Senators for Segregation

Remember when Trent Lott was lavishing praise on Strom Thurmond's 1948 run for president on a white supremacist platform? Remember how most of his fellow conservatives disavowed him? Well, here's Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR) praising Lott's defense of white supremacy. And then Orrin Hatch (R-UT) did it. And then Arlen Specter (R-PA) did it.

I kind of assume Specter's too old to run for another term, and Utah's the most Republican state in the country, but Smith needs to run for re-election in Oregon next year so I'm pretty surprised to see this sort of gaffe coming from him. It's true that his second-degree praise of Thurmond and the Dixiecrats isn't quite as egregious as Lott's, but this is still pretty despicable.

Comments

I'm surprised that Smith would risk antagonizing the Oregon black community like this.

Posted by Duvall | December 18, 2007 4:43 PM

Especially as Smith - at the time of this scandal - actually criticized Lott and basically called for an apology. But, this is a typical Smith flip flop - its his M.O.

Posted by tiparillo | December 18, 2007 4:51 PM

I don't feel like chasing down the link, but didn't Fox News go straight for the jugular against Lott on this one? It was an indication that the ConIntern had decided to cut this guy loose. It's not like this was a battle the GOP lost; this was a battle they decided wasn't worth fighting, or even a convenient moment to dump a guy they didn't like. Which just makes today's gaffe-fest all the more strange.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | December 18, 2007 5:02 PM

If Smith, Hatch, Specter felt that Lott was being deliberately misinterpreted, why didn't they say so at the time, instead of throwing him under the bus (or passively acquiescing in same)? What they are saying today is revolting and preposterous, but their hypocrisy and cowardice in just now speaking up are equally bad.

Posted by kth | December 18, 2007 7:21 PM

Another flip flop for Smith. Even though what he's doing is disgusting, he's actually making it easier for us Oregonians to unseat Smith with the Speaker of the House Jeff Merkley. Merkley is a solid progressive who won't defend racist statements! That's the kind of Senator I want representing me, not someone like Smith who has actually devolved instead of evolved over time.

Posted by Sarah Lane | December 18, 2007 7:27 PM

Geez, praising Lott at his retirment party - and during the holiday season too!

The humanity.

This link is more useful as to the current and past comments.

Posted by Tom Maguire | December 18, 2007 7:42 PM

Matt: It's easy to pick on whites. Why not criticize any of these people below?

“We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we’re a new Mestizo nation.”

“Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes…”

“We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”

– Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, founder of La Raza

“Except for a small number of pure European blood, 30% of Mexicans are Amerindian, and 60% are Mestizo.  We are not Western.  We are of Aztlan.”

"Around the year 2040, whites will become a minority in the United States and, believe me, it will be 'payback time'."

- Pro-Immigration Activist, Jorge Sanchez

“And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people because that in my estimation is the only conclusion I have come to. We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem.”

- African Studies professor, Dr. Kamau Kambon

"Blond hair and blue eyes are a biological defect."

"The white race is a disease, and the only cure is a bullet. The rule of whites is history. Soon they will be our serfs. It's now the Age of the Brown Man."

- Hindu nationalist, Ramesh Sharma

“The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Make no mistake about it we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed–not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed."

- Jewish studies professor, Dr Noel Ignatiev

.

Posted by Paleoconservative Peter | December 18, 2007 8:01 PM

Gee I don't know, maybe the fact that they aren't US senators?

Posted by eric k | December 18, 2007 8:15 PM

"Around the year 2040, whites will become a minority in the United States and, believe me, it will be 'payback time'."

Awww. But I want payback now.

Posted by Duvall | December 18, 2007 8:20 PM

Well, if that link Tom Maguire points to is correct, Gordon Smith was being totally two-faced about Lott earlier WITHOUT the excuse of a retirement party or the holiday season. I don't quite see how this gets him off the hook. (Nor do I quite see why retirement or the holiday season serves as justification for praising a defender of enthusistic racism, which one would think is a bit contrary to the Holiday Season itself.)

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | December 18, 2007 9:51 PM

i dont understand why they even brought this up.

Lott's been in the senate a very long time. surely they could have talked about his vast other accomplishments...but they decided to focus on the one thing he probably would leastlike to be remembered for...

with friends like these...

Posted by freaktown | December 18, 2007 10:09 PM

Actually, those comments about Lott are perfectly understandable once you remember the Senate's REAL role as The World's Most Exclusive Club And Mutual Admiration Society Masquerading As A Deliberative Body.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | December 18, 2007 10:30 PM

You know, if I read your post without following the links and actually listening to what they said, I would think that Lott had defended white supremacy and these three agreed with that defense.

Since that couldn't possibly be the case, I followed the links and listened -- and it turned out that your, and TPM's characterizations were not accurate. They're saying Lott was misconstrued, that his statement should not have been understood in context as being a defense of white supremacy.

Now argue against that view if you like. But don't put words in people's mouths.

You wouldn't want Andrew Sullivan to have to rename the Yglesias Award, would you?

Posted by Cheerful Iconoclast | December 18, 2007 10:32 PM

"Senators for Segregation" and no mention of Robert Byrd? How soon they forget. I can understand. Hell, he's only been a senator for 50 plus years. What was it that he once wrote re: blacks in the military? Let us recall:

"Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."

Sorry to ruin your little selectivity thread.

Posted by resh | December 18, 2007 10:36 PM

My entire worldview is upended. An ancient ass old democrat was (is) a racist. God has truely shat upon us all. I've got to ponder my party registration.

Posted by Ed Marshall | December 19, 2007 12:22 AM

Well, of course, Resh. That's precisely why so many Southern Democrats jumped to the GOP when the Democratic Party as a whole finally started opposing racism, and the GOP (in Goldwater's immortal phrase) decided to react by "going hunting where the ducks are" and supporting it. (That's when -- and why -- Thurmond and Helms jumped parties. Remember?)

As for Robert Byrd: his own reaction to his early spectacularly slimy racism -- like that of(at long last) George Wallace and Orval Faubus -- was to stick with the Democrats and finally, if horrendously belatedly, drop his racism instead.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | December 19, 2007 1:37 AM

As for Cheerful Iconoclast's statement that what Lott said was "misconstrued": really. As even Krauthammer, Bill Kristol and George Will said forcefully at the time, it's rather difficult to construe it as anything but an enthusiastic defense of white supremacy:

"I want to say this about my state: 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 all these years, either."

So, what we saw in the Senate today is simply yet another demonstration of two extremely familiar political phenomena: the stupidity of many high-ranking politicians, and their eternal hope that the public's memory will be very short.

(On a side note: why is the right-wing troll percentage among your commenters so unusually high today, Matt?)

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | December 19, 2007 1:57 AM

Cheerful iconoclast's point was accurate. None of the three Senators were actually defending Lott for praising segregation. They were unsuccessfully and incredibly asserting that Lott's statements were NOT praising segregation. The distinction is relevant. The latter, as hacktastic as it is, at least involves an implicit acceptance that segregation was and is bad and ought not to be praised. Matt's post is amusing, but inaccurate.

Posted by Led | December 19, 2007 2:06 AM

Oh, okay. So they're only willing to lie through their teeth in defense of explicit racists, rather being willing to explicitly defend racism themselves. That makes all the difference in the world.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | December 19, 2007 2:09 AM

Yes it does make a difference, Bruce.

Led, thanks for clarifying my point. To be clear, I didn't say Lott wasn't defending segregation -- I'm saying that these other senators didn't interpret Lott as defending segregation.

Nor do I think, actually, that they were lying through their teeth. I suspect that, if you hooked them up to a polygraph and asked them the question "do you think that Trent Lott meant to support segregation when he said what he said at Thurmond's 100th birthday party," they would all pass.

I could be wrong about this, but I think they want to think the best of their friend. None of the three come from Jim Crow states, and I'm pretty sure none of them secretly support a return to segregation. Today, most decent people of all political persuasions think that Jim Crow was an evil thing. They know Trent Lott and, one presumes, like him on an interpersonal level. So they would rather not believe their friend is evil.

That's all I am trying to say. Matt (and the folks at TPM) are being factually inaccurate when they claim that these Senators are in favor of segregation.

Posted by Cheerful Iconoclast | December 19, 2007 6:48 AM

Did Sen. Smith try to help Lott's reputation by pointing out that he'd made the same comments many times before? If that was the case, wasn't an intervention in order? Friends don't let friends *appear to praise segregation.

Posted by aleks | December 19, 2007 7:11 AM

I'm not really that surprised that Smith's such an ass. It's the northwest. We may be famous for liberality, but we're also infamous for our pockets of racist, religionist, often violent idiots.

Oregon has within its mostly live-and-let live populace a streak of pretty nasty, pretty racist jerks. They get elected from time to time there and often they get elected due to out-of-state help and funding, but there have to be enough of those rough-hewn quasi-survivalist morons to vote for them, or they couldn't get elected with or without campaign strategizing and funding in-state our out-of-state.

Some time back the grand poobah of W.A.R. -- a violence-advocating domioninist white supremacist group that made the KKK look like a kiddy klub was in Portland to rabble rouse and *directly* after his rally several of his supporters ran down a young African man attending college and murdered him. The court case in which he was held financially responsible for that man's death spiked W.A.R, but that he could even scrape up enough adherents for a rally in what's otherwise a pretty liberal city in a pretty liberal state is "notable".

Oregon is a mountain state, and in every mountain state, there are pockets of wingnut survivalist skinhead racists.

We have them in WA state, too, and we're pretty much a blue state.

My hope is that someone strong enough to beat Smith will be offerred the good people of his state as an alternate and he'll be out the door after 2008.

Posted by webehere | December 19, 2007 4:13 PM