The Dish

Check out Jake Tapper’s piece on Lott’s close friendship with a proud segregationist, Richard Barrett, who’s alarmed by Lott’s apparent apologies:

And Barrett remembers that November 1994 night, right after Lott was reelected to his second Senate term when, “at his victory celebration, at the Coliseum Ramada Inn, Trent entered the hall and the first person he went up to shake hands with and greet was me. He called me by my name and was very affable.” But has Lott ever specifically talked to Barrett about supporting segregation? Barrett finds the question naive. “Does Jesse Jackson talk to Al Sharpton abut integration?” he asks. “Do they have to? Is there some split in the black caucus on that issue? There is certainly no split in Mississippi on segregation. Mississippi is still the solid South.” Barrett spent a lot of time on the phone Wednesday night with close advisors to Lott, he says. “We’re all like one big happy family in Mississippi. We’re the heart of Dixie. I’ve certainly never heard him say anything in favor of integration, let me put it to you that way.”… Barrett has harsh words for President Bush’s Thursday rebuke of Lott. “Sen. Lott was right” in his original comments, Barrett says. “Integration is immoral and should also be illegal.” Barrett thinks that whatever he’s saying now, Lott still believes that in his “heart of hearts.” What about Bush? “His heart of hearts has been addled by his drug-abused brain,” Barrett says.

More and more of this stuff is now bound to emerge. Yet Lott wants to hang on. How much more damage does he want to do to the country and to his party?

Here’s a reflection with which I completely concur. How sad it came to this. How important that there has been some tiny measure of accountability. How important this resignation is for the morale of all the good priests out there who have been horribly tarred and demoralized by this saga.

If Drudge is right and Trent Lott makes yet another apology this afternoon, we’re entering the Twilight Zone. If all you’ve got is Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan in your corner, and a damning silence from your colleagues, and a public denunciation from your own president, a fifth apology is simply not good enough. If Lott perseveres, he will be serving posthumously as Senate Majority Leader. He will be handing the Democrats a dream issue. The hard left position, that the GOP is a party of racists and closet racists and their enablers, will be given wider credibility. The New York Times spin is already trying to credit liberals – rather than many conservatives – with campaigning for Lott’s departure. I don’t know what the White House has been saying to Lott behind the scenes. But anything but asking him politely to step aside is not good enough. This is a pivotal moment for the GOP and the whole country is watching. The skeptics – who argue that Bush’s denunication was not genuine and will be followed by acquiescing to Lott’s leadership – will gain adherents. And many more centrist Republicans – and Southern Republicans – will be crushed that this relic of a terrible legacy has been allowed to live another day. This isn’t something that can be smoothed over. Lott must go.

What on earth does Trent Lott do now? A reader rightly points out that yesterday’s presidential scolding is a bigger deal than Sister Souljah. Ms Souljah was a no-good hip-hop fifteen minutes. Trent Lott is the Republican leader in the Senate. And his own president – almost entirely responsible for returning Lott to his position in the first place – has just chewed him out in the most public way. Surely Lott must go. But how? Another reader presents this awful scenario:

Lott quits (per your howling) in a huff. Not just the Maj Leader, but the whole shootin’ match. Mississippi’s Democratic governor appoints a Democratic senator, who joins with li’l Tommie D. and the boyz to promise Lincoln Chafee the world and a box of crackers. Final score 49-49-2, Daschle with the gavel, Bush gone in ’04. Who’s actually setting the party back, Andrew?

Anything’s possible. But it would turn his disgrace into a calamity for him. What would he do with his life? Lobby? After stabbing his president and party in the chest? It would be an act of spectacular bitterness and narcissism (which is why it’s not entirely impossible). But I don’t get the subsequent point. The issue here is not the short-term advantages for the Republican Party. The issue here is the soul of the Republican Party. When it comes to having a Dixiecrat who publicly waxes nostalgic for Jim Crow as a leader of that party, the damage is far, far greater than any short-term setback. If Lott – or his cronies – play such a resignation card, Bush should and would call his bluff. But I think Bush sees the bigger picture here. The president, after all, did an amazing and important thing yesterday. He rebuked a major figure in his own party and recast conservatism quite clearly and radically toward racial inclusion and tolerance:

We will not, and we must not, rest until every person of every race believes in the promise of America because they see it in their own eyes, with their own eyes, and they live it and feel it in their own lives.

Put that in Bartletts now. Purging the party of the sentiments expressed by Lott is a critical part of the process toward making the modern GOP truly an inheritor of Lincoln’s promise. The fate of any vain and bitter individual should be secondary to that great initiative.

MORE ON LOTT: Let’s recap a tiny bit. He fought integration of his college fraternity; he has hobnobbed with white supremacists; he submitted an amicus brief defending Bob Jones University’s right to prohibit inter-racial dating; he has twice regretted the fact that Strom Thurmond didn’t win the 1948 presidential election on an explicitly segregationist platform; he voted against the Voting Rights Act extension in 1982; in 1983 he voted against the Martin Luther King Jr holiday; last year, he cast the only vote against the confirmation of Judge Roger Gregory, the first black judge ever seated on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In these last three instances, even Strom Thurmond voted the other way. I don’t know. What do you think? Again, much of this was already well known about him. (I’ve omitted his equation of homosexuality with a compulsion to steal things. It’s still legit to demonize gay people and get away with it.) And if the white voters of Mississippi want to keep electing him, that’s their business. (He got a paltry 5 percent of the black vote last time around). But being a leader of the Republican Party is not a right; it’s a privilege. Surely, Lott has now shown himself to be unworthy of that privilege. So far, no other Republican Senator has dared to express his or her dismay at the prospect of being led by such a political albatross. It’s time they did. Where are you, John McCain?

ONE LAST PITCH: You’ve got another day or so to help us make our target for making this site financially viable. You’ve heard me before so I’ll cede to a reader on why it’s important to keep the blogosphere running. This week in particular:

What is amazing is how many articles are now popping up saying “oh, yeah, he also said this in 1983.” “Look what he said in 1981.” “In 1992 he said the following about Bob Jones.” “In 1978 he did this.” And so on. The thing is that these are not new stories! These have been around – Trent’s reputation has probably been known for some time. But nothing sustained has ever happened, even though quite a few people have probably known very well that one of the more powerful Senators was a segregationist in his heart.
But this story gets out on the blogs – I think you and Josh Marshall have been leading the discussion – and now it is impossible to stop. The blogs give legitimacy to the other papers. They create the momentum, and the big boys can jump on. Do you think that the NY Times would be running articles on this if InstaPundit had not? The research that the blogs have dedicated to this story has been amazing – every hour, someone has an excellent point to make about Lott, and every blog point is another drip in the bucket, so to speak. I have been a fan of blogs for a while now, but I have not seen a story happen around the edges of the major media like this one has. Strangely, this could be a watershed moment for the world of blogging. Not because they have done everything in the story, but because they sustained the momentum when the major dailies could not, or would not.

I think he’s onto something. Just compare the blogs’ coverage with the New York Times. We can’t replace the big media. But we can light fires and keep them going. That matters. And you can help keep it going. Please, please do. Click here to pay for this blog’s future.

This speech is a watershed. Here’s the critical passage that appeared early in the speech and not as an after-thought or an aside:

We must also rise to a second challenge facing our country. This great and prosperous land must become a single nation of justice and opportunity. We must continue our advance toward full equality for every citizen, which demands the guarantee of civil rights for all. (Applause.) Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive, and it is wrong.
Recent comments – recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country. He has apologized, and rightly so. Every day our nation was segregated was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals. And the founding ideals of our nation and, in fact, the founding ideals of the political party I represent was, and remains today, the equal dignity and equal rights of every American.
And so the – and this is the principle that guides my administration. We will not, and we must not, rest until every person of every race believes in the promise of America because they see it in their own eyes, with their own eyes, and they live it and feel it in their own lives.

The prelude to those passages was a recognition that we are at war. And I think that’s important. African-Americans play a disproportionate role in defending all of us from the evil out there. For the Senate Majority Leader to wax nostalgic about Jim Crow while these people are laying their lives on the line is unconscionable. With this speech, Bush shifts the center of gravity in the Republican Party away from its Dixiecrat-wannabe faction. I cannot see how Lott can survive now.

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?