Phony Moral Outrage Over Lott Saga
December 11, 2002
What you have, in essence, ladies and gentlemen, on this Trent Lott situation is that selective moral outrage has become a political calculation for Democrats. In other words, Trent Lott is wrong, but only because this hurts Republicans politically.
As far as the left is concerned, what Trent Lott said is great. There's no real outrage. There's happiness on the left over this. We played a back and forth for you between Jesse Jackson and Bob Novak screaming about this on Crossfire and you can hear that there's no outrage in Jackson's voice at what Trent Lott said. There's happiness, because they're taking what they pretend is moral outrage and converting it to a political calculation.
This is all phony-baloney, plastic-banana, good-time rock 'n' roll outrage because these people all know Lott's not really a racist. What he said was stupid. You can't defend the remark. But there's no evidence in his behavior, his voting record or in legislation that he's authored to suggest that he's racist at all or segregationist. So this is all politics passing as moral outrage, and as is embodied in the audio link below in the form of a question from Robin Roberts to Clair Shipman on ABC's Good Morning America. Roberts says, "As you know it's not just Lott under fire, it's the entire Republican Party…" That's it in a nutshell.
We also have Algore and Maxine Waters (who's more angry at Tom Daschle than Lott) taking their shots at Lott, which is all just more evidence that this is all selective moral outrage based on a political calculation, and it's phony, pure and simple.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_121102/content/truth_detector.guest.html
these people all know Lott's not really a racist. What he said was stupid. You can't defend the remark. I can't agree with Rush's dismissal that Lott is not really a racist - neither he nor I can crawl inside Lott's head (ugh, stay away from the toupee tape) and know what Lott really meant and what his racial attitudes actually are. Only Lott knows that for sure. But, in the end, I simply do not want someone in that significant of a leadership position to have such poor judgement as to even insinuate that there was anything positive about the Dixiecrat Party and their platform.