That would be a better headline for Dick Morris’s column this morning. It has nothing new, except an embarrassing attempt to argue that Lott is indistinguishable from John Lewis on the matter of civil rights. Oh, Dick, come off it. Then there’s this:
Let’s start with the fact that I have known Lott for 15 years and have had, perhaps, a hundred or more meetings with him. I got to know him better than any American politician other than Bill Clinton. He is no racist. There is not a racist bone in his body.
Translation: Lott has paid me an awful lot over the years to figure out how to use race and other issues effectively as an electoral tool while not getting caught. If he’s a racist, what does that say about me?
THE OTHER PARALLEL: John Scalzi makes an interesting point today:
Do I think Lott is a racist? Well, at the very least, I do suspect that Lott thinks of black people the way that conservative Republicans my age and slightly older think of gays and lesbians – that whole “why, this person seems agreeable enough, and look, I’m not even thinking about the fact he’s gay at all” sort of thing. The folks in this situation deal with gays by concentrating on the trivial matters at hand in front of them and desperately not thinking of that gay person in any other context – say, at home with their partners, slicing tomatoes for a salad or watching HBO or talking on the phone or having red-hot oral sex on the stairwell.- Replace “gay” with black” and you get an idea of where Lott is coming from. It’s sort of like being told not to think about a white elephant, and so of course that’s exactly what you do. “White Elephant,” of course, being oddly appropriate here.
I wonder if, in twenty years or so, another politician is going to come acropper because of blatant scorn for gay citizens, uttered in, say, the 1990s. Don Nickles, anyone?
The Dish 