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

 
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