NORTON’S ANTHOLOGY

In the situation of the Confederacy, ‘we certainly had bad facts in that case where we were defending state sovereignty by defending slavery. But we lost too much. We lost the idea that the states were to stand against the federal government gaining too much power over our lives.’ – Gale Norton, in a 1996 speech. This is the new smoking gun against a Bush appointee. Huh? She’s for federalism, states’ rights and a rollback of federal power. She explicitly distances herself from any idea that she supports or would have supported slavery. But she regrets in some part the federalization of the American polity that occurred after the Civil War. Does this make her the moral equivalent of David Duke? Apparently it does. ‘Her deeply divisive remarks suggest she lacks a vital instinct to protect what needs protecting, whether it’s wilderness or the rights of people of color,’ says Kenneth A. Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an activist environmental research organization. I don’t know where to begin in dissecting that statement. Any remark staking out a political position is inevitably divisive, since it splits listeners into supporters and opponents. And how on earth does a support for states’ rights in an environmental context mean either neglect of the environment or thinly veiled racism? The illogic is as remarkable as the moral posturing. At this rate, any candidate for office is going in future to have to be a tee-totaling, amnesiac virgin with the rhetorical flair of Jim Lehrer. I think I just became a fervent supporter of Gale Norton.