Posted on 10/18/2007 9:13:32 AM PDT by freespirited
Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Wednesday the Senate should apologize for slavery and segregation, calling them “dark chapters in our history.”
McCain said he would support a planned resolution by fellow Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, who is also seeking the presidency, to apologize for racist laws, some of which ended more than a century ago.
“They were federal policies,” Brownback told the Boston Globe on Monday. “They were wrong. The only way for us to move forward . . . is at the end of the day acknowledging those, taking ownership for it, and asking for forgiveness.”
McCain agreed with Brownback’s approach.
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Spokesmen for other presidential candidates, including Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, the only top-tier black candidate, declined to comment on the planned Brownback apology. Also silent were Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican candidates Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson.
Nothing that “various states have adopted similar resolutions,” McCain emphasized that words alone cannot make amends for America's past policies of racism. He said the U.S. should “continue our efforts to make sure that all Americans have equal opportunity to take part in this great, great free-enterprise system of ours.”
The Arizona Republican pledged to “address the issues of poverty and lack of education in parts of America, including parts of South Carolina, parts of my state, that some of our Hispanic students are not getting the same quality of education we want them to.”
McCain made the remarks during a two-day swing through South Carolina, a state that effectively ended his presidential campaign in 2000 when Republicans voted instead for George W. Bush. McCain used the visit to attack Clinton for advocating taxpayer funding of a museum on the Woodstock rock concert. McCain also slammed Giuliani for fighting against the presidential line-item veto, which McCain called an essential tool for controlling federal spending.
600,000 US citizens dead. There’s your freaking apology.
I wore Brut cologne last week Wednesday. I'm not sorry.
I’m sorry that we didn’t have the audiences to carry Gilligan’s Island for another year or two.
lack of education inh parts of America??? where?? there are places without any form of private or public education in this country?? people would be flooding in
How about a resolution commending the Republicans for freeing the slaves in the US while the Arabs and most of the world continued allowing slavery.(England had already freed them)
Pandering old fool! That will just make the Liberal Plantation restless as they smell that free reparation money. What about the Irish indentured servants that were the Colonies' first slaves? Do we get an apology and some fast money too?
I wish McCain would just STFU.
He has done little or nothing while he has been in Congress to help this country. He needs to retire and go home and never be heard from again.
Retarded pandering A-hole.
I think you already paid your dues McCLame for pandering to liberal blacks:
New York Daily News (NY)
May 3, 2000
Page: 18
MCCAIN MAKIN’ NICE WITH REV. AL
Author: GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY With Lisa Arcella
Sen. John McCain seems to have grown more tolerant of the man he once called an “agent of intolerance.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton says he was “stunned” when McCain expressed his “admiration” for him at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday.
Sharpton says that, after shaking his hand, McCain put his arm around him and proclaimed: “I admire your style; I admire your passion.” Sharpton says McCain also suggested, “ ‘Let’s get together sometime.’ I told him I’d give him a call.”
McCain’s cordiality is surprising when you remember that, when he was campaigning for President, McCain lumped Sharpton together with Louis Farrakhan, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as people who pandered to “the outer reaches of American politics.”
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives
I said it before, I’ll say it again: Apologizing for something you did not do and are not responsible for is illogical and irrational.
I’m sorry that Rome was sacked by the Alaric and the Visigoths in 410.
You just keep embarrassing yourself.
McCain is trying to buy the black vote.
They're being as irrational as those that insist that there must be some sort of apology.
If you look at the Constitution, the way Jefferson and co. sort of 'pussyfooted' around slavery is quite revealing that the issue was heavy topic of debate at that time. They made the [bad] decision. They should have outlawed slavery then and there, instead of postponing full legal debate until 1808.
Even pro-Confederate Southerners should agree with this. The slave states would be forced to either decide to abolish slavery or would have been able to not ratify the Constitution and join the Union. Thus, independent Southern states without the bloodshed of the War Between the States.
Worthless grandstanding by McCain and Brownback. If these guys really wanted to help blacks, they wouldn’t favor policies which fill the country with illegal aliens who compete with poor blacks for jobs.
Get out of my Country McCain
Or to the actual European descendants who did die because they sought to help those of African descent during the Civil Rights Movement?
Nobody should apologize for something that they didn’t do. Doing so is assuming collective guilt simply because one has the same skin color as some of the slaveholders.
Don't you realize freeper consensus seems to be that the Armenian genocide should be denounced and Turkey forced to recognize it while an apology for slavery should be out of the question? (this is not so much directed at you, just using your post to make what is, granted, a snub--but a logical one).
The Constitution was both written, signed, and ratified years after the United States won independence.
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