Confusion

In other leadership news -- Trent Lott (R-CSA) is trying to get back into a high-level post within the GOP Senate caucus. I'm confused. My recollection was that after Lott was exposed as a die-hard segregationist, the American conservative movement washed their hands of him and made him a committee chair banished him from the realm as a token of their commitment to the new rightwingery with twice the homophobia and half the racism. Now they're going back on all that? Didn't everyone love Michael Steele.

Meanwhile, Jeff Sessions also wants in on the leadership. Really? This Jeff Sessions:

Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers--including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.--on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions's focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. . . .

On its own, the case might not have been enough to stain Sessions with the taint of racism, but there was more. Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." . . .

Another damaging witness--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers." . . .

He was elected attorney general in 1994. Once in office, he was linked with a second instance of investigating absentee ballots and fraud that directly impacted the black community. He was also accused of not investigating the church burnings that swept the state of Alabama the year he became attorney general.

He got to the US Senate after that (Alabama, you know) and you'll be shocked to know he's racked up a voting record that's not especially solicitous of the interests of black people.

Comments

but...but...but...Robert Byrd was once in the Klan. And...uh...Chappaquidic.

/troll

Posted by Goldberg | November 14, 2006 10:48 AM

The right wing has somewhat successfully flipped the script on Trent Lott. Now he was smeared by the PC police instead of being revealed as a racist. Seriously -- look at how many of them defended their late October attacks on John Kerry by using some variant of, "Hey, this is just the same as the left gave to Trent Lott."

Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra | November 14, 2006 10:48 AM

It's not clear that Sessions wants in to the leadership -- it's just that K-Lo, having had her heart broken by Santorum, has now fixated her obsessive attention on drafting Sessions into the leadership.

Posted by right | November 14, 2006 11:02 AM

Matt, it's hardly evidence of Republican racism that Lott is running for whip. If he gets the position, then you'll have a good case, but for all we know his caucus will shun him.

Posted by Tim | November 14, 2006 11:34 AM

You left out that Jeff Sessions was one of only nine Senators to vote against John McCain's anti-torture amendment.

Posted by Scott in Birmingham | November 14, 2006 1:58 PM

Sessions has an undeservedly low profile. He's the true moral and intellectual heir to the Jesse Helms tradition. He's the Senator who said (quoting from memory here), "Just because I'm a Senator doesn't mean that I have any right to classified information which might cast the Commander in Chief in a bad light." How many nanoseconds do you think it will take him to completely reverse that interpretation of checks and balances, should a Democrat occupy the White House?

Can't we grant the Deep South a retroactive Civil War win, and allow them to go ahead with their secession project?

Posted by sglover | November 14, 2006 2:06 PM

this goober also warned us that if we don't fix the immigration problem we will soon have over 200 million new immigrants in this country. that would be pretty much the entire population of south america.

Posted by wheeler | November 14, 2006 2:18 PM

Actually the NAACP and ALCU probably DID "forced civil rights down the throats of people."

But how is that a bad thing? It would never have happened otherwise?

Posted by MNPundit | November 14, 2006 3:47 PM

"[Session] was also accused of not investigating the church burnings that swept the state of Alabama the year he became attorney general."

And he was absolutely right. That was just a frenzy made up by the media and promoted by Bill Clinton. There are _always_ a lot of church arsons each year -- 1400 per year a few decades ago, down to 500 per year recently. Churches, which are empty most of the week, are attractive and easy targets for firebugs who like to see stuff burn. There was no uptick in black church arsons in Alabama, just more media attention, which ginned up a phony crisis that there was vast racist conspiracy to burn down black churches.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 14, 2006 4:17 PM

There was no uptick in black church arsons in Alabama, just more media attention, which ginned up a phony crisis that there was vast racist conspiracy to burn down black churches.

He's right. Churches burn down all the time, and there is no conspiracy. I mean, just last week I burnt down two churches, and I work alone. Oh wait, no, that wasn't me, that was ChurchArson.com.

Posted by RicanJew | November 14, 2006 5:07 PM

Lott's comments were ill-advised, but it's an exaggeration to say that he was proved by them to be a diehard segregationist. He tried to please a half-dead old man by saying nice things about his long-ago segregationist presidential campaign. He never said anything about segregation directly.
And I thought that everybody knew by now that the black church burning "epidemic" was largely imaginary; I thought you were smarter than that.

Posted by James Kabala | November 14, 2006 7:53 PM

Lott had made comments back in the 1990's about multiracial children and unions that basically compared them to vermin and shit. He made these comments at the Christian Coalition and got a standing ovation. His gaffs contantly show him to be a die-hard racist. Anyone who argues otherwise is either willingly stupid or arguing in bad faith.

Posted by Reality Man | November 14, 2006 8:08 PM

Citation? I have a hard time believing such a thing wouldn't have made national news. I can't find anything about it on the internet. It isn't mentioned in Lott's Wikipedia entry.

Posted by James Kabala | November 14, 2006 10:30 PM

It actually made the New York Times (Page 2 if I remember correctly) some time back in the mid to late 1990's. I'm too lazy to look it up and the paper's search function sucks if you don't know the exact date or headline. It would only be big news if he didn't make a career out of saying stupid shit. Dixiecrats saying racist shit is along the lines of dog bites man. Is that really surprising? He is from the intellectual background of Helms and other segregationists. He isn't exactly Harold Ford. He isn't even Bush in this regard.

Posted by Reality Man | November 14, 2006 10:35 PM

James, I have no idea whether the Lott speech at the Christian Coalition is true as reported by Reality Man or not. But, your assertion that it would have made national news if true has a few flaws: (1) in the early/mid 1990s, Lott was NOT Senate Majority Leader, if he did make the statements, the media firestorm would have been much less than the Strom thing; (2) it was also pre-internet, remember, the mainstream press largely ignored/were not aware of Lott's comments and it was the blogosphere (especially TPM) that kept the story alive until the press finally started paying attention.

This, of course, is not to say that Lott did say these things, only that it is possible that they could have been overlooked or easily forgotten by the national media at the time.

Posted by Ethan Mundy | November 15, 2006 1:41 AM

Lott may or may not have been majority leader (the date is unclear), and if he had made the alleged speech at Bob Jones University or some such obscure place, I could believe that it flew under the radar. (Conrad Burns's racist and quasi-racist remarks generally did.) The Christian Coalition was a big deal, however. There were myriads of news stories about them, frequently hostile in tone. It was probably, except maybe for the NRA, the most powerful organization on the right at the time. Their issue platform had little to do with race, however, and thunderous applause at a speech that not only condemned interracial unions but implied the offspring of them were subhuman would have been a revelation about the true nature of the organization that certainly would have been newsworthy.

Posted by James Kabala | November 15, 2006 9:07 AM

I think Reality Man was actually talking about a speech Lott gave at the Council of Conservative Citizens. I couldn't find a news article at the NYT mentioning this, but here is a discussion from a 1998 Frank Rich column:

Senator Lott and Congressman Barr, for instance, have both been revealed as fawning speakers at events sponsored by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist, immigrant-bashing organization that even David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union, has labeled racist. Among other beliefs, the Council proselytizes that interracial marriage ''amounts to white genocide'' and that Jews have ''turned spite into welfare billions for themselves.''

When they were outed for their involvement with this group, both politicians dutifully repudiated its views and then instigated cover-ups to try to camouflage the extent of their actual relationships with it. Mr. Barr, who gave the keynote address at the group's June meeting, dismissed his appearance as ''brief''; his story has since been demolished in excruciating detail by Jason Zengerle of The New Republic. For his part, Mr. Lott vowed he had ''no firsthand knowledge of the group's views'' -- a denial that became inoperative after Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post came across a 1992 newsletter in which the Senator is pictured telling its members they ''stand for the right principles and the right philosophy.''

Posted by Crust | November 15, 2006 11:45 AM

Matt, it's hardly evidence of Republican racism that Lott is running for whip. If he gets the position, then you'll have a good case

Glad we've cleared this up!

Posted by Scott Lemieux | November 15, 2006 12:28 PM

Basically the same info also in Dec. 18, 2002 issue of National Review, article by Deroy Murdock.

Posted by stl.tom | November 15, 2006 6:58 PM