Christopher Dodd praised Robert Byrd, a former KKK member. No outrage in the press.
Trent Lott did the same thing with Strom Thurmond, a former segregationist, and had to resign a leadership position.
What’s the difference?
Well, I think one difference is that Lott’s praise was generally interpreted as sympathy for Thurmond’s segregationist views, which he hadn’t ever formally repudiated.
Byrd, on the other hand, has long ago done the sorry dance for his loathsome association with white supremacists, and Dodd’s praise of him related to a different issue entirely, AFAICT.
Noticeably missing from the columnists comparison was exactly what Trent Lott said, which is important:
Trent Lott reaffirmed the segregationist policies that Strom Thurmond espoused during the 1948 presidential campaign. The difference is that Dodd’s praise of Byrd recognizes the man as he is, not as he was. Lott praised the segregationist Thurmond of 1948. There is a big difference.
The big difference is between Dodd and Lott and their past relative to civil rights and racial matters.
Originally posted by Fear Itself
Unless my calculations are way off, Trent Lott was a 7 year old in 1948.
Perhaps he was just being fulsome in his praise for a silly old 100 year old fart who was about to kick the bucket at any moment?
Have you no sense of proportion?
I said Lott praised the Thurmond of 1948, not in 1948.
It is quite clear to me that Trent Lott felt the world would be a better place if a segregationist had been elected in 1948. I don’t for a minute believe that he was just gushing at a birthday party.
Well I think any reformed Republican with a racist past is doomed to be mistrusted by virtue of his association with a party that gets very minimal support from the leadership of the black community in the States.
But any Democrat today regardless of his past would be perceived as a non racist just by virtue of his association with a party that has specifically wooed the black constituency for the past several decades.
Where is the condemnation of Justice Black? He too was a member of the KKK. But like Sen. Byrd he renounced his association with the hate group. Sen. Lott seemed to be yearning for the bad old days.
How else can you interpret Lott’s statements?
I can’t tell if Armstrong Williams is really being sincere in his puzzlement or whether he knows better and is just bull-shitting. I personally find it hard to believe he is really that incapable of understanding the difference here.
As other people have pointed out, the uproar over Lott’s remarks had nothing to do with him praising someone who had formerly been a segregationist (or klansman or whatever). I am sure there were lots of people gushing about Thurmond at his birthday party and they didn’t all get in the trouble that Lott did.
What Lott did was obviously very different. He gave a statement that gushed about Thurmond’s candidacy on a segregationist platform. And, since, as I understand it, really the one major distinction of that candidacy was its segregationist platform, it was hard to interpret the statement in any other way than saying that Lott felt the country would be better off if we had adopted that segregationist platform.
Is this really so hard to understand?
Posted by Fear Itself
I accept that you truly believe that.
I am troubled that someone could believe that or believe it to be really important.
I found the Lott stuff to be a harmless bit of puffery, of no significance.
Likewise, with the latest nonsense involving another retiree (Byrd) of no significance.
I accept that you truly believe that.
I am troubled that someone could believe that a US senator advocating segregation is insignificant.
I’m not aware that Thurmond ever gave a teary mea culpa on Larry King or whatever one does on an apology tour, but his actions in the past several decades indicated a repudiation – he didn’t refer to “white niggers” a few years ago, for example.
And Dodd’s praise did not reflect a different issue entirely at all. He said specifically that Byrd would have been on the “right side” during the Civil War, kind of an unusual thing to say about a former Klansman, whatever his subsequent accomplishments. He also said, “I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation’s 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country.” Gee, I can think of one. How about the moment when he was Treasurer of the Klan!
No, those aren’t the differences at all. There is exactly zero substantive difference between Dodd’s praise and Lott’s.
There are two differences. One is personal. Dodd is a likeable guy, whereas Trent Lott is kind of an asshole, personally. There were a lot of people just waiting for a chance to take a shot at him as revenge for past slights. (As to the praisees, Thurmond was the more likeable of the two, but Byrd never ran up negative chits the way Lott did and in fact ran up a lot of positive ones because of his management of pork while he was in the majority).
The other is a combination of party discipline and power. The Democrats in the Senate are more disciplined than the Republicans and have been for a while in here. No Democrat is gonna take a shot at Dodd. And, partly because of the strong discipline, no Senator, Democrat or Republican, is willing to take a shot at Byrd.
As it happens, the right outcome was achieived in this case, not the Lott/Thurmond one. A few sentences of praise for a senile person of accomplishment, even when they’re really really stupid sentences, shouldn’t be a career ender. It would be better if the Republicans took the high road here, though they’d get no points for it.
As a riposte from Fear Itsel
In your own mind you have somehow managed to transfer the whole KKK, segrationist thing from the 100 Year Old Democrat Fart (May he RIP) then about to keel over and snuff it, onto the evil, racist Trent Lott.
Against someone who appears to be confident enough to carry this absurd stunt off, I confess, I am at a complete loss.
How do you do it?
Oh, I don’t know, could it be that I can actually read and comprehend what Lott said?
How do you manage to overlook the patently obvious?
If you actually watch the tape of what Lott said, it’s clear that his praise for the old guy got out of hand. He wanted to make Thurmond feel good, so he said the country would be better off if he would have won. An unfortunate and insensitive choice of words? Sure. An indication that Trent Lott secretly yearns for segregation? Absurd. I’ve worked around politics my entire life, and this type of overblown praise is par for the course. These guys kiss each other’s asses with fulsome praise all the time and no one takes it seriously.
This was not a case of Lott “advocating segregation.” Lott was praising Thurmond, and his choice of words to do that were not very well thought out. However, just because Lott didn’t think things through doesn’t mean he’s a closet segregationist. It just means he needs to think before opening his big mouth.
Trent Lott was murdered by Karl Rove, in the library,with the dagger. Bill Frist, good-lookin, doctor, moneyed, well-bred Bill Frist, wanted his job. The burbles of outrage put out by the Dems was standard, boilerplate stuff. No way they could have engineered his undoing without surreptitious support, the Bushiviks had been bitch-slapping them from one end of the Beltway to the other.
I would have loved to think the Dems had enough clout to bring down Trent all by theirselves, with thier own two little pink patty paws. No way.
I’ve been on record here saying that I didn’t think that Lott really deserved the acrimony, and that his takedown pretty much seemed to be because he was getting in the way of the Bush team.
But Dodd’s comments clearly don’t even rise to Lott’s level. He said that Byrd, meaning the Byrd of today, the Byrd who has renounced his Klan past over and over, would be a good Senator in any age. If it is a crime to praise Byrd, then guess what: Bill Frist has praised him too. Double standard much?
This entire brouhaha is a joke.
And, by your tortured interpretation, Byrd clearly wouldn’t have made a good Senator during WWI, since he would have been a sperm cell.
The statement clearly means: the Byrd of today, the Senator, would have been an asset in any age. If it meant Byrd at any age (as in, his age in years) then the statement would be nonsense if he talks about the Civil War, when Byrd wasn’t even born.
Easy, he’s a democrat. A few other other small differences. One was said at a birthday party, one was said on the floor of the senate. One could be misunderstood to support segregation and one could be misunderstood to support slavery.
I haven’t been able to find the full uneditted text of his remarks, but here is how the Washington Times, as you know not exactly a liberal newspaper (as is obvious from the rest of the article), reported the actual remarks:
I think this makes it clear that Apos’s interpretation is the one that makes sense and yours is simply partisan. One can argue about whether what Dodd said was true, given Byrd’s past, but I think there can be no logical way of interpretting it to mean that Dodd thought the “right” think in the conflict of Civil War was to be on the side of the south. Plus, there is absolutely nothing I know of in Dodd’s record which would show sympathy with the Southern cause during the Civil War.
Of course, as elucidator noted, no intelligent and knowledgeable person who is not fooling themselves seriously believes Lott lost his leadership position just because of Democratic uproar over his remarks. He lost it because Bush et al. did not find him to be a very sympathetic character to push their extremist agenda. Better to talk like a “compassionate conservative”.