After verifying:
Still col-lg, col-md, and col-sm were not working. Finally I moved the references to bootstrap to be before the references to html5shiv.js and respond.js and it all worked.
Here is a snippet:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
<title>Bootstrap Test for IE8</title>
<!-- Moved these two lines up -->
<link href="includes/css/bootstrap.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
<script src="includes/js/bootstrap.js"></script>
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="includes/js/html5shiv.js"></script>
<script src="includes/js/respond.min.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4" style="background-color:red;">col-md-4</div>
<div class="col-md-8" style="background-color:green;">col-md-8</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>