Andrew Sullivan is up to his old tricks, trying to rehabilitate Ronald Reagan yet again on the issue of his infamous campaign speech at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980. This time he has bipartisan help, in the form a new post by Bruce Bartlett and an old one from Kevin Drum.

Bartlett somehow manages to say with a straight face that Reagan's use of the phrase "states' rights" at Neshoba was not evidence of any "winking and nodding" on race, and then goes on to cite the scheduling sequence of Neshoba ahead of an appearance before the Urban League to indicate just how sensitive the Reagan campaign was to the whole race issue.

Right. That's why in his speech in Neshoba, Reagan was careful to distinguish between his modern, non-racist version of states' rights and the Mississippi version, which meant "we can disenfranchise all our black citizens and beat them with impunity if they complain and murder them with impunity if they really complain." Oh wait, sorry, he didn't do that.

In his 2004 post, Drum cites the same Neshoba/Urban League sequence as Bartlett, then says this is not a convincing defense of Reagan. Agreed. He then cites an appearance by candidate Michael Dukakis at the Neshoba Fair in 1988, at which, based on my reading of the New York Times account that Drum quotes at length, Dukakis also chose not to speak truth to power. And that excuses Reagan's behavior exactly how?