That's awfully white of you.

That's awfully white of you.

“I’m not offended by our flag or the Confederate flag for that matter,” Barbour said. “But some people are. [...]

Other politicians may have suddenly made up their minds that maybe the symbols of slavery and segregation ought not hang from state flagpoles anymore, but former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour is not going to be listed along these belatedly courageous souls. Should Mississippi change their state flag? Is the Confederate flag offensive? Well golly, don't ask him There's yer headline, boys. Southern White Republican Ex-Governor Not Offended By Confederate Flag. But he recognized that some people are—that's something, right?

This was only the highlight of an extended conversation in which the Morning Joe crew and hangers-on valiantly tried to get the previous governor of America's worst state to express any opinion at all as to why other people keep getting so peeved over that flag and whether it should or should not be prominently displayed in front of state buildings as a constant reminder of struggle to prevent black Americans from gaining freedom, voting rights, education, or the ability to drink from the same water fountains as Haley Barbour. All attempts were in vain—which is a bit odd, given that Barbour had taken to Twitter Monday evening to strongly imply the state should change the flag. Between then and the next morning he seems to have had a change of heart on whether to pipe up about it at all.

Barbour, you will note, has some history with the Council of Conservative Citizens, the pro-segregation group whose rhetoric about the dangers of black Americans were specifically credited by domestic terrorist Dylann Roof as inspiration for his mass murder. He was pilloried in 2010 for defending the group as merely "an organization of town leaders," dismissing the group's plain segregationist and white supremacist history. So it's always been pretty clear where he stood on these things, which is how he got to be a governor to begin with.



Yeah, I'm an idiot. It was Barbour's nephew, Henry Barbour, that tweeted support for taking down the flag. I should have known Haley wouldn't have done such a thing. My apologies for the screw-up.