Posted on 12/24/2002 1:09:54 AM PST by goldstategop
TRENCHANT (I HOPE) COMMENTS ON THE LOTT AFFAIR By Don Feder December 22, 2002
At the outset, please note the following:
1) I am no fan of Trent Lott. As Senate Majority Leader, Lott was an unprincipled pragmatist. So much so, that when he first became majority leader, DC conservatives produced buttons proclaiming: “Lott For Sale, Will Build to Specifications.” At the height of the current manufactured crisis, the Mississippi invertebrate went of Black Entertainment Television to plead that he now supports affirmative action (racial quotas) “across board.” That declaration was more profoundly racist than anything the Senator said at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party. In many ways, Lott does indeed represent everything that’s wrong with the Republican Party – lack of purpose, lack of courage, at times, even lack of consciousness – though not in the way his critics charged.
2) Segregation was evil. To tell a man that he can’t use a public restroom or that he has to sit in the back of a bus, -- to bar his admission to a public school or university -- on the basis of skin color is loathsome.
3) Had I voted in the 1948 election, it would not have been for Thurmond – or Thomas Dewey, for that matter. I would have supported Harry Truman, one of the few Democratic presidents I admire (along with Andrew Jackson). If not for Give ‘Em Hell Harry, we might have lost the Cold War at the outset. Truman also integrated the armed forces, another courageous move.
Enough disclosure. Lott’s resignation highlights a profound double-standard regarding racism. I doubt Lott’s opponents really believe his dumb remark reflects ingrained, or even visceral, racism, or a desire to return to the era of Jim Crow. But America now has a racial sensitivity Gestapo that pulls out its truncheons at the slightest sign of hostility – real or imagined -- toward people of color.
Of course, the reverse is not the case. Black grudge-bearers are free to condemn whites as a race, to say virtually anything about them, however vile and unjust, and to support policies (quotas, reparations) that are manifestly racist – designed to punish people for an accident of birth. And Democrats are free to race-bait to their hearts’ content, a tactic almost as reprehensible as racism itself.
You think Trent Lott’s awful?
You know what Lott didn’t do? He didn’t refer to New York City as Hymie-Town and complain that Jews are always “whining about the Holocaust.” He didn’t call Judaism a gutter religion. He didn’t spark a race riot in Crown Heights that led to the death of a young man or organize the picket of a white-owned business that resulted in the deaths of five (all minorities). He didn’t write a poem about Jews blowing up the World Trade Center.
He didn’t try to justify the thugs who burned down a large part of South Central LA in 1992 by calling their crimes “a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration.” Oh, and he didn’t suggest that George Bush had foreknowledge of Sept 11, but did nothing to prevent it so his business friends could profit from a war on terrorism.
In case you’re curious, those laurels go to Jesse Jackson, Louis Farakhan, Al Sharpton, New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka (the artist formerly known as LeRoi Jones), Congress-creature Maxine Waters and soon-to-be-former Congress-cretin Cynthia McKinney. But don’t hold your breath waiting for any of them to be taken to the woodshed.
An unspoken assumption of our culture is that it’s racist (or insensitive, at the very least) to criticize a black person. Thus if I observe that Jackson is an opportunistic jerk – a person of limited intelligence and low morals – in the establishment’s eyes, my views must be shaped by racial animosity. (The more unscrupulous black leaders invariably exploit this assumption.) Thus it would seem that prominent blacks suffering from foot-in-mouth disease are to be the exception to Martin Luther King’s dictum that Americans should be judged by “the content of their character, not the color of their skin.”
Democrats passionately embrace the accountability double standard. Republicans meekly acquiesce.
When it was disclosed last year that the Reverend Jackson had fathered a child out-of-wedlock and used his influence to engage in corporate shakedowns, President Bush called the race hustler par excellence to commiserate. In the 2000 election, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Al Gore each made a pilgrimage to Sharpton’s Harlem headquarters to kiss his ring.
Black-on-white crimes are roughly ten times as prevalent as white-on-black offenses. How many of the former are hate crimes is anyone’s guess. Surely the anti-white racism that pervades our culture (the idea that whites as a race are responsible for black suffering) -- encouraged by the liberal elite and black race-baiters – plays a part in these crimes.
The Democratic Party, the media and groups like the NAACP are avid proponents of racial quotas in education and hiring. Cut through the rhetoric and murky reasoning in defense of these vile programs and it’s clear that they penalize or reward solely on the basis of race. What’s worse – to praise a form of racism long dead (if in fact that’s what Lott did), or to support a virulent strain of racism that’s alive and kicking?
For admissions to the University of Michigan, whose affirmative action program will soon be before the Supreme Court, race (minority status) counts for more than a perfect SAT score combined with an excellent essay. To tell a man or woman that they won’t get in to an elite school – even though they’re bright, studious and creative – because they also happen to be white (or Asian) is a species of racism every bit as ugly as get-to-the-back-of-the-bus or whites-only restrooms.
Although still just a sick notion (whereas affirmative action is a sick reality), reparations is racism writ large. It seeks to hold today’s (largely white) taxpayers responsible for the racial sins of the past. It’s a giant rip-off scheme, favored primarily by the least responsible black leaders – who believe they’ll be the ones to divvy the loot – and the loopier white liberals (which, come to think of it, might be a redundancy).
Race-baiting is almost as bad as racism. At this the Democrats excel. It is for them mother’s milk.
You may recall that during the 1998 election, the Missouri Democratic party ran ads which said, in effect, if Republicans win, more black churches will go up in flames. (Newsflash: “Newt Gingrich was seen fleeing the scene of a burning black church, a can of kerosene in hand.”)
Former felon-in-chief, William Jefferson Clinton (who actually believes he was born a poor black child) used the Lott fiasco to pontificate that Republicans are the second coming of the White Citizens Councils.
In the last election, Republican gains in the South were due to racist appeals to white voters, Clinton opined. “How do they think they got a majority in the South, anyway? I think what they (Republicans) are really upset about is that he (Lott) made public their strategy.”
This from a leader of the party that has it’s own unspoken strategy – to do whatever it takes to monopolize the black vote, including terrifying black voters with lurid visions of Republicans seeking to disenfranchise them, reestablish segregated lunch counters, and send them back to the plantations in chains. Simultaneously, Democrats strenuously oppose those measures that have the best chance of ameliorating the condition of urban blacks – including education vouchers.
Soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi have intimated that it’s now up to congressional Republicans to prove that they aren’t a bunch of cross-burners by supporting affirmative action, a general expansion of welfare programs and DC statehood -- in other words, to embrace racism to prove that they aren’t racists.
And so, as we rejoice in the political demise of the villainous Lott, we can all congratulate ourselves on this historic victory over racism. Meanwhile the most prevalent racism in America – camouflaged as compassion, justice or sensitivity -- is either tolerated or celebrated. Ah, well.
My opinion?
Very few, either black or white.
But the blacks, they know it didn't offer them equal protection for a long, long time. And that's all they have to know to hate (or maybe just simply distrust) it.
I certainly don't agree, as I said right now that's the only thing separating us from the third world hell holes we all cringe at. We're all in the same boat now.
I can understand it though and we compound this error by not teaching civics as we should.
IMHO.
Chiang Kai-Shek did far more to bring that unhappy state of affairs about than Truman could ever do.
I just thought it was gay..
As far as Senators Al Gore, Sr., and William Fulbright, they were NOMINAL segregationists. I personally think both men decried segregation, but it was too risky during their tenure in the Senate to denounce segregation. Had they done so, they would have likely lost renomination to a segregationist Democrat in their next primary election. We later learned, after his death, that the MS Democrat Senator James O. Eastland was a segregationist only for political reasons. He had been contributing to the NAACP all of those years! Thurmond switched to the GOP in 1964. He remained segregationist only until 1970, after which he dropped his segregationist position. By 1970, there were no more segregationist politicians in the South -- in either party, to my knowledge.
Here's the rewrite I'd been thinking of for a few days:
I'll let this be my set of defining sentiments on FR:
1. Trent Lott meant exactly what we thought he meant at Strom's birthday party, and confirmed it during his interview on BET when he talked of race, immoral leadership in the South and admitted that he was part of that.
2. There is no objective standard by which anyone can state that government imposed segregation and the Jim Crow laws were good.
3. There is no objective standard by which anyone could say that opposing the end of segregation and the Jim Crow laws was good.
4. There is no objective standard by which anyone can say that the systematic exclusion of a race of people from the economy was good.
5. There is no objective standard by which anyone can say that opposition to full voting rights by blacks was good.
6. That century of apartheid that followed the Civil War left a stain on our history - and there are many people alive today who remember what that was like. It isn't remote and long past - so when blacks cringe over the type of remarks made by Lott, or by talk of states rights, don't moan that they're being PC.
7. It isn't PC pandering to feel some sense of shame over the things people in our parents' and grandparents' generation did. My folks were Wallace voters in '68 - something they're not proud of now. I brought my own grandmother up short when she tried to support Trent Lott based on a very little knowledge and a lot of stored up racial vitriol.
I am sorry..
Lose the "puppy dog" stuff, talk about football and spit allot.
(I hate football also, but when in Rome..)
Something had to give, it was the elephant in the living room that can only go unadressed for so long.
That said though, I think allot of conservatives used the occasion of Lott's (admittedly stupid, no argument) comment as an occasion to lynch him for many other failings.
While these peripheral issues, in and of themselves might well constitute valid a reason for his removal, they weren't addressed. Just his comments on the Thurmond matter.
That's cowardly and dishonest in my opinion.
And I hate Trent Lott.
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