I'm just the guy that can't stand cant. ___________

 
LOTT’S LEGACY: Whatever else Trent Lott has proved himself to be, he has demonstrated prowess as a vote counter in his three decades in Congress. Lott put that skill to use this morning and resigned as Senate majority leader after counting the horses’ heads in his bed.

While Lott’s resignation as majority leader may spare Bush and fellow Republicans some embarrassment, it may have come too late to put all the worms back in the can that Lott opened with his tribute to Storm Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign.

If Lott had resigned his leadership post a week ago – or even if he had not kept reviving the story with near-daily clumsy apologies – L’affaire Lott might have been quickly dropped by the news media as just another politician done in by a gaffe. By hanging on and staying in the public eye with his pathetic serial apologies, Lott has practically forced commentators to look for some larger context in which to place his transgressions.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, Lott’s statements retroactively endorsing a segregationist campaign for president – as well as his long history of opposing civil rights legislation – are reflective of the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy. For more than three decades, Republican candidates have won the votes of Southern whites by indicating that they would be far less sympathetic to the grievances of African Americans than the Democrats have been. Starting in 1968, when Strom Thurmond campaigned for Richard Nixon, the Southern Strategy has enabled Republican presidential candidates to rely on large blocs of electoral votes from the South.

Since hardcore racists are among the voters attracted by such Republican appeals, the Republican Party has always been skittish about discussing the Southern Strategy in the rest of the country. To a large extent the news media have obliged the Republicans on this point and have rarely focused on the Southern Strategy.

Lott, however, has performed an unintentional service to his country – and the Democrats – by keeping the story of his political demise alive and fresh. With each bumbling apology, Lott would revive the story and force commentators to look for new angles and eventually they focused on the Southern Strategy. The topic of the Republicans’ cynical and crass manipulation of white racial attitudes to achieve electoral success in the South has become a mainstream news topic. For a few examples, see what a leading newspaper, the last elected president and an insightful blogger have said about the Republicans’ Southern Strategy.

It would be a fitting tribute to Lott if his legacy is a continued sensitivity by the news media to the Republicans’ Southern Strategy. Perhaps, the major news media will turn the spotlight on the Southern Strategy the next time Republicans try to suppress black voter turnout – as they did recently in the Louisiana Senate race – or make veiled references to the Democrats as the party of criminal or unpopular blacks – as Bush the elder did in 1988 and Senator Frist (a leading contender to replace Lott as majority leader) did in 1994.

If a heightened awareness of the Republicans’ Southern Strategy is Lott’s legacy, the Democrats may want to give Lott the tribute he deserves. The next time Republicans try to profit from white voters’ racial resentments or suppress black voter turnout, Democrats might want to state the following:

When Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon and Trent Lott ran for office, we voted against them. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.
posted by Gary at 5:09 PM

 
BUSH’S SOUTHERN STRATEGY OF SILENCE: While the Bush administration is renown for speaking with one mind on all things political (and for this administration all things are political), when it comes to the fate of Trent Lott, the White House is certainly having trouble expressing that mind.

The reason for the Bush administration’s recent muddled statements on Lott appears to be that the White House would prefer that voters not know that what is on its mind is preservation of the Republican Party’s southern strategy. While the White House’s statements about Lott have been ambiguous, the White House has expressed no ambivalence toward the southern strategy, which Republican presidential candidates have used since the 1960's to lock up southern electoral votes with campaigns designed to appeal to white voters opposed to civil rights legislation.

The White House’s enigmatic approach began last Thursday when Bush criticized Lott for his statement at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party lamenting that Thurmond did not win his 1948 third-party campaign for president on a virulently segregationist platform. The White House immediately muddied that message by having presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer state “emphatically and on the record, the president doesn't think Trent Lott needs to resign.”

Since Thursday, the White House has strived to make its intentions towards Lott even less clear. Reporters trying to discern Bush’s position on whether Republican Senators should vote to replace Lott as Senate Majority Leader in a caucus vote on Jan. 6 received mixed messages yesterday.

In public, the White House was reaffirming Bush’s view that Lott did not need to resign as Senate Majority Leader:

The White House, which rebuked Lott last week, repeated that Bush does not believe that Lott, elected to become majority leader last month, should step aside. But it refused to say if the president wants Lott to be majority leader.

In private, however, White House sources were singing a different tune:

A ... Republican close to the White House said Bush's advisers were second-guessing a decision last week to give Lott a chance to survive. Despite strong criticism of Lott's remarks by Bush, spokesman Ari Fleischer was instructed to say the Mississippian should not resign.

In fact, some Republican sources were indicating that Bush and his advisers would prefer for Lott simply to vanish from the face of the earth:

In contrast to Monday, when White House officials went to great lengths to portray themselves as leaving Mr. Lott's fate to his Senate colleagues, today they appeared to be more overtly involved.

Republicans said that Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, was engaged in phone calls with party members about Mr. Lott today and was receiving advice about what the White House should do.

Mr. Rove was careful, Republicans said, not to push a point of view or otherwise be seen as trying to manipulate the outcome of Senate affairs.

Mr. Rove declined to comment on Mr. Lott's remarks. But privately, a Republican close to President Bush said that Mr. Lott's refusal to step aside was prolonging the inevitable.

Although the Bush administration apparently views Lott as a liability that needs to be thrown from the train, they do not want their fingerprints on the body. And why does the Bush administration prefer the present chaotic situation to playing any discernible role in replacing Lott? The most likely answer is that Bush and his advisers want to discard only Lott – not the southern strategy:

Bush's political advisers say they are highly disappointed with Lott's explanations, but say they had been ordered by the president not to take any overt or covert action against the Mississippi Republican.

The White House faces a dilemma: Lott is hurting both Bush and his party, but any effort to take down Lott will hurt Bush with his Southern base, say senior Republicans close to the White House. Bush also feels some loyalty toward Lott, White House officials said.

Thus, the president's political team is forced into what one White House official called a “strategy of silence,” hoping events themselves lead to Lott's removal or – much less likely – somehow end the controversy.

It is richly ironic that Bush, after slapping Lott’s wrist for his retroactive endorsement of Strom Thurmond, is settling on a southern strategy of silence.

The original southern strategy was used by Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond in the presidential race of 1968 to convince unreconstructed white voters that Nixon would not advance the cause of civil rights for black Americans. With a nudge and a wink, Nixon and Thurmond telegraphed to racists that Nixon’s silence on civil rights issues should be interpreted as signaling that a Republican White House would be more to their liking than a Democratic administration.

Bush’s southern strategy of silence is true to the spirit of Nixon’s and Thurmond’s original southern strategy. Rather than take a moral stand and actively seek Lott’s removal as Senate Majority Leader, Bush is remaining silent so as not to antagonize white southern voters that see nothing wrong in Lott’s embrace of Thurmond’s segregationist past.

Regardless of what happens to the beleaguered Lott, perhaps he can take comfort in the knowledge that even though Thurmond’s segregationist platform of 1948 was rejected by the voters, Thurmond’s southern strategy of 1968 has been adopted by Bush.
posted by Gary at 2:02 PM

 
LOTTS O’ LIES: Trent Lott’s chances of surviving his retroactive endorsement of Storm Thurmond’s 1948 Dixiecrat race for president would be better if Lott were only a bigot and a liar. Unfortunately for Lott, he is also a clumsy liar.

As Lott engages in serial apologizing in an effort to keep his post as Senate Majority Leader, he is tripping over his own lies.

On Larry King’s show last Wednesday, Lott tried to excuse his comments expressing support for Thurmond’s segregationist campaign for president by pleading ignorance about what Thurmond stood for a half century ago. After apologizing for comments at Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, Lott added:

Having said that, you know, I see – I was 7-years-old when, you know, Strom first ran for president. I don't really remember anything about the campaign.

Lott’s plea of ignorance was laughable. Lott is a 61-year-old senator from Mississippi – a state at the heart of the civil rights struggles of past decades – who has served with Thurmond in Congress for three decades. If Lott had been a thirtysomething political neophyte, his plea of ignorance might have been plausible. Coming from him, the plea was ludicrous.

Indeed, in his interview with BET’s Ed Gordon last night, Lott effectively admitted that his earlier plea of ignorance about Thurmond’s segregationist background was a lie:

GORDON: But you also saw a senator that personified for years segregation.

LOTT: Yes, but let me tell you...

GORDON: Did you not, though?

LOTT: I did. I did.

GORDON: And you knew and understood what he stood for?

LOTT: I – absolutely I did.

Later in the interview, Lott tried once again to fall back on his claimed ignorance to excuse his record in voting against the Martin Luther King Holiday in 1983. Lott’s whopper that he did not knot know what Martin Luther King represented was so ridiculous that Lott quickly began back pedaling when Gordon prodded him:

GORDON: Let's talk about the King holiday.

LOTT: I want to talk about the King holiday. I want to go back to that.

I'm not sure we in America, certainly not white America and the people in the South, fully understood who this man was; the impact he was having on the fabric of this country.

GORDON: But you certainly understood it by the time that vote came up, Senator.

LOTT: Well, but...

GORDON: You knew who Dr. King was at that point.

LOTT: I did, but I've learned a lot more since then.

Having chosen mendacity and ignorance for his sword and his shield as he fights for his political life, Lott also tried the lie that he is in favor of affirmative action. Lott conveniently ignored his 1998 vote to eliminate affirmative action for federal construction contracts. When Gordon probed this untruth, however, Lott fell back on feigning ignorance of what affirmative action really means.

GORDON: What about affirmative action?

LOTT: I'm for that. I think you should reach out to people ...

GORDON: Across the board?

LOTT: Absolutely, across the board. That's why I'm so proud of my own alma mater now, University of Mississippi, that obviously had a difficult time in the 60s and 70s, now led by an outstanding chancellor, Robert Khayat, that has gotten rid of the Confederate flag, that has now has an institute of reconciliation, that has a leadership...

GORDON: Yet your votes in the past have not suggested that you are for affirmative action.

LOTT: I am for affirmative action. And I practice it. I have had African-Americans on my staff, and other minorities, but particularly African-Americans, since the mid-1970s.

I have had a particular program ...

GORDON: But to have one on one's staff--you understand the difference, though, to have a black on your staff and to push legislation that would help African-Americans, minorities across the board, are completely different.

LOTT: You know, again, you can get into arguments about timetables and quotas.

Lott has apparently reached the point that he is willing to say anything – no matter how outrageous or untrue – to keep his job as Senate Majority Leader. While Lott might have been able to survive if he had merely been a bigot and a liar, I suspect his being a clumsy liar is one liability too many even for his Republican colleagues.
posted by Gary at 10:36 AM

 
NO GORE IN ‘04: The republic is a little poorer today with Al Gore’s announcement that he will not run for president in 2004.

Gore is one of the most thoughtful politicians around today. If he had not been savaged by numerous misleading treatments in the news media in 2000 – fueled largely by Republican and right-wing spinmeisters – he would undoubtedly be president today. For that matter, if five members of the Supreme Court had not disgraced themselves with the most partisan decision in Supreme Court history, he would probably be president.

Recently, Gore has been a forceful critic of the Bush administration’s slapdash policies, which appear coherent only when they forthrightly cater to corporate interests. Unlike many other Democrats, Gore has not been afraid to criticize a foreign policy that has simplemindedly chosen a forceful sounding bellicosity towards Iraq over a more considered approach of how best to deal with terrorism. He has also not been afraid to attack disastrous economic policies that favor the rich.

Despite sounding like a presidential candidate – and a great one at that – Gore has decided that another spokesman might serve the Democrats better in 2004:

Well, I personally have the energy and the drive and the ambition to make another campaign. But I don't think it's the right thing for me to do. I think that a campaign that would be a rematch between myself and President Bush would inevitably involve a focus on the past that would, in some measure, distract from the focus on the future that I think all campaigns have to be about.

....

The last campaign was an extremely difficult one. And while I have the energy and drive to go out there and do it again, I think that there are a lot of people within the Democratic Party who felt exhausted by that, who felt like, O.K., I don't want to go through that again. And I'm, frankly, sensitive to that feeling.

Gore’s decision must have been a difficult one to make. I certainly find it a difficult decision to accept.

Given Gore’s recent outspokenness, I think he would have been an effective candidate against a fundamentally dishonest administration, which is adopting domestic policies even more ill-advised than the first Bush administration’s. For just the latest outrage, read today’s Washington Post article on the Bush administration’s plans to shift taxes from the rich to the poor. (Link via Counterspin Central.) Gore, who has the instincts of a populist – in the best sense of the term (see Trent Lott for the worst sense) – would have been one of the best spokesman for the Democrats in 2004 in denouncing Bush’s class guerrilla warfare on behalf of the rich.

In recent weeks Al Gore has shown what a spirited Democrat can do as he has forcefully and effectively blasted the Bush administration. I hope other Democrats that what to be president are not shy in following in his footsteps.


posted by Gary at 10:30 AM

 
WHEN A BUSH FLIES: Reading President Bush’s slap-on-the wrist criticism of Trent Lott’s retroactive endorsement of Strom Thurmond and the 1948 Dixiecrats brought to mind that age-old ethical question that has divided philosophers for centuries: When an elephant flies, do you criticize him for not getting very far off the ground?

While it is all well and good that Bush has finally criticized Lott’s lament that America did not vote for a segregationist platform a half century ago, that criticism was both too late and too weak for Bush to be given any credit. After several days of White House statements that Bush accepted Lott’s half-hearted apologies, Bush finally criticized Lott yesterday:

“Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive, and it is wrong,” Mr. Bush said as his mostly black audience of religious leaders in Philadelphia rose from their chairs and erupted in shouts of approval and long burst of applause. “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,” the president continued. “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.”

After reading these noble words, who can dispute that Bush would not countenance any Republican leader that expressed hostility to civil rights for all Americans? Well, Bush can – and, through a spokesman, did – dispute it. Despite his ringing endorsement of equal rights for all, Bush wants Lott to continue as the Republican leader in the Senate:

While Mr. Bush did not address the question of whether Mr. Lott should step aside, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said in an interview after Mr. Bush's speech that “emphatically and on the record, the president doesn't think Trent Lott needs to resign.”

Now, Bush could have done the moral thing and called for Lott to step down as majority leader. Or Bush could have been wishy-washy and had a spokesman say noting more than that Lott’s continued tenure as majority leader was a matter for him and the Senate Republicans to decide. Or Bush could have been mildly supportive of Lott and have a spokesman merely say that Lott does not need to go.

Instead, Bush had Fleischer state that Bush “emphatically and on the record ... doesn’t think Trent Lott needs to resign.” Why was it necessary for Bush to express his support for Lott “emphatically”? Perhaps Bush was afraid that Republicans would think that Bush was actually serious when he mouthed those noble words and not realize that his rebuke of Lott was just a political ploy designed to end the controversy:

The White House at first tried to stay clear of the controversy, but Bush and his advisers, in meetings Wednesday night and Thursday morning, decided it could undermine their efforts to increase black support in the next election. In 2000 Bush received just 9 percent of the black vote.

....

“The president did Trent Lott a big favor today,” said Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who accompanied Bush to Philadelphia. “He basically cleared the air. ... This is not an issue that divides us anymore.”

Given Bush’s endorsement of Lott’s continued leadership role, it seems clear the Bush’s toothless rebuke of him was done more for political than moral reasons. Bush is not so committed to the ideals of equality that he minds having the Senate run by a segregationist sympathizer.

While Bush deserves criticism for this lack of moral leadership, this episode offers no illumination on the age-old ethical question posed above. Unfortunately, this elephant didn’t really fly, he merely stomped around the jungle making loud noises.
posted by Gary at 11:14 AM

 
LIES, DAMNED LIES AND TRENT LOTT: Trent Lott’s pathetic attempts at apologizing are revealing him to be a liar as well as a bigot.

In his first feeble apology, Lott claimed that his retroactive endorsement of Strom Thurmond’s segregationist campaign for president in 1948 was reflective of nothing more than a poor choice of words. At the time I thought that it was marginally conceivable that Lott had not really thought through what he was saying. But (as I discussed in my previous post) even if idle, such comments reflected gross racial insensitivity. (Actually, I said he did not give a rat’s rump about black Americans).

As I discussed, I suspected that such an interpretation might be overly charitable to Lott. Indeed it was. It has since been revealed that Lott made almost identical comments endorsing Thurmond’s 1948 campaign at a campaign rally for Ronald Reagan in Mississippi in November 1980. Far from being a spur of the moment effusion at Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, Lott’s praise for the Thurmond of half a century ago has a lineage of more than two decades.

Given the untenability of Lott’s original defense that he made his remarks because he was giddy from being at a birthday party, Lott is now trying to explain what he meant by his multiple endorsements of Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist campaign. According to Lott, whether it’s 1980 or 2002, when he thinks about the Dixiecrats’ 1948 campaign he thinks of defense issues. In giving his new, improved mea culpa yesterday to the right-wing pundit Sean Hannity, Lott claimed:

When I think of Strom Thurmond, I'm talking about defense issues. 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.

What a load of bunk. Lott is being deceitful when he implies that for Strom Thurmond in 1948 “defense was big issue.” If ever there was a one issue campaign in the history of America, it was Thurmond’s 1948 campaign as the presidential candidate of the State Rights Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic Party in 1948 for the sole reason that they were opposed to civil rights for blacks. Thurmond ran on the issue of being opposed to civil rights for blacks – not on any defense issues. Take a look at the Dixiecrats’ 1948 party platform. Not a word about defense issues. Instead, you get such noble sentiments as “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race ....”

Speaking on Larry King last night, Lott made another real howler when King asked whether he really thought the country would have been off if Thurmond had been elected in 1948:

KING: But you don't think he'd [have] been a better president, say, than Harry Truman who defeated him that year?

LOTT: You know, I'd have to go back and look at the election of that year.

Lott’s answer is a clumsy lie wrapped inside an evasion. Does Lott really expect people to believe that after being roasted for several days for retroactively endorsing a segregationist candidate in the 1948 race, he has no idea what Thurmond’s campaign was about? Lott obviously knows that Thurmond’s campaign was all about maintaining segregation of the races, but still refuses to disavow that effort.

Take a moment to consider this. After getting pilloried for days, Lott still can’t bring himself to say that it was better for the country not to have elected a segregationist as president in 1948. The man is an absolute disgrace.
posted by Gary at 11:17 AM

 
WHAT (IF ANYTHING) WAS ON LOTT'S MIND?: Now that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has issued a half-hearted apology for his love note to Senator Thurmond’s racist campaign for president in 1948, America’s media can return to more pressing issues such as pinning down Senator Kerry on the price of his haircuts.

Before we leave Senator Lott on his own magnolia lined memory lane, however, a few points are worth considering.

Lott’s statement was a classic gaffe. My definition of a gaffe is slightly different from Michael Kinsley’s, who has defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth.” I’ve always thought that definition, while clever, misses the mark. For example, Ronald Reagan’s idiotic statement that trees and other plants are the main cause of air pollution was both a gaffe and untrue. I think a better definition of a gaffe is when a politician does not let the limitations of his mind prevent him from speaking it.

Lott’s statement was a gaffe in that sense. I have no doubt that Lott was speaking his mind when he waxed nostalgic about Thurmond’s pro-segregation 1948 race for president.

The question is what was on his mind. As Lott was waiting to speak at Thurmond’s party and staring at the Centenarian, was Lott really musing about how much better America would be if we didn’t have those pesky laws against lynching and denying the vote to blacks? Probably not. (Though lacking President Bush’s ability to look into the eyes of a man and see his soul, I can’t say for sure.)

While we can never be sure exactly what Lott meant – especially since he refuses to say – even the most charitable view of what he meant is actually quite damning.

To be more charitable to Lott than he probably deserves, he may not have been thinking about anything specific and was expressing some vague resentments about federal enforcement of civil rights laws. To be even more charitable, Lott may have just been trying to honor Thurmond and wanted to praise him as a states’ rights prophet before his time without even reflecting that the cause he was celebrating sought to perpetuate the subjugation and degradation of black Americans. Yet, the denial of civil rights to blacks was so central to Thurmond’s 1948 campaign, such a lapse on Lott’s part would indicate that the denial of civil rights to black Americans is an issue that never crosses his mind.

Thus, even this most charitable view paints a sorry picture of Senator Lott. For the most charitable thing that can be said of the man leading the Republicans in the Senate is that he does not give a rat’s rump about black Americans.
posted by Gary at 11:08 AM

 
THE STUDENT PRESIDENT: President Bush was a bit off the mark when he said he would be the education president.

It turns out that Bush is really the student president, given his tactic of “studying” problems – such as stem cell research – as a way of pretending to be concerned about problems without doing anything to upset his right wing backers.

The Self Made Pundit has already mocked Bush in our Nov. 13 post for using this tactic of calling for more research as a way of avoiding tackling the ever growing problem of global warming.

The cause for that derision was a New York Times report that Bush was recycling his father’s environmental plans and calling for four more years of research into the causes of global warming rather than taking more immediate steps to address this impending global catastrophe. The Self Made Pundit was outraged (though hardly surprised) that Bush was cynically calling for years of research as a way of feigning interest in the potentially disastrous problem of global warming while doing nothing to disturb his corporate backers.

Perhaps we were too harsh at that time in criticizing Bush for calling for four more years of research before taking action. After all, given the Bush administration’s ties to energy industries, the proposal could have been far worse. For example, the administration could have proposed studying the problem of global warming for another 10 years – not jut four – before taking any action.

Unfortunately, Bush too apparently realized that his environmental approach could have been far worse, and has decided to go for it. Bush is now calling for 10 years of research before taking any meaningful action on global warning. As The New York Times reports today:

On Tuesday, the Bush administration convenes a three-day meeting here to set its new agenda for research on climate change. But many climate experts who will attend say talking about more research will simply delay decisions that need to be made now to avert serious harm from global warming.

President Bush has called for a decade of research before anything beyond voluntary measures is used to stem tailpipe and smokestack emissions of heat-trapping gases that scientists say are contributing to global warming.

....

But many climate experts say the perennial need for more study can no longer justify further delays in emission cuts.

"Waiting 10 years to decide is itself a decision which may remove from the table certain options for stabilizing concentrations later," said Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton.

For example, under today's rate of emissions growth, he and other experts say that certain losses are already probable, including dwindling of snow-dependent water supplies and global die-offs of vulnerable ecosystems like coral reefs, alpine meadows and certain coastal marshes.

....

If greenhouse gas concentrations double, climate experts expect substantial disruptions of ecosystems and water supplies, coastal damage as sea levels rise and intensified drought and downpour cycles. Even more calamitous surprises could lie in store, including disruptions in the Atlantic Ocean currents that help warm Europe.

The experts concede that they cannot say exactly what may happen, or when. Also, changes will probably occur slowly — sea levels rising by millimeters a year, say — so there will be no one event to prompt people to choose a fuel-saving hybrid car over a gas-guzzling S.U.V.

But the warming will have enormous momentum, they say. Unlike soot or sulfur pollution, which falls out of the atmosphere within days or weeks, molecules of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can circulate for a century or more.

Similarly, the toxic effects of the Bush administration’s cynically negligent inaction on global warming will continue to harm the environment for decades to come.
posted by Gary at 10:25 AM

 
THE KURTZ AWARD FOR UNINTENTIONAL IRONY GOES TO ...: The Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz deserves some kind of an award for his journalistic achievements. It cannot be easy to write media criticism that manages to be both wishy-washy and conservative leaning while never venturing into actual criticism of the media. Yet Kurtz has managed this trifecta of bad political journalism.

As Kurtz noted in his column on Friday, Al Gore has criticized those elements of the news media that regularly repeat Republican Party talking points as “news.” Since Kurtz is a media critic, you might expect him to offer an opinion on whether Gore’s criticism has any validity.

Does Kurtz, the media critic, even entertain the thought that partisan manipulation of our national political discourse might be detrimental to our society? No. Instead, he poses hypotheticals about how even if Gore is right, he shouldn’t be discussing such things:

Let's say Gore is right, that conservative news outlets are trying to blacken the reputations of people like him. Doesn't complaining about it just sound like whining? Or is he playing to his base, the way conservatives have done all these years by moaning about the liberal media?

Perhaps Kurtz just needed the weekend to mull over Gore’s criticisms that right-wing media outlets such as the Washington Times do the bidding of the Republican Party. Kurtz actually addresses the issue in today’s Washington Post.

Kurtz, however, seems to find Gore’s media criticisms to be unwarranted, absolving at least the Washington Times of being a Republican Party mouthpiece. In a column entitled “Right, but Not 100 Percent Right,” Kurtz writes:

Since taking over the Washington Times editorial page last summer, Tony Blankley has thrown some hard rhetorical punches. And it's not just Democrats who have been on the receiving end.

....

Blankley .... says "The Washington Times is a conservative paper, it's not a Republican paper. We don't hold a brief for either party. We hold a brief for our values and principles.”

It's no surprise that the colorful Blankley, a "McLaughlin Group" regular, is skewering leading Democratic officials. "It's going to be a long two years for Lefty Pelosi and the San Francisco Democrats," he wrote in one signed column. But Republicans aren't exempt from the Blankley Treatment.

Just who are these Republicans the fiercely independent Washington Times is attacking despite their ties to the Republican Party? They are Republican maverick Senator John McCain and ex-Republican Senator Jim Jeffords. Apparently, Kurtz views McCain as a loyal Republican and includes Jeffords on the theory that an ex-Republican is a type of Republican.

If a poll were taken of Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration on who is the biggest traitor to the Republican Party, the only suspense would be in whether McCain or Jeffords finished first. Yet Kurtz views the Washington Times’ attacks on these two Republican Party heretics as demonstrating the paper’s autonomy from the Republican Party.

Let’s add unintentional irony to Kurtz’s other journalistic achievements.
posted by Gary at 10:32 AM