Posted on 12/14/2002 8:18:17 AM PST by doug from upland
I have wanted Trent Lott removed from leadership since Impeachment. The spineless weasel had the votes to bring live witnesses before the Senate on national television that would have revealed the extent of Bill Clinton's sexual predator history.
David Schippers called it a SELLOUT. Schippers was absolutely correct. Could the prosecutors have changed enough minds to get 67 votes? We will never know. They should have had the opportunity to try. Lott is the one who stood in the way.
The RATS have been in turmoil since the midterm elections. They were shocked to their core. And now, Lott puts his foot in his mouth to give them the opportunity for which they have waited.
The same people who were not concerned with rape, perjury, obstruction of justice, intimidation of witnesses, etc., are suddenly concerned that a weak-kneed GOP leader (who is their best friend) made a really stupid statement last week, made the same kind of statement 20 years ago, and didn't want his fraternity integrated 40 years ago. We know what the South was like 40 years ago. It appears that Lott has led his public life since those days as someone who believes in racial equality.
Now, he is being a whiner and threatening to quit the Senate if he is removed from leadership. What a weenie. We don't want him as leader, but we need him in the Senate. It is blackmail.
Perhaps the statements will blow over soon. He is certainly damaged goods, but the GOP may have no choice but to keep him. The RATS will benefit either way. If he stays in his position, he will continue to compromise and kiss their RAT posteriors. That is Trent.
The more ominous scenario is that the GOP does the right thing to force him out. Yes, I believe if he is forced out of leadership he will quit the Senate and a RAT governor will appoint a RAT to the Senate.
So here we have the reason for the assault. If Lott stays, the RATS have an issue to fire up their base and they have a weak Lott right where they want him. If Lott goes, the Senate is 50-49-1, with the 1 voting for their team.
But it won't stop there. I suspect that the RATS are confident that either Snow or Chaffee might then see an opportunity to jump. Either of them could become an Independent and vote with the RATS. All of the effort by the GOP to retake the Senate will be flushed down the toilet.
This really is an effort to undue an election. The RATS, not surprisingly, are even doing it in time of war while al-Qaeda plans another assault on our nation.
We may have little choice but to reluctantly support Lott. Let's see how it plays out through the Christmas season (not the "Holiday season"). If he survives for another week, he may ultimately keep his post.
The real conservatives of the party, and those who really know how to deal with RATS, better sit Lott down and tell him the facts of life. If he is to keep their support, he needs to throw down his pom-poms, get rid of his light loafers, and start acting like a man. We don't need a wimp when we are dealing with the RATS.
President Bush made some strong statements as he clearly needed to do. Now it is up to the rest of the party to start fighting back. It is time to be reciting the awful, hateful, racist comments said by the RATS. We really do have an opportunity to stick it in their faces if we have the gonads to do it. There is no White Caucus, but there is a racist Black Caucus. It is no time to sit on the sidelines and wave pom-poms. Or is it pom-pons?
Instead, he made a big deal of the event.
Wishful thinking, my friend. If Lott hangs on, it will be by kow-towing to the media and Al Sharptons and undermining the conservative agenda ("See I'm no bigot, I just voted for this welfare bill the NAACP wanted")
How many Freepers can you find who think Hillary is NOT blackmailing Lott? The general opinion seems to be that she's been doing that since impeachment or before.
If she/they can blackmail him into caving on issues important to the country and to his party, why couldn't they pressure him into reading one short, almost "harmless" script. They are prolific "scriptwriters" for their friends in office or the media. Why not their victims, too?
OK, I don't really think this is what happened, but the thought did occur to me along with a few follow up questions. Who depressed the black vote this election? (Carl McCall certainly made it clear who cut off HIS money and why--Clintonian revenge on Jeb.) Who absolutely NEEDS the black vote? Who's laying low right now whose mug is usually plastered all over TV? Cui bono--short of their actually losing their victim? OTOH if he's replaced by a Rat...
Miss Marple, I think this "news" got out so fast because an opportunist Rat was at the party and made a quick phone call. OTOH it COULD have been a set-up.
After reading Sellout, I turned on Lott and do not understand why Nickles or Santorum hasn't challenged him.
I hope to God that they're not being blackmailed, too. It's possible they're not, but enough other (lower-profile) pubbie Senators who cast votes ARE.
No, textual analysis reaching back two decades is the means by which we later understand what was in Lott's heart, not the plain sense of the words I quoted from 2002.
Textual analysis is the means by which we put he plain sense of words into a greater context.
When someone says, "I'm gonna kill him," the plainest sense is that he intends murder, though textual analysis might inform us otherwise.
Grand Old Segregationists Trent Lott said what he said—and for the second time. Can this be a blessing in disguise for the moribund Democrats?
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE Dec. 13 — Not one Republican member in the next Congress is African-American, and that’s not surprising. The modern GOP is built on a legacy of racism. Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” set the poisonous tone, and Republican candidates continue to exploit racial fears for political gain.
TELEVISION IMAGES canvassing Republican headquarters on election night showed so few black faces that a casual viewer could easily assume the GOP is a white-people’s party. Conversely, there is no Democratic Party without an energized black base, a fact of political life that too many Democrats would rather not confront. Race drove last weekend’s runoff election in Louisiana. GOP flyers distributed in black areas sought to depress turnout with the rumor, “If the weather’s bad, don’t worry, you can vote on Tuesday.” Minority voters weren’t fooled, but it wasn’t for the GOP’s lack of trying.
Senate leader Trent Lott’s birthday wish to former segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond that, if he had won the presidency in 1948, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years,” is the latest example in a long line of insults to people of color. Too bad for Democrats that Lott didn’t say what he did before Nov. 5 because the election outcome might have been different.
Lott’s claim that his comment was a “mistake of the head, not the heart” collapsed when news reports revealed that he had expressed almost the identical sentiment about Thurmond’s Dixiecrat candidacy in a campaign appearance for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Other comments will inevitably come to light. “If you’re wondering whether there’s a pattern,” says a former Republican campaign worker, “there’s a pattern.”
Most people are uncomfortable talking about race so politicians convey messages in code. Standing up for state’s rights has long been a favorite cover for racist impulses. When Lott stepped out of that polite way of speaking about race, he exposed the GOP’s double game: the lip service the party gives to reaching out to blacks and the winks and nods to whites assuring them nothing fundamental will change. With one stupid and thoughtless attempt at humor, Lott stripped away the carefully constructed façade the Bush team erected at the GOP convention in 2000 and revealed the party’s true colors. “We’re on the hook now,” says a Republican strategist, who hopes his party understands the depth of the damage and the need to do more to contain the fallout. Keeping Lott in place is tantamount to raising the Confederate flag over the Capitol. No matter how many times he apologies, he has become a visible symbol of the country’s racist past, and the ongoing hypocrisy of the Republican Party.
Lott’s remark at the Friday, Dec. 6, party for Thurmond initially drew little attention. The Washington Post played the story inside, and little was said over the weekend. Conservative columnist Bob Novak dismissed the comment on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” as “birthday-party rhetoric, for goodness sake.” He blamed the press for blowing it out of proportion and the Democrats for obsessing about race. Democratic leader Tom Daschle issued a pro-forma condemnation of what Lott said and showed no inclination to do more. It looked as though the boys-will-be-boys club would come through for Lott. But the story kept building in part because conservative Republican voices picked up the drumbeat. They have worked too hard to see their party gain majority strength to allow Lott’s words to go unchallenged and confirm the worst stereotypes about Republicans.
Trent Lott's Greatest Hits A time line of deeds and words
1 / 18 Next: Early 1960's
Introduction
Trent Lott has had a rough week. Eight days ago, Lott made statements that implied he supported centenarian Sen. Strom Thurmond's pro-segregation 1948 presidential bid. Ever since the scandal-generating birthday bash, Lott has been finding himself under a steadily growing attack. Today, the senator from Mississippi asked the nation for its "forbearance and forgiveness" and called segregation "immoral" and "a stain on our nation's soul." His mea culpa was a far cry from last week's terse apology that referred to Jim Crow laws as "discarded policies." The "sharecropper's son," as Lott described himself, spoke from his hometown of Pascagoula, Miss., where he denied ever having said he favored segregation. The time line below tells a different story and traces the former Ole Miss cheerleader and soon-to-be--if he survives politically--Senate majority leader's long and tangled history with race.
2 / 18 Next: 1968 /Early 1960's
Lott--a University of Mississippi cheerleader and president of the Sigma Nu fraternity--leads the fight to keep his frat segregated. At Ole Miss, desegregation efforts reached a flash point after the arrival of a black student, James Meredith, triggered waves of riots and National Guardsmen were called in to secure the campus. Lott would later say: "Yes, you could say I favored segregation then. I don't now … The main thing was, I felt the federal government had no business sending in troops telling the state what to do."
3 / 18 Next: 1972 1968
Lott gets his first job working for Mississippi Democrat Rep. William Colmer, a fiery segregationist, as a congressional aide. Colmer is perhaps most famous for using his position as chairman of the House Rules Committee to stymie civil-rights legislation.
4 / 18 Next: 1978 / 1972
Lott is elected to the House of Representatives.
5 / 18 Next: 1979 /1978
Representative Lott spearheads a successful effort to posthumously restore U.S. citizenship to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Lott is later awarded the United Daughters of Confederacy medal for his work.
6 / 18 Next: 1980 / 1979
Lott joins a bipartisan group that supports a constitutional amendment to prohibit busing to desegregate schools.
At a presidential-campaign rally for candidate Ronald Reagan in Mississippi, Lott follows Sen. Strom Thurmond to the podium and tells the crowd, "You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today." The comment is very similar to the senator's more recent remark praising Thurmond's 1948 bid for the presidency as a Dixiecrat.
8 / 18 Next: 1982 /1981
Lott is one of 24 representatives to vote against extending the Voting Rights Act, legislation that eliminates obstacles to the voting booth for minorities. Also that year, Lott files a Supreme Court friend-of-the-court brief supporting a tax exemption for South Carolina's Bob Jones University, a school most famous for its discriminatory policies and for banning interracial dating. He argued that "racial discrimination does not always violate public policy."
9 / 18 Next: 1983 /1982
The Reagan administration is embarrassed after Lott's letter to the president, which urged him to reverse a longstanding law withholding tax exemptions from schools that discriminate, becomes public. Lott was lobbying the administration on behalf of Bob Jones University. The representative received an answer from Reagan--"I think we should" scrawled in the margins of his memo--and forwarded the president's remark to high-ranking Justice Department and Treasury officials. Reagan initially sides with Lott, but after ensuing controversy the decision is modified.
10 / 18 Next: 1984 / 1983
Lott and 97 others in the House vote against making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. Senator Thurmond votes in favor of the legislation. Lott would later tell Southern Partisan magazine, "Look at the cost involved in the Martin Luther King holiday and the fact that we have not done it for a lot of other people that were more deserving."
11 / 18 Next: 1988 /1984
Serving as chairman of the Republican Party's Platform Committee, Lott tells a meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans that "the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican Platform." He would tell Southern Partisan magazine that after the Civil War, "a lot of Southerners identified with the Democrat Party because of the radical Republicans we had at the time." Lott also called the Civil War, the "war of Northern aggression" during the interview.
12 / 18 Next: 1990 /1988
Representative Lott is elected to the Senate.
13 / 18 Next: 1992 / 1990
Lott is one of 34 senators to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1990. The legislation was sponsored by Republican Sen. Bob Dole and made it easier for victims of employment discrimination to win court cases. Lott is also one of four senators to oppose legislation that would force the Justice Department to keep hate-crime statistics tracking race- and prejudice-based crimes.
14 / 18 Next: 1995 /1992
The senator gives a keynote address at a Council of Conservative Citizens gathering. The CCC is a direct descendant of the Southern white citizen councils that resisted civil rights for blacks. He is quoted as saying that "the people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries." Lott gave three speeches before the group in the 1990s and he has published several columns in the group's magazine, a publication that has advocated segregation. (The senator is currently pictured on the organization's Web page where he is heralded for his work stopping the "illegal alien invasion.")
15 / 18 Next: 1997 /1995
Lott publicly scolds Rep. Bennie Thompson, an African-American Democrat from his state, for pressuring the government to unseal records relating to the 1966 murder of a civil-rights activist. Thompson was intervening on behalf of a prosecutor who sought to reopen a case against a Klansman who had been freed when a late-'60s jury failed to reach a verdict in the murder trial. "Bennie Thompson would do well to tend to his job in Washington," Lott told the press. "Because we've got a lot of very important issues to work on that affect the Delta and his constituency and leave legal matters and lawsuits to district attorneys and the FBI and people involved."
16 / 18 Next: Dec. 5, 2002 /1997
Lott is photographed standing with the national leaders of the CCC in his Senate office. He later denies "firsthand knowledge" of the group, but subsequently is forced to acknowledge that his self-described favorite uncle is a director of the group.
17 / 18 Next: Dec. 13, 2002 /Dec 5, 2002
During a celebration honoring the 100th birthday of Strom Thurmond, Lott tells the audience: "I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president [in 1948], we voted for him. 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." A delayed furor ensues after media observers point out that Thurmond's Dixiecrat campaign followed the South Carolina senator's decision to lead several Democratic delegates from Southern states in a walkout from their party's national convention. The Thurmond camp subsequently ran a nearly single-issue anti-civil rights campaign that was provoked by a pro-civil-rights convention speech given by Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey as he made racial equality a plank in the party's platform.
18 / 18 /12/13/2002
Trying to stamp out an increasingly heated eight-day political firestorm, Lott apologizes again for "reopening old wounds and hurting so many Americans." He does not offer his resignation as majority leader, ignoring demands made by the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP and pundits and pols from both parties that he step down. "I'm not about to resign for an accusation that I'm something I'm not," Lott said.
By Suzanne Smalley
Newsweek Web exclusive
Lott has no reservoir of goodwill to draw upon and could find himself expendable. All it would take is a phone call from White House political mastermind Karl Rove to send the dominoes tumbling on Capitol Hill. Bush won only 5 percent of the African-American vote in 2000. Expanding that vote was considered easy until Lott single-handedly changed the dynamic. “Where the Republicans create a mess, let them fix it,” says former Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile. More than most people, Brazile, an African-American, understands the sensitivity of talking about race. She was called a racist in 2000 for her remark that “Republicans care more about taking pictures with black children than feeding them.” She called Colin Powell, among others, to apologize. But when she sees Daschle issuing a second statement lambasting Lott because his first statement didn’t satisfy his fellow Democrats, she loses patience with the purists. Keep the focus on the Republicans; don’t put your own party on trial, she says. “Democrats are not a social-service agency. We need to get back to being a political party.”
Brazile is floating an idea of recruiting favorite sons and daughters to run for president as a way of generating grass-roots excitement for Democrats. “It’s not just a black thing,” she says, although promoting local black candidates could draw support away from Al Sharpton’s likely candidacy. If successful, such a drive could accumulate up to 1,500 delegates, enough to sway the choice of a nominee and build interest in the Democratic Party. Brazile is having lunch next week with Rove, operative to operative. They’ll discuss the midterm numbers, just as they did after the 2000 election. “I like Karl. He’s smart,” says Brazile. “We talk simple arithmetic. He drinks Coke, and I drink Chardonnay.”
Thanks to Lott, those numbers could look a lot different in 2004.
With the number of files, reportedly 900, that the 'toons had/have, I've all along thought that they've got something on literally every single member of the House and Senate, and that still leaves, what?, almost 400? The 'toons have the goods on everybody who is anybody, I'd bet.
There's safety in numbers. When virtually all of Stalin's lieutenants concluded, in 1953, that he was about to kill them in a new purge, they struck first, and committed medical murder against him.
The Clintons are a threat to virtually all politicians, Republican or DemocRAT. Why can't they draw the proper conclusion from that?
Somebody gets it.
Lott won't be going anywhere. The Bushman was pissed off at him, but I strongly suspect by next week this story will be dead and buried.
Still, you want to put Pickering's nomination off until late in the Spring. Everyone else (Patricia Owen, etc.) should be moved to the front.
Key to understanding how much by the bollocks we have Lott will be the organizational fight. We have the majority, so we should get two thirds of the money. That's the way the game is played. If the Dems want to gridlock the Senate in the middle of a military buildup in the Middle East (we're about to send five divisions over there for the Big Dance...), then it's their funeral.
Remember who has the biggest microphone in DC? Clue: it ain't Tom Daschle....
Be Seeing You,
Chris
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