This has nothing in common with the Clinton situation. Nothing at all. You're attempting to compare this to the events of the Clinton affair and thereby make certain individuals who disagree with you, look like they have the integrity and character of those scumbags libdems who defended SlickWillie.
That's nothing but pure slander and you're still an idiot!
I am saying that your argument about the need for political defense was very similar to arguments made by Dems about the need to defend Clinton at all costs from Republican attacks. You can infer from that what you wish.
Again, GOP drops the ball on the race issue
Armstrong Williams
December 10, 2002
Southerners are the only Americans to have lost a major war and to have had their cultural configurations torn apart.
In 1948, Sen. Strom Thurmond tapped into the south's identity crisis with his third party bid for the presidency. Running as a "Dixiecrat" segregationist, Thurmond vowed to maintain the uniquely Southern heritage by "stand[ing] for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race."
During a stump speech in Jackson, Miss., Thurmond declared that "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches." Ultimately, Thurmond captured 39 electoral votes and carried Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina. It was one of the most successful third-party bids in this nation's history.
A lot has changed in this country since the days when Ol' Strom could make viable a run at the presidency by promising to keep "Negroes" from our schools. The shape of racism has now been twisted inward. It's subtler, less acceptable. Instead of donning white sheets and stomping down our streets, racists perpetuate their beliefs with snide remarks and insensitivity.
Case in point: Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott recently said that the Unites States would have been better off if Thurmond had actually been elected president in 1948. Lott made the comments during a birthday party celebration for Thurmond, who turned 100 last week. Lott went on to express pride in the fact that his home state of Mississippi supported Thurmond's 1948 presidential bid. "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, either."
You mean those pesky problems associated with letting Negroes into our schools and churches? That is what Thurmond campaigned against in 1948.
For obvious reasons, Lott's office played down the significance of the senator's remarks, opting merely to issue a curt two-sentence press release: "Sen. Lott's remarks were intended to pay tribute to a remarkable man who led a remarkable life. To read anything more into these comments is wrong." Lott's office issued similar remarks in 1998 when it was reported that Lott appeared before - and praised- the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group dedicated to the separation of the races.
Then, as now, there was scarcely little condemnation amongst Mr. Lott's colleagues. This needs to change. Our Republican leaders cannot keep squinting their eyes to Lott's racial insensitivity. As congressmen, they bear a dual responsibility to represent the nation's conscience and to act as respectable faceplates for the party. By giving Lott a pass on his racist-seeming remarks, they've suggested the worst kind of stereotype: that lurking beneath the Republican party is a private identity that harkens back to a time when blacks were valued only as a cheap source of labor.
Some commentators have suggested that the Republicans use Lott's remarks as an occasion to go on the offensive by pointing out that Democratic senator Robert Byrd, formerly a "Grand Kleagle" with the Ku Klux Klan, recently used the N-word during an interview on "Fox News Sunday."
This will not work.
The Republican Party spent much of the '60s opposing the Democrats on civil rights legislation, affirmative action legislation and race-based quotas. This gives the Democrats the benefit of the doubt on race-related issues. Whereas Sen. Byrd's history will be discarded as the indiscretion of one, Lott's remarks are seen as endemic of a party that has consistently displayed insensitivity to the issues that blacks care about most. The Republicans simply do not have the credibility to go toe to toe with the Democrats on the race issue. They will lose that battle every time.
So far, President Bush has made a considerable attempt to build bridges in the black community. His grassroots support for school vouchers and the diversity of his own cabinet should proclaim to black Americans that they are part of the Republican Party.
But black America's distrust of the Republican Party runs deep. The psychological scars won't just fade away. And whatever gains the president has made (and was poised to make with a GOP-controlled Senate) can be ripped to shreds when just one leading member of the GOP makes remarks as racially insensitive as those offered by Sen. Lott.
That is why the only acceptable response from the GOP should be harsh criticism. Sadly, no such criticism seems forthcoming.
That sound you hear is the GOP once again dropping the ball on the race issue.
Hypocritical or not, the party of Abraham Lincoln does not need the language of segregation. It doesn't need to be reminded of the old times that should be forgotten of Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, lynchings, segregated schools and the literal devaluing of blacks as subhuman.
Among some conservatives, Lott was already in trouble for cutting too many deals with Democrats when they controlled the Senate. Lott is believed to lack a strong ideological foundation, preferring to perpetuate his own power and perks rather than advance a uniquely Republican agenda. His remarks at the Thurmond party may contribute to unease among his fellow Senate Republicans, some of whom believe it is time for a new leader.
If Republicans have any hope of attracting more black voters (President Bush won a measly 5 percent of the black vote in his home state of Texas and only 10 percent nationally, despite a sincere effort to attract support), the least the party must do is to bury the rhetoric of a past that should only be resurrected for study by historians and politicians determined to make amends for it.
There can be no more wistful appeals by whites to past "glories" when blacks were treated as inferior and racial jokes were part of the "entertainment" at all-white country clubs. These messages are heard in the black community far more than the occasional appeals from elected or appointed black Republicans who are often seen as tokens and servants of the white establishment.
Why are Republicans still struggling with this issue? Are they in need of highly paid consultants to point out the obvious? Why in 2002 are we even discussing something that should have "gone with the wind"?
Trent Lott might as well be a Democratic Party mole, placed among Republicans to cause his party severe political damage. Republican senators, some of whom have wanted to move in a new direction, must now decide whether Lott is a hindrance to the party. Will it be politics as usual, or will Senate Republicans clearly break with the past and proclaim not only to black Americans, but to all Americans, that their party is the party of emancipation, not segregation?
Thomas Sowell
Anybody can put his foot in his mouth but making it a habit is too much, especially when you are in a position where your ill-considered words can become a permanent albatross around the necks of other people whom you are leading.
That is the situation now, in the wake of Senator Trent Lott's latest gaffe, his widely publicized statement that we would have been better off if Senator Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948. Senator Thurmond ran on a platform of continued racial segregation.
Does Senator Lott have any idea what racial segregation meant to black Americans -- and, indeed, to many white Americans, whose support was essential to passing the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s that did away with Jim Crow in the South?
Let me recall a personal experience from that era. Although I lived in New York, during the Korean war I was a young Marine who was stationed in the South. On a long bus ride down to North Carolina, the bus stopped very briefly in Winston-Salem so that the passengers could go to the restrooms. And in those days there were separate "white" and "colored" restrooms.
The bus stopped next to the white restrooms and I had no idea where the restrooms for blacks might be located -- or whether I could find it in time to get back to the bus before it left. So I went to the men's room for whites, leaving it to others to decide what they wanted to do about it.
I figured that if I were going to die fighting for democracy, I might as well do it in Winston-Salem and save myself a long trip across the Pacific. It so happened that nobody said or did anything. But I should not have had to face such a choice while wearing the uniform of my country and traveling in the South only because I was ordered to.
This was just one of thousands of such galling experiences -- many others were far worse -- that blacks went through all the time during the era of racial segregation that Senator Thurmond was fighting to preserve as a candidate for the Dixiecrats in 1948.
If Senator Lott spoke without thinking about all this, that might be one thing. But he made the same asinine statements back in 1980 and apparently learned nothing from the adverse reactions it provoked then.
More important, such statements are going to live on as long as Trent Lott is leader of the Senate Republicans. Whatever the issue and whatever the election, Senator Lott's statements are going to be a recurring distraction from the serious concerns his party, the Senate, and the country will be confronting.
The changing demographics of the country mean that Republicans over the years will have to make inroads into the minority votes that now go automatically to the Democrats. Remarks like Senator Lott's will be a permanent albatross around the necks of Republican candidates trying to win the votes of blacks or of others who want no part of a racist past that was overcome at great cost.
The position of black Republicans will be undermined especially, if not made untenable. And any blacks considering becoming Republican candidates, or even Republican voters, will have to have some long second thoughts.
As someone who is not a member of any political party, I will not be directly affected. But any American who wants to see the two-party system working will be affected when one party's self-inflicted wounds make its long-run viability questionable in the face of changing demographics.
Back in 1998, Representative Bob Livingston was scheduled to become Speaker of the House, just as Senator Lott is now scheduled to become Majority Leader in the Senate. But when a personal embarrassment in his life became public, Congressman Livingston announced his resignation, in order to spare his party.
While Bob Livingston resigned from Congress, though he had violated no Congressional rule, all that Senator Lott would need to do to spare his party would be to step aside from the role of Majority Leader in the Senate. Will he do it? Time will tell.
A tin ear and a loose tongue are a bad combination for any publicly visible leader, and Senator Lott has shown both on other occasions and on other issues besides race.
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Still wish to claim that conservative voices condemning Lott are few and far between?