“I want to say this about my state,” Lott said last Thursday. “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it,” he said to applause. “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”
Sure, it was a 100th Birthday Party for Thurmond, and everyone wanted to make nice and all that. But, ye gods, d’ya think someone who is supposedly politically savvy enough to be the GOP Majority Leader in the US Senate would be smart enough to realize that someone might take offense at the suggestion that the man who ran on the Dixiecrat segregationist ticket should have won the ’48 election?
The Congressional Black Caucus is often a bunch of yahoos, too, but it’s not just they that are teed off at Lott. Some senior conservatives think he was responsible for the previous loss of the Republican majority in the Senate, and wish he would go away.
Of course, with comments like that, the Democrats should be thrilled that he’s as prominent as he is. He can more than make up for some of the idiocy that dribbles out of Tom Daschle’s lips.
Ah, nothing like victory smugness to bring out the truth in a Republican bigwig. He can apologize all he wants. Nobody who isn’t a racist scumbag moons over Jim Crow and horror at ‘miscegnation’. Apologies just mean, “My spin doctors are yelling at me, please pretend I stuck to my script.”