the Republican Party in Mississippi than any man alive, Emory professor Joseph Crespino, author of In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution, usefully puts the whole conservative-invented "controversy" to rest with both a crucial discussion of historical context, and a documentary smoking gun: a 1979 letter from a leading Mississippi Republican leader suggesting that if he wanted the "George Wallace inclined voters," the Neshoba County Fair was the place to speak.

Come on, Brooks: clear enough for you yet?

David Brooks wrote a stunningly simple-minded column