Will Harry Reid be forced to step down?

[kaylasdad99]

It’s elitest, now, to prefer that people shower in the morning?

Interesting.

[CC]

@sandwich

“senior political figure discusses electorate’s biases in informal private conversation during election campaign. Choice of words possibly anachronistic.”

the horror! The horror!

bingo!!!

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Paleface

Maybe so, but does it have to be said by a United States Senator, who is supposed to be at the service of the citizens?

Why not? What’s elitist or offensive about it?

[Bricker]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

The comment would be ok by either a Democrat or a Republican. Lott did not make this comment. He made (albeit probably unwittingly) a far more inflammatory one. Reid said that Obama doesn’t talk black. Lott said de-segregation wa the cause of “all these problems.” The sentiments are not the same. The comments are not comparable.

As you point out, you defended Lott at the time. But while I agree the comments are not the same, I disagree with your paraphrase of Lott’s comments above.

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

@John_Mace

Why is Reid being judged solely as a Democrat? He’s many things besides just a Democrat. He’s an older, white male and a member of a religion that has been historically hostile to Blacks.

He’s also got a long and strong history of support for civil rights.

[joebuck20]

@Jophiel

Of course he won’t. There’s a huge downside to him stepping down and virtually no upside. Is there some bloc of voters who would vote Democrat but who now won’t that I’m unaware of?

Exactly, the people who would typically be offended by a comment like this aren’t the types who are likely to turnaround and vote Republican.
And the ones who are feigning outrage right now weren’t ever likely to vote Democrat either.

[ElvisL1ves]

@kaylasdad99

It’s elitest, now, to prefer that people shower in the morning?

In a Washington summer, a morning shower wears off pretty quickly anyway.

[RTFirefly]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

Seriously, if we give into that kind of PC whining, we’re letting the tourists win.

This D.C. native says: we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them at the Metro stops, we shall fight them in the streets and on the Mall, we shall fight them in the museums; we shall never surrender!!

[Boyo_Jim]

Fight them? Just give them fake maps and send them all to Silver Spring.

[elucidator]

It gets complicated. You see a gaggle of clueless tourists, maybe 15 or 20, and that night you see them on Fox,and they were really a massive Tea Bagger demonstration, one hundred thousand strong…

[ElvisL1ves]

There’s a pop theory that the growth of the US government is traceable to the invention of air conditioning. It made it possible for Congress to stay in session during the summer.

[elucidator]

But enough of the content-free one liners!

Seems to me, just relying on my ever-dimming memory, that the Republicans at the time did not exactly defend Ol’ Trent from the jackboots of political correctness as fervently as they would like to pretend. If they had really,* really* wanted to keep Trent in a leadership role in the Senate, couldn’t they have done so, even given the massive, overwhelming power of the Dems? Or did they calmly accept a golden opportunity to slip Trent the pork sword, all the while tearing their hair and whining about a good ol’ boy being done in by liberal correctness? As well as neatly connecting to the troglodyte wing while publicly denying any such thing? Win, whine, win.

Now, perhaps my memory isn’t as good as it once was. Or maybe it is, and I just don’t remember. But did the Pubbies really defend Trent as much as they would like to pretend they did? Or did they just shrug? Did his replacement adamantly refuse any such tainted promotion, or did he wait just long enough for the seat to cool before planting his own butt therein?

Ah, well, its good to remember what Trent’s old lady said, “Never look back!” Salty old broad, Lott’s wife…

[Boyo_Jim]

@elucidator

…Seems to me, just relying on my ever-dimming memory, that the Republicans at the time did not exactly defend Ol’ Trent from the jackboots of political correctness as fervently as they would like to pretend. If they had really,* really* wanted to keep Trent in a leadership role in the Senate, couldn’t they have done so, even given the massive, overwhelming power of the Dems? Or did they calmly accept a golden opportunity to slip Trent the pork sword, …

I don;t remember if they did this, but it sounds like the perfect thing to do with Reid. He’s totally inneffective as a leader. He was bad even when the Dems were in the minority, but it hardly mattered.

[Squink]

From 2002:

Why did Trent Lott get into so much trouble? I admit that his choice of words and the situation could be construed as racist, but could’ve “problems” mean other things such as the national debt, teen pregnancy, the economy, etc?

[Clothahump]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

The right’s pretended outrage at this is completely disingenuous and transparently partisan and opportunistic. What Reid said was clumsy and embarrassing in the way that many people of a certain generation can make us cringe (“negro” was the polite, PC word in 60’s and 70’s), but his words were said in private, and the actual sentiment was not only unremarkable, but something that most conservatives would agree with (and not infrequently in the same words).

I agree with everything except “pretended outrage”. There’s not even that.

[kingbighair]

The only people who should be offended are the racist whites Reid accurately described.

Michael Steele’s faux outrage is downright laughable and is a perfect example of how the right will seize on every single opportunity to try to score political points. He is starting to make me rethink my position of supporting affirmative action.

[Death_of_Rats]

@John_Mace

Eh. So was the outrage at Trent Lott. It’s just payback.

I call BS on this one. The outrage at Trent Lott was over his outright statement at a public forum that everyone would have been better off if the Segregationists had won with Strom Thurmond in 1948. His exact quote was:

“When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”

There is no way to pase that statement as anything other than support for segregationist polices.

and he was stupid enough to say it publicly.

[Chen019]

“Negro” is being used as a racial identifier, along with “black” and “African-American” on the 2010 U.S. Census. And the Census Bureau is defending it on the basis that in past censuses, a significant number of blacks preferred to be called Negro.

Larry Auster has a good piece on the affair:

When public men are making statements that are devoid of any sense, the amount of work needed to try to make sense of them is more than it’s worth. Are the Republicans saying that Reid’s statement is objectionable because Reid described Obama as “light-skinned” and as having “no Negro dialect,” or because he said that his being light-skinned and having no Negro dialect would enable him to win the presidency? It’s not clear. No one gives reasons. We live in the cave below Plato’s cave, where there’s not even a simulacrum of sense.
I think for the Republicans it’s come down to pure tit for tat, without any principle involved at all. “You got Lott (or, rather, we willingly sacrificed Lott), and now we’re going to extract our pound of flesh from Reid.” But the two cases are not at all alike.

Lott didn’t go down just for his clunker of a statement (a clunker in the political context of 2002 America) that a Strom Thurmond presidency would have been good for America, but because of his tone deaf initial responses to the situation which got him deeper and deeper in hot water, followed by his desperate turnabout and disgusting self-abasement before blacks, promising them everything under the sun. As I wrote at the time, he could have dispensed with the problem the first day with a simple statement of clarification that he didn’t believe in segregation, that nothing in his career showed that he was for segregation. But he was too insensible to do so. So he showed himself to be, first, a political incompetent, then, second, a desperate whore who would take any leftist position to appease blacks, which in my view was why he had to step down as leader. (See my old entries on Lott below.)

As for the substance of the Reid issue, what has Reid said that violated today’s ruling liberal standards (and let us remember that in this case it’s the Republicans who are presenting themselves as the enforcers of liberal standards)?

Liberals have always said that America is racist, and therefore electing a black president was a historic step toward being non-racist or at least less racist. But since the underlying assumption is that America is racist, naturally the first black to get elected president would need not to set off America’s racist alarms too much. So Reid’s statement, from a liberal point of view, is simply a realistic acknowledgment that in racist America, the first black president would need to be not too black.

But the Republicans, in not accepting Reid’s statement in that way, are becoming super PC and saying, “If you even imply (even in a private conversation) that a candidate’s racial characteristics will have an effect on whether he will be able to win the presidency, and that such a consideration should be treated as legitimate in making political calculations on whether a candidacy is viable or not, that is a racist statement that has disqualified you from a position of leadership in our society.”

So those are the two ways of seeing it: (1) that Republicans are trying to get back at the Democrats, using the same whip on them that Democrats readily use on Republicans, which would be unprincipled but at least understandable; or (2) that Republicans are more PC than even the Democrats, which was also the case in the Lott affair.

Either way, the Republican behavior, backed up by conservatives columnists, is deeply dispiriting and disgusting.

The ridiculous Reid affair

[John_Mace]

Wow. This is really dominating the news cycle today. Maybe Obama can turn Negrogate into another “teachable moment”.

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

That Auster analysis is spot on. Thank you for providing it.