Still waiting for an apology…

I just want to say this before everybody moves on to bigger and better things and forgets Old Trent and all the hoopla around the sudden “revelation” that he had been a racist all of his life.

I was very moved by Peggy Noonan who seemed so puzzled and disturbed by Lott’s unfortunate statement. She wrote:

…when Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948 he ran explicitly as a segregationist who would attempt to stop the civil rights revolution. He never, ever should have been elected president of the United States. It is truly weird for a person who lives in our world, in the modern world, to say otherwise

She goes on to tell a little story about a Democrat who fought for civil rights back in the 60’s. She feels his pain.

It is very painful, our racial past. We made blacks and whites and all other colors equal in this country at great cost. A lot of feelings got hurt; a lot of people got hurt; a lot of people died. To pick only one of the millions of examples: Harold Ickes, the political operative who worked for Bill Clinton and now works for Hillary Clinton. I can’t imagine agreeing on too many political issues with Mr. Ickes, but back in the ’60s he helped organize the Freedom Riders to desegregate the South. In Louisiana he got into a fight with some local bad guys. He was beaten so badly that he lost a kidney. He’s still walking around with only one kidney. He’s just a middle-aged white lawyer who’d pass you by on the street in a shirt and a tie, but in this respect, in terms of what he did 40 years ago, he is a hero. There were a lot of heroes in those days. It was all wrenching, but in the end we did the right thing

(Did we, now.)

In a later column she writes

But it would be best for the Republican Party–and the country–if Republican senators were utterly brutal and moved to fire him before then. This would be a Christmas present to the country: Jim Crow’s long, gasping death is finally over. If they do not move before Jan. 6 they certainly must fire him as leader on that date.

She goes on:

“… we believe completely in our hearts and minds that all races are equal and no one should be judged by the color of his skin. And then some guy comes along and speaks the old code of yesteryear and seems to reinforce the idea that those who hold conservative positions are really, at heart, racist. We are indignant, and we have been for a long time

In the Lott scandal our indignation reached critical mass. A lot of conservatives, many of them 50 and under, decided enough is enough, let’s end this, let a new party be born. And by the way, in the particular case of Trent Lott, it didn’t start yesterday. Stanley Crouch just surprised me by sending me a column he wrote almost four years ago for the New York Daily News. It was about a Lott appearance before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist group. I said it was springtime and it’s time to throw out the garbage, and Mr. Lott should go.

How inspiring. But I’m a little bit confused about one little thing and I sure wish Peggy would take the time to explain it. If Peggy felt so strongly about this topic, if she’s been indignant for a long time, if Trent Lott represented the last, gasping breath of Jim Crow, then I would really like to know where in the hell she got off tendentiously lecturing Democrats like her hero Harold Ickes about how they had “lost their souls” because a few people in a crowd of 20,000 booed this despicable racist bastard at a tribute for a guy whose entire life was about social justice?

Why did she say that booing a known racial bigot at a memorial tribute for the man who was Jesse Jackson’s Minnesota campaign manager in 1988, a man who in 1997 retraced Bobby Kennedy’s 1967 national poverty tour (which started in Mississippi) was “just envy and revenge and resentment?”

Why does she demand that the GOP leadership be “utterly brutal” and fire Lott for his racist statements, which she admits had been out there for at least 4 years, (and we all know his sentiments haven’t exactly been a secret for nigh on to 35 years now, don’t we Peggy?) when just 6 weeks earlier she had the ineffable chutzpah to write the following:

Imagine Trent Lott dies, and there’s a big memorial back home in Mississippi in some big auditorium. Half the Senate shows up to show respect: Trent was a nice guy. But they show up for another reason too: to show solidarity with democracy. To show we’re all Americans together, and we respect the ballot together, and we are big enough to feel regard and respect across party lines.

[…]

When you’re in politics not to live life but avoid it, you become especially susceptible to a kind of polar thinking. You become convinced you’re with the good team and the good people over here. You become convinced anyone who doesn’t want the same policies you want must be bad. After all, you’re good, so if they disagree they must be bad. When you’re polar like that you dehumanize the people on the other side. And when you dehumanize them–well, then you wind up booing them at a funeral..

Yeah, that’s true. Trent Lott was booed at the funeral because some of the grieving Democrats there “became convinced” that Lott’s known support for things like Thurmond’s 1948 campaign platform was “bad.” They were downright “polar” about it. They “dehumanized” poor old Trent and wound up booing him.

But, just 6 weeks later, without even a trace of embarrassment, Peggy is indignant that Lott is even associated with the Republican Party.

Seriously, I just hope she can live with herself for turning the pain and anguish in the Wellstone family into a cheap, political talking point. I hope she will find it in herself to examine how she could use a totally righteous display of disgust at a man like Trent Lott, who stood for everything that Paul Wellstone fought against in his life, into a campaign strategy that deigned to lecture Democrats about the “goodness” of the man she demanded the leadership of her party “brutally” fire less than 2 months later.

Here’s some advice for Peggy, in her own words:

…you need to stop, sit down, think, question yourself, look at your actions and ponder what you’ve become. And how somehow love for your side in the fight became hatred for the other.

Let me be very candidly specific. …You need to get a good psychologist and a good holy man or woman, a priest or rabbi or minister–or how about all three–and figure out why you’re turning everything in your life into politics. Because I have to tell you what I know: Politics is the biggest, easiest way in all of America to avoid looking at yourself, and who you are, and what fence needs fixing on your own homestead.