Over at Greg Sargent's blog, Adam Serwer has a great post on the GOP's "Huck Finn-ing" of the Constitution:
Earlier this week, there was an uproar over a publisher's plans to release an edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that would replace the N-word with the word "slave" in order to make the book more "appropriate" for schoolchildren. This kind of political correctness offers no justice to the descendants of slaves -- it merely papers over a terrible ugliness that is an essential part of American history.
Republicans, intending to make a big symbolic show of their reading of the Constitution, have now taken a similarly sanitized approach to our founding document. Yesterday they announced that they will be leaving out the superceded text in their reading of the Constitution on the House floor this morning, avoiding the awkwardness of having to read aloud the "three fifths compromise," which counted slaves as only three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and apportionment.
This really shouldn't come as a surprise; as a general matter, Republicans refuse to acknowledge the painful or ugly parts of American history and conduct. Granted, belief in American exceptionalism is a bipartisan affair, but conservatives and Republicans tend to go above and beyond liberals and Democrats in their effusive praise for the United States. Rising Republican stars, like newly minted Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, are virtually required to sing paeans to America's singular greatness, while movement conservatives routinely condemn anyone who fails to hold the United States as the single greatest thing to ever happen in the whole of human history.
For example, when President Obama acknowledged other countries' sense of national pride -- even while praising the United States -- conservatives attacked him as an America-hater, with prominent Republicans lambasting him for his insufficient belief in America's all-encompassing super-awesomeness. When it comes to belief in American greatness, Sean Hannity captures conservative sentiments well when he says that "the U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth." Blasphemy -- of course -- but apparently, the good kind.
When Republicans refuse to read the Constitution's three-fifths compromise, they are simply expressing a core ideological belief: American history is nothing more than a long, unbroken line of spectacular cosmic raditude.
-- Jamelle Bouie
