It has been really encouraging to see many conservative outlets coming out and decrying Trent Lott. It tells you something when the Washington Times has editorialized and the New York Times hasn’t. The best piece so far is Jonah Goldberg’s. It has a brutal sentence: “[Lott is] a deal-cutter who seems to stand for nothing except massive amounts of pork to his home state and, occasionally, sticking up for Jim Crow.” My gut tells me that this contempt for Lott is particularly acute for younger conservatives/libertarians/classical liberals. In arguing for a race-neutral society, we have an obligation to repudiate with even more vehemence those formally racist institutions of the past. A loathing of Jim Crow is a critical part of our attempt to persuade people that our opposition to, say, affirmative action is not a function of racism, but a function of anti-racism. With this comes an obligation, especially from non-blacks, to acknowledge the uniquely hideous legacy African-Americans have endured. Indeed, it should not be up to blacks to complain about this kind of statement. That’s why I’m heartened by the conservative reponse. It’s a watershed. But that’s also why having someone like Lott as the leader of the Republicans in the Senate is such an intolerable affront. Lott makes the Left’s point for them. And he undermines a politics of race-neutrality that is still empathetic to the historic plight of African-Americans while eager to move on. Perhaps older conservatives can look beyond this. Younger ones, who were born after Jim Crow, can’t. It’s time for Lott to go. And it’s time for Bush to say so.
ANTI-WAR SPIN: Someone out there has begun to realize that the anti-war movement needs a radical make-over. Plagued by Marxist nut-cases, anti-Semites, and varied extremists, it has come to seem to many indistinguishable from a pro-Saddam movement. So in some ways, it’s encouraging that this particular message is now being re-tooled. “Win Without War” has this as its credo:
We are patriotic Americans who share President Bush’s belief that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq cannot be allowed to acquire weapons of mass destruction. We part ways with the president, however, on the issue of pre-emptive military attack against Iraq.
So what do they propose? The best guess is that they will argue as Saddam wants them to argue: that Iraq is fully compliant now with the international community, that inspections are all we need to verify this, and so on. Indeed, one of the new slogans is “Let The Inspections Work.” But don’t they realize that the only reason we have inspections at all is the threat of military force? Meanwhile, the photograph acompanying the new York Times’ sympathetic account shows a protestor with a sign declaring that president Bush is an “international terrorist.” Ah, yes. Let the inspections work …
The Dish 