Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Up till now I haven't blogged about the Trent Lott controversy for two reasons. I do believe that his comment about how "we wouldn't of had all these problems over all these years" if Strom Thurmonds Dixiecratic run for the White House in 1948 has been successful was racist but I already knew that Lott was a racist. His ties to the white supremacist group Council of Conservative Citizens might not be household knowledge but it isn't exactly something that isn't known either. If you didn't care about Lott being connected with such a group before December 5, then I don't see why you should care all that much about these comments unless you are like Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan and your main concern seems to be that having a person like Lott who has made such comments in a prominent position hurts the GOP.
More importantly, in a country where it is does not cause outrage that U.S. policies over the last 12 years or so have caused, according to a conservative estimate, 100,000 Iraqis to die prematurely, I find outrage over Lott's comments to be a tad hypocritical. The message seems to be that if you live in the U.S. you have a right to liberty but if you don't live in the U.S. you don't deserve anything better than death if the U.S. decides it wants to kill you. That is a sick message and while I doubt many people consciously view the situation that way, their selective outrage seems to indicate that such is the case.
One thing that I have to see mentioned in any news or blog coverage of the Lott controversy is how this situation indicates that the Republicans have been less than perfectly honest for years when they say things like, to quote Linda Chavez, "Republicans in Congress actually supported the two most important civil rights bills on record, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in higher percentages than Democrats did." This is true but igonores the fact that the composition of these two political parties was about to change and that civil rights was the catalyst for this change. Namely many Democrats of Thurmond's variety would join the Republicans. posted by micah holmquist at 12/12/2002 11:52:00 AM
