Yes.
OK, for those Democrats/ liberals out there, does anyone else think Tom Daschle needs to either grow a pair or step down in favor of someone who actually has a spine? I mean, the National Review has been harder on Lott than Daschle has:
For the National Review:
http://www.nationalreview.com/george/george121002.asp
http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary120902.asp#001590
http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary121002.asp#001628
And Daschle? Well, all he said was:
“There are a lot of times when he and I go to the mike and would like to say things we meant to say differently, and I’m sure this is one of those cases for him as well,” Daschle said.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/12/09/lott.comment/index.html
Daschle needs to step down i favor of someone with balls.
Like Hillary Clinton.
Now i know why she never wears miniskirts _
Daschle knows he has to keep working with Lott, who he admittedly knows personally better than any of us, and do it from a position of reduced power. Politically, he has to avoid giving the far-right firebreathers any opening to say “Look, those Dems are just as bad as us!” I think he’s wrong about that politically, since they’re doing it anyway, but yes, it’s time for new leaders on both sides.
Politics is a contact sport. This is something that Mondale and Dukakis (and apparently Daschle) never learned, that Bill Clinton (and James Carville) understood perfectly, and that the Republicans have known for years. Lott and the GOP leadership’s pronouncements after the midterm elections do not evidence a strong interest in bipartisanship, and there are no votes that Daschle or the party would gain by trying to avoid giving Rush Limbaugh fodder for his talk show. If Daschle’s personal friendship with Lott prevents him from articulating things that the Democratic party believes in and distinguishing the Democrats from the Republicans, he should relinquish his leadership role.
[hijack]Hillary never thought she was talking to Eleanor Roosevelt’s “ghost.” she was participating in a an exercise in which she PRETENDED to have a conversation with ER and tried to imagine what Roosevelt might say. there was never any belief that anything supernatural was going on. This story was twisted and distorted, as usual, by the right-wing media.
Nancy Reagan, OTOH, actually BELIEVED in astrology, and based policy decisions on it.[hijack]
True, except that she didn’t make policy decisions. She used astrology to recommend the time that certain meetings should be held.
Well, I’m obviously a raving liberal and I like Dole. I actually thought he was a very good senate majority leader. He was a good compromiser and an extraordinarily good legislative technician.
Plus he gets credit for possibly the funniest one-liner in political history:
“There they are. See no evil, hear no evil, and…evil.”
- Bob Dole, watching former presidents Carter, Ford and Nixon standing by each other at a White House event
I thought that she had made some hiring and firing decisions on this too, but I’ll take your word that it was only meetings.
I’ve never before heard Martin Gardner accused of being the right-wing media before. And the right-wing media didn’t write Jean Houstons books.
You know, the books where describes how she puts her subjects into a “trance state” where they have heightened ESP powers which allow them to contact “entities” which are “essentially goddings of the depths of the psyche…personae of the self that take on acceptable form so that we can have relationship to them and thus dialogue…”
Or perhaps you prefer her description of contact with a universal intelligence, “Some is embodied, some is disembodied and ultimately probably none of it is disembodied. It may have minus n-dimensional structure…”
You and Hillary are, of course, free to do as you wish. For myself, I think I’ll do my mental exercises without Jean Houstons help.
To me, as an outsider, the more puzzling question is:
Why was Strom Thurmond consistently re-elected to office? Does that say something about the voting population of South Carolina?
“Service to the state of South Carolina.” In other words, pork.
All it really says is that their attitudes didn’t change overnight. That’s not the same thing as saying that their attitudes haven’t changed. I, for one, would find it a lot easier to out-n-out condemn Strom if I could know exactly what the world will be like in 60 years, and what they are going to think of my present beliefs and attitudes.
Oh yeah…and pork.
I don’t have any respect for Jean Houston, I’m just saying that the Eleanor Roosevelt thing had nothing to do with “channeling.”
And nothing that Houston teaches is any fucking stupider that the fundamentalist horseshit that Junior buys into.
I was just being facetious. No disrespect intended.
See if you can get DDG to google you a list of all the buildings in this state named after Strom. The guy’d be willing to slaughter Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web if it’d bring another pound of ham or bacon here.
Unfortunately, highway repair funds aren’t among the monies brought in.
Daschle is not the NRO. The NRO makes it it’s bussiness to run scorched earth against any threat they see to their political interests. They see this as a threat. Daschle gets viciously and personally attacked whenever he complains about cheap-shots from Republicans or conservatives, and so it’s no wonder that he feels that he needs to moderate himself at least more than a screaming screed-rag.
Again, I don’t have a lot of love for Lott, but there is something disingenuous about linking his praise for Strom as a potential president to a quote from Strom from back then, as if Lott was responding directly to that quote (though, I should note that the press, when repeating that quote, has for some reason decided to replace the original “nigger” with “Negro”). And indeed, I’m not quite making the same link other people seem to be to “these problems we have today.” Why is that quote supposedly so obviously about segregation and blacks? It doesn’t make much sense, given that desegregation isn’t exactly a pre-eminent problem on the minds of people today, certainly not his audience that day.
Of course, far be it from me to get in the way of december’s chance for token fairmindedness.
Read your history, Apos. Strom Thurmond’s 1948 candidacy arose directly from his opposition to civil rights and President Truman’s decision to run on a platform supporting civil rights legislation. The oft-quoted speech from Thurmond was an expression of that platform. The reason Thurmond and his cohorts formed a third party and ran a campaign separate from that of the Democrats was because they wanted to protect and preserve the racial status quo in the South, which was disenfranchisement, segregation, and inequality. Lott’s comment is obviously about segregation and the preservation of racial inequality because that’s what Thurmond’s candidacy was all about.
So what Lott said was that he is proud that Mississippi voted for an avowedly pro-segregation white supremacist Presidential candidate in 1948, and that if the rest of the country had voted for an avowedly pro-segregation white supremacist candidate in 1948, we wouldn’t have all “these problems” that we have today. Now, what could all “these problems” be? Well, he doesn’t say. That’s true. But Lott expressed a belief that there are problems in society that would not exist had followed the pro-segregation creed that Thurmond was espousing in 1948, and that society would be a better place for it. He doesn’t have to specify what the “problems” are for the statement to be racist.
CNN has an update on the widespread fallout, following Gore’s having shown some spine and having spoken out in the attempt to show Democrats that it’s acceptable, just as he did over Iraq a few months ago.
This isn’t going away, and shouldn’t. After every incident, it gets harder for Lott to slither away and for his enablers to excuse him. Maybe they’ll at least think longer before re-electing him as a party leader next time?
Apos, I’m sure you understand why the media wouldn’t use the actual N-word now, especially when it doesn’t change the meaning.