I suspected, when anonoblogger Atrios and partisan pundit Josh Marshall initially tore into Trent Lott for his stupid and insensitive remarks in praise of Strom Thurmond, that the whole affair would get plenty ugly before it blew over, and sure enough it has. Marshall is now implying that Lott’s a cross-burner, because he once talked to a group that’s had the gall to file an amicus brief in the cross-burning case that’s before the Supreme Court now. Marshall calls it harmonic convergence, but I prefer the traditional name, smearing. If it were a flag-burning case, Lott would be champion of Free Speech.
Atrios’ blog is all Lott, all the time, and he’s out in front if the sweepstakes to take the title of the blogosphere’s leading purveyor of hate. So at this point, Atrios and Marshall have managed to overwork the story to such an extreme degree that they’re courting a reaction. Lott, as stupid as he was, at least didn’t sound hateful; you can’t say that about the holier-than-thou folks who are still piling on him.
Lott’s error was to break the cardinal rule of Southern civility, which is that we don’t talk about those times anymore. Southerners know that segregation is an unhealed scab, and the more you pick at it the worse it gets, so it just isn’t discussed any more. Maybe a hundred years from now we’ll be able to talk about it, but there won’t be any point to it, and there probably isn’t any now.
If Lott had said something like “Strom, you did it all — you were a prosecutor, a judge, a Governor, a Senator, and you even ran for President, picking up more electoral votes than some major party candidates of recent memory (McGovern and Mondale). You’ve lived a charmed life” he’d have avoided all of this flap, and he just might have said something like that if he hadn’t been drunk at the time. But he didn’t, so he got raked over the coals of Southern history, and it’s now time for everybody to put that baby to bed or risk becoming the story, like the two hate-mongers I named and their colleagues Al (Tawana Brawley) Sharpton and Jesse (Hymietown) Jackson.
Enough already – it’s starting to look like a campaign of rape and wanton destruction, like Sherman’s march to the sea.
The man was *drunk*, now? That’s the excuse? I thought he was talking about Thurmond’s stance on foreign policy (“We shouldn’t let foreign Negroes in our swimming pools, either”), or just was ignorant of what the campaign was about. There have been a good four or five different excuses for Lott, none of which make much sense or dovetail at all with each other.
My great-great-great grandfather — a German immigrant — was one of Sherman’s key generals on that march…..
Well, at least he wasn’t a Dodgers fan.
none of which make much sense or dovetail at all with each other.
Yeah, it’s almost like they’re not coordinated or something, but we all know the VRWC* coordinates everything, don’t we?
*Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
I don’t know if he’s racist or not, but I’m convinced that if he’s not, he’s at least stupid. Either way, as a Republican I think he has no business being the Senate leader of the party.