Category: Old Dish

Thank God. I’m immensely relieved. The statement clearly shows that Bush doesn’t believe Lott’s attempt to explain away his words. Lott must now resign. He has no other choice.

SOWELL ON LOTT: I think Lott now has to resign. Bush has a day to make the move:

Let me recall a personal experience from that era. Although I lived in New York, during the Korean war I was a young Marine who was stationed in the South. On a long bus ride down to North Carolina, the bus stopped very briefly in Winston-Salem so that the passengers could go to the restrooms. And in those days there were separate “white” and “colored” restrooms.
The bus stopped next to the white restrooms and I had no idea where the restrooms for blacks might be located — or whether I could find it in time to get back to the bus before it left. So I went to the men’s room for whites, leaving it to others to decide what they wanted to do about it.
I figured that if I were going to die fighting for democracy, I might as well do it in Winston-Salem and save myself a long trip across the Pacific. It so happened that nobody said or did anything. But I should not have had to face such a choice while wearing the uniform of my country and traveling in the South only because I was ordered to.
This was just one of thousands of such galling experiences — many others were far worse — that blacks went through all the time during the era of racial segregation that Senator Thurmond was fighting to preserve as a candidate for the Dixiecrats in 1948.

Krauthammer comes through again:

What is so appalling about Lott’s remarks is not the bigotry but the blindness. One should be very hesitant about ascribing bigotry. It is hard to discern what someone feels in his heart of hearts. It is less hard to discern what someone sees, particularly if he tells you. Lott sees the civil rights movement and “all these problems over all these years.” He missed the whole story.
Backbenchers might be permitted such a lack of vision. Leaders are not. Lott must step down.

Exactly right.

More telling than the New York Times. Here’s their conclusion:

Thurmond and Byrd have worked hard to get on the right side of history. Lott still has work to do. He should do it, but not as the Republican leader of the Senate.
It’s not as though the Republicans will suffer from a change in leadership. Lott’s previous tenure as Senate majority leader was uninspiring and ultimately self-defeating. In part because of Lott’s tin ear, Sen. James Jeffords bolted from the GOP and took control of the Senate with him.
Lott may not, as he says, have a racist bone in his body. But he has a strange way of expressing that. As long as Senate Republicans prop him up as their leader in the Senate, it will be difficult for them to say with a straight face that they represent the party of Lincoln.

Amen. So why is the president dithering on this? Doesn’t he realize that Trent Lott has just trashed years of hard work trying to persuade minorities that they are welcome in the GOP’s big tent? The president is strong enough to ask Lott to step aside. Lott’s only Senate Majority Leader because of Bush, after all.

From the Republican appointees on the Civil Rights Commission:

As Republican appointees to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, we deplore Senator Trent Lott’s December 5, 2002 statement that if Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948 “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”
The central issue on which Thurmond ran was support for racial segregation. Senator Lott thus lends credibility to the view that such civil rights advances as President Truman’s executive order mandating an end to racial segregation in the U.S. armed forces, the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were grave mistakes. Certainly, in 1948, Strom Thurmond opposed all of them.
This is a particularly shameful remark coming from a leader of the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, and the party that supported all of these essential steps forward far more vigorously than did the Democratic Party, which at the time was the home of congressional southerners committed to white supremacy.
The civil rights era was a shining moment in American history. We believe Senator Lott agrees, and invite him to join us in celebrating the revolutionary change in the status of African Americans that flowed from a movement in which blacks and whites joined hands to make a better America.

Abigail Thernstrom
Jennifer C. Braceras
Peter N. Kirsanow
Russell G. Redenbaugh
Commissioners, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

Fair enough. But why no demand for his resignation as Majority Leader? And where on earth is John McCain?

MORE LOTT LIES: Josh Marshall is beginning to own this story.

Do these words sound familiar:

And I would hope that we could move on from that and move to things that we can do to help the people all across this country, economic opportunity for everybody, community renewal, which is something that’s important for people of all races and income levels, work to make sure we have election reforms that guarantees that people have an opportunity and a right to vote, and the funds to pay for it; put more money in the education, so that really no child is left behind. That’s the best way to show how you really feel, is by doing things that will open up the opportunity for people all across our state.

Blah blah blah. Reading the transcript of Lott’s interview with Lott-defender Sean Hannity, you have to wonder who Trent Lott is channeling. This last piece of Clintonian blather was preceded by a long, elaborate Clintonian fib. When Trent Lott thinks of the presidential candidacy of Strom Thurmond, what he’s really thinking about is … national defense! As they say out there on the web, ROTFLMAO*:

If you look back at that time, which was 1948, defense was a big issue. We were coming out of the war, of course, but we also were dealing with communism and then in the ’80s, you know, when I talked about Strom again, we were talking about the problem in Iran, talking about deficits over the years, strong law enforcement speeches. I remember when I first got to the Senate, one of the first speeches I ever heard Strom give was talking about the need to have strong law enforcement to protect the people, all of the people. And also, I have a memory of Strom promoting economic development in South Carolina, as have others there in that state. So those are the kinds of things where we’ve had problems over the years with defense, budgets, you know, law enforcement. I think we could have done a better job.

Hands up everyone who thinks he’s telling the truth. The trouble with Lott is that he combines the worst part of some Democrats – big-government pork-barrel spending – with the worst part of some Republicans – racial obtuseness, in Lott’s case, to the brink of outright bigotry. The connective tissue is Clintonian spin. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve to be a senator from Mississippi – that’s up to the voters. What I am saying is that he cannot be Republican Senate Majority Leader any more without destroying a good deal of what George W. Bush has accomplished. Nice try, Mr Lott. But your time is up. Do the decent thing and get the hell out of there.
(* i.e. Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off. By the way, Bob Herbert thinks Lott should stay. Doesn’t that tell you something?)

LOTT AND THE YOUNG: Here’s an email that confirms my suspicion of an age gap in how seriously to treat Trent Lott’s apparent nostalgia for Jim Crow:

You are absolutely correct on the generation gap. I am 32, my father is 55. We are both attorneys practicing in Toledo, Ohio, both Republicans. He thinks the Lott gaffe is just that, a gaffe, and thinks we should give him a pass. I, on the other hand, agree with you, Lott has to go. Lott is the worst kind of government lackey. He has no principles, other than governing, for the sake of governing. To Lott, and his ilk, it’s all about pork. Big government is good, as long it is my big government. I cannot stand this in a politician. At least Ted Kennedy does not hide his love for government. Lott would sell out any conservative principle (school choice, small government, pro business, growth through tax reduction, personal and economi freedom) to have a bridge built in Mississippi. And he is my party’s “leader” in the Senate?
I was ready to pull my hair out yesterday having this discussion with my father. Even he knows Lott’s conservative shortcomings, yet still gives him a pass. As a practical matter, the GOP has its best chance to dump Lott now. As a principled matter, the GOP has no business having this segregationist as its front man. Good bye, Mr. Lott.
And what really insenses me, what really makes my blood boil, is those who attempt to deflect Lott’s statements by citing to Robert Byrd and the KKK, or Bill Clinton and his southern pals. You know what? Jim Crow is Jim Crow. My GOP racist is no worse than you democrat racist? Dammit, what the Hell? Sean Hannity, as entertaining as he can be, is going total hack on this on his radio show. Mr. Hannity, condemn Lott, don’t compare, condemn. Where is your soul?

Yes, Hannity has been among the worst on this issue. Didn’t come as a surprise to me.

THE JESUITS TAKE A STAND: The current issue of America, the American Jesuit magazine, is devoted in large part to a defense of gays in the priesthood. Alas, the essays require subscription. But this wouldn’t be happening if the Society of Jesus wasn’t deeply worried about the forthcoming directives from Rome. What it suggests to me is that if Rome decides to purge celibate and faithful gay priests and seminarians, then the American church will not take that decision as binding. Many in the clerical hierarchy and many more among the laity and religious orders will simply disobey, leading to crisis and/or a real danger of schism. This may, of course, be what some at the Vatican want, and in the absence of a functioning pontiff, they might get away with it. But not without a struggle. And not without fierce resistance in America.

THE STEROID PANIC: A useful counterweight to the New York Times’ recent scare story about steroid use can be found in the current Reason magazine. But where both pieces agree is the need for much more research on how steroids can improve health and beauty, if used responsibly. I’ve experienced this myself and seen it in others with HIV and AIDS – enough to wonder how much more good these drugs could do if allowed to be used more widely:

One reason the health effects of steroids are so uncertain is a dearth of research. In the almost 65 years that anabolic steroids have been in our midst, there has not been a single epidemiological study of the effects of long-term use. Instead, Yesalis explains, concerns about extended usage are extrapolated from what’s known about short-term effects. The problem is that those short-term research projects are often case studies, which Yesalis calls the “lowest life form of scientific studies.” Case studies often draw conclusions from a single test subject and are especially prone to correlative errors.

And yet we all carry about in our heads the notion that steroid use will cause you to drop dead in your fifties. More research and less hysteria, please.

RAINES DIGS IN: The indispensable Sridhar Pappu has the goods on what really went down last week at the Times:

Mr. Raines, according to a Times source, has told people that the incident will not change the way he and the rest of the masthead conducts business at the paper. However, the story revealed a measure of control that surprised the outside world. Some asked if Mr. Raines had contracted the kind of iron-fisted attitude that former editor A.M. Rosenthal had insisted upon during his tenure. “So much of this comes from a top-down management structure as it does ‘censorship,'” said one Times source. “These are decisions that would normally be made by a section editor who would say, ‘You know what? I don’t like this for whatever reason.’ … Here, they’re actually making the decisions and putti
ng their fingerprints on it and they’re going to continue to put their fingerprints on it because they don’t trust their editors enough.”

Not encouraging, is it?

“As a student at the Catholic University School of Law I read with great interest your commentary on Doug Kmiec as a potential candidate for a seat on the D.C. Circuit. Having been a student at the Catholic University’s law school for one and a half years under Dean Kmiec’s tutelage, I feel uniquely qualified to offer further insight Kmiec’s particular viewpoint. What troubles me most about the possibility of Judge Kmiec is that he has an abiding inability to divorce his ultra-conservative religious views from his use of garden-variety logic.” – this, and a Democrat defends Trent Lott, on today’s Letters Page.

A hopeful sign from Michael Kramer’s column:

Unofficially, the Bushies are beside themselves. “We need this like a hole in the head,” says one. “At a time when we’re trying to reach out to black voters, Lott’s an embarrassment. Gore’s right on the substance and also on the politics. If he runs again, blacks are going to remember that Gore was the one who bashed Trent early, and I can easily see all those Democratic commercials replaying [Lott’s] words ad nauseam.”

Dan Drezner has more.

James Taranto has a superb and measured condemnation of Trent Lott today. So does the American Prowler. Josh Marshall discovers Lott defending Bob Jones University’s old segregation policies. Still no official word from 43d Street. Maybe the New York Times actually wants to keep Lott as Majority Leader. They know how damaging he is to the Republican Party.

Different perspectives but similar conclusions:

I’m from Mississippi and until now, a Republican. Trent Lott’s patently racists remarks horrify me on many levels. I wholeheartedly agree with you, he must step down as Senate Majority Leader. And I am enraged that Lott spoke as if all Mississippians agree with his vile remarks.
Then, today, the staggering practical damage becomes clear. Until now, the Republican party, nationally and in Mississippi, seemed finally to be breaking free of its stolid, exclusive image — thanks largely to President George W. Bush. And it’s now time down here to recruit candidates for state legislative elections next year. I have been encouraging several black friends to run as Republicans in a number of key races. Now I hardly know what to say to these people.
Unless the GOP quickly disavows Lott in no uncertain terms, it will take decades to undo the damage with black voters, who were until now receptive to Republican ideas. The loss of these good people because of Lott’s indefensible statement sickens me. I cannot continue to consider myself a Republican so long as Trent Lott is a party leader.

And this one from a black Democrat, who also sees problems within his own party:

My roommate turned me onto your site some time back and I enjoy it immensely, but I disagree with you a bit on the Trent Lott fiasco. While I agree that bringing up Robert Byrd is not a sufficient response (Lott should resign immediately, before the inevitable pressure from the press and the Democrats make it look like caving-in rather than acting on principle.), neither is it beside the point. The Democrats and members of the press, including you to a certain extent, have used this mess to make sweeping statements about the Republican party. In that context, isn’t it reasonable to point out the Democrats’ similar behavior?
I’m a lifelong Democrat, and Black, but this seems like a golden opportunity to spotlight my party’s hypocrisy. They talk a good game when they’re trying to get out the Black vote, but between elections they act no better than the opposition, and in some cases even worse. I cannot stand the man, but George Bush got about 5% of the Black vote and his cabinet looks like Showtime at the Apollo.
I’m beginning to wonder if my loyalty is misplaced.

And then there’s this email from one half of an inter-racial marriage:

I’m adrift. I’m the white half of an interracial couple, and my politics might be described as leaning-libertarian. I was pleased that Bush beat Gore, and equally pleased with the results of the latest midterms. But I’m not a Republican, and I did not cast my vote for Bush.
While I don’t suspect racism, latent or otherwise, in the heart of the President, there’s a reason why I couldn’t cast my vote for him: his appearance at Bob Jones University. In that single moment of sad acquiescence to the bigot wing of the party, George W. Bush lost my vote. And Trent Lott’s recent comments represent yet another, even more jarring “Bob Jones Moment” for me.
Simply put, if Trent Lott is allowed once again to assume the mantle of majority leader, without dissent from the President or anyone in the President’s party, how can I ever vote Republican again? How can I look my black wife in the face after doing so? How can I live with my own conscience?
This could be a moment of truth for the Republican Party. It certainly is for me.

Me too. We’re waiting for you to speak out, Mr President. This is your moment of truth as well.

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 …