Josh Marshall  Josh Marshall is editor and publisher of
TalkingPointsMemo.com.  Articles by Josh  What are some of the
great political betrayals of history? One certainly would be the
federal government's betrayal of the ex-slaves of the South at
the end of Reconstruction. After a dozen or so years trying to
impose biracial democracy on the conquered South, the then-party
of emancipation and civil rights, the Republicans, abandoned the
freedmen to the tender mercies of Jim Crow for about a century.
Then there was the shameful, though likely inevitable,
abandonment of the fledgling electoral democracies of Eastern
Europe. Those which were occupied by the Red Army -- Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany and others -- at the end
of World War II had to endure about four decades of Stalinist
tyranny.  Of course, now we have a much more recent example: the
Bush White House's betrayal of the administration-obedient
scribes who rushed forward in recent weeks to defend the White
House's folly in North Asia.