|
Friday, December 20, 2002
The blogosphere has been slow to react to the latest Lott news. It's at least an hour since the announcement, and nary a mention from InstaPundit, Kaus, Marshall, etc...which creates an interesting paradigm: the media breaks blogger stories slowly, and bloggers are slow to react to media stories. It's working on the head & tail ends of the Lott story, and likely this thesis would bear out a test in other big stories.
Steven I. Weiss 12:26:00 PM
Nickles backing Frist, hopefully. It's reported here , so it looks like the three-way race is over, but Lott's already saying he has 20 votes...just 6 away, and I don't think the anti-Lott camp has yet reached double digits. (link via...ugh...The Corner)
Steven I. Weiss 7:37:00 AM
Thursday, December 19, 2002
Deep into this NRO plea for Lamar Alexander step up against Lott is the claim that:Alexander shouldn't have any problem challenging Republican leadership — he, after all, took on the grand old man of the GOP, Bob Dole, in 1996. Speaking of, where is Bob Dole on this issue?
Steven I. Weiss 10:22:00 PM
Central Park Five Exonerated. If you haven't read Ydanis Rodriguez's Op-Ed in the 12/12-12/19 issue of the Amsterdam News, do so.
Steven I. Weiss 9:32:00 PM
Re: the press conference about Bruno I mentioned earlier, here's the Newsday article covering it, though I don't think anyone else did...
I don't know if I saw this before, but this quote simply makes one go "wowsers":Bruno (R-Brunswick) told reporters in Albany on Monday that Lott, the U.S. Senate majority leader, should be "cut some slack" because he has apologized for his remarks. Bruno then added, "What else do you want to do? You want to hang him up from an oak tree?"
The guy's out of control! Flood the zone!
UPDATE: Three Council Members introduce a resolution calling on Bruno to resign. They are: Hiram Monserrate, Helen Foster, and Bill DeBlasio...
Steven I. Weiss 6:45:00 PM
Will Lott be deposed? Not if it becomes a three-way race, what with Frist thinking about it, and Nickles assumedly doing so, as well...Daily Kos is compiling a pro-Lott/anti-Lott list, which, with 11 senators reporting, shows Lott with a 7-4 lead...with two of those four being Nickles & Frist -- if they split, the coup is over.
Steven I. Weiss 6:35:00 PM
Reader Allan Goldsmith responds to my earlier quick-post referring to TPM on Clinton:While Mr. Marshall can claim something is truth because it is impossible to deny the obvious, the truth is that firstly, the Republican party does not coordinate every campaign from a central base. To blame them for pandering to racism is to claim that the Democrats are anti-homosexual because of Alex Sanders' ridiculous and offensive "light in the loafers" remark about Senator-elect Lindsey Graham. By and large, both parties do not pander to racists, and when Msrahall tries to draw fine lines, all he ends up doing is
looking like an arrogant pseudointellectual who claims that his word is truth because anyone who denies it is blind. No, they don't coordinate every campaign from a central base. But they do with the big ones, and, as was detailed in this past election, with Karl Rove in charge, they did so more thoroughly & effectively than ever before. On the general issues of pandering to racists, it simply is so common and so accepted. W, the one guy not being creamed as a racist in this whole ordeal, spoke at Bob Jones University; John Ashcroft made positive characterizations of Jefferson Davis in Southern Partisan Magazine; the campaigns to which Clinton refers were national issues and did have RNC talking points. Alex Sanders's "light in the loafers" comment I never understood; however, when he talked about Giuliani with "two gays and a shih-tzu", he obviously spoke in a way that obviously hadn't been vetted by anyone -- and got spanked by Barney Frank...and he lost, and will likely never see a DNC dollar again.
For as much as I've been sitting here accepting the claim that conservatives aren't racist, conservatives keep letting me down. The vast majority of conservatives I know personally are, in fact, racist and/or sexist. Andrew Sullivan made a grandiose claim of how Trent Lott, in trading in segregation for affirmative action, went from being a devotee of the "old racism" to being one of the "new racism"...which I think could be justified -- though I'd still disagree -- if you arrange your ideas correctly; he then went on to clarify that his idea of "new racism" was of one directed at whites, the "victims" of affirmative action, and I am left thinking that he simply doesn't care to rectify the wrongs of the past...and given that his investment in this country is incomplete -- he hasn't applied for citizenship -- I think there's good reason to assume that he won't throw his lot in as well as others might (btw: this isn't anti-immigrant; the guy's been here for 20 years and is fully aware of how to become a citizen, he just doesn't want to). The conservative argument against affirmative action, against changing state flags, etc., panders to protection of whites' place in society, on the individual level as well as on the general social level. That isn't entirely equal to racism, but it is white-protectionism, and people who are inclined to be happy with the latter are necessarily less inclined to worry about the former.
Summation: Marshall is right that Clinton's arguments were "truths", and the GOP does necessarily pander to near-racist ideology that often and easily tips over into out and out racism.
Thanks for writing, Allan...
Steven I. Weiss 6:25:00 PM
South Korean election: I have no clue what was going on. And my sense from the news coverage and blogosphere is that no one else was paying attention, either. I think it's past time we started.
Steven I. Weiss 12:32:00 PM
"No one compares to Bill Clinton when it comes to cutting to the chase and telling truths in a way sure to make Republicans howl." Josh Marshall.
Steven I. Weiss 12:30:00 PM
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Empire State Pride Agenda wins, as the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act passes the NY State Senate. We've already seen this gay-advocacy group go conservative as it attempted to block a trans-gender amendment. Now that they've got their one issue taken care of (for a while, until they start pressing for civil unions), the challenge becomes: Just how much more conservative can they prove to be?
Steven I. Weiss 12:31:00 PM
It's an interesting thing about Lott, how now that he's made his apologies and declared his "absolute" support of affirmative action, that liberals aren't wary that his endorsement of that policy is precisely what can help to undermine it.
Steven I. Weiss 12:24:00 PM
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
PoliticsNY: USELESS. PoliticsNY.com has not seen fit to come up with original commentary since...well, a long time ago. Put the domain name on the auction block and give up.
Steven I. Weiss 10:20:00 PM
The NYC Council held a press conference today denouncing Bruno's remarks. I wasn't there and haven't seen any coverage yet, but there could yet be a trickle-down effect of Lott's statements...Reaganism at it's best.
Steven I. Weiss 2:34:00 PM
Monday, December 16, 2002
Joe Bruno: Lott should be ``cut some slack''.
Steven I. Weiss 11:07:00 PM
I finally got around to adding a counter over the weekend and it's so interesting to see where people come from. One person came to the site with this:Google Search: conservative response to lott's statement. This Internet thingamabob is just too cool.
Steven I. Weiss 8:02:00 AM
Sunday, December 15, 2002
You want a more conservative Republican leadership? You got it: Nickles challenging Lott. This likely won't bode well for Dems.
Steven I. Weiss 10:26:00 AM
I actually enjoyed most of a Jonah Goldberg column. Of course, that can't mean that I've changed, so it must mean that he's changed, at least somewhat. His nearly-cogent column argues that conservatives aren't all racists just because Trent Lott is. Correct. He then rightly notes that "southern conservatives...have some serious baggage."
He then goes on to compare politicians' more popular positions with their less-popular ones: Fulbright down on Vietnam, up on segregation; Wilson anti-Semite and racist, moralist on foreign policy. But first he lists Thurmond: "Strom Thurmond was for a strong national defense in 1948. Does that mean it's racist to be for a strong national defense?"
No, but it does mean you had to be racist to support Thurmond in '48, because his number one issue was segregation. He might have had dozens of policy proposals that were agreeable -- but he wasn't really running on them, they were just rounding out the slate.
Take Clinton: he didn't fully integrate the military to gays and lesbians, but that wasn't his main issue; the economy was.
Bush: the war on terrorism may or may not be going well, but he ran on missile defense.
But choosing one position over the other is precisely what Lott's rhetoric is claiming to do: Thurmond on national defense, not segregation; Jerfferson Davis on states' rights, not slavery. Why can't he just say that Bush supports states' rights, he's the Republican president, and have that be the end? It is precisely because one chooses one's associations that one can be held responsible for them. It's obvious to Lott -- as it is to those to whom he's pandering with these comments -- that Jefferson Davis stands for something more than states's rights as the leader fo the Confederacy. It's unspoken for Lott, but more verbal for Southern Partisan Magazine and its supporters. That nod-nod, wink-wink, we-all-know-what-I'm-really-talking-about pandering to racists makes him a questionable figure because he respects their language and their ideas and never takes them to tasks for the parts that he should find objectionable. His associations are problematic, and others' are, too -- see John Ashcroft. And we should seriously question the conduct of senators in response to this scandal...why weren't Dems more outspoken instead of reining in their comments to gain political capital?
I made a post a few days ago talking about how much baggage boomers bring into the present day. I don't doubt for a second that a kid my age can be conservative and not racist -- at the same time, I've known dozens who are -- but I really do question that about people older. You're talking about people who tacitly accepted segregation, on both aisles, in both camps, all over the country. What an extreme minority it was that actually did something.
So, the problem of association with segregationists and racists is seen as inevitable -- indeed, Goldberg, takes this to the extension in which the whole world is racist. But that is not a logical extension. We can differentiate between those who make racist pandering their priority and those who don't. We can differentiate between those who really hate everything that segregation represented and those who don't. The problem is not that we make that indictment too broad, it is that we make it too narrow, singling out men like Trent Lott when there are likely dozens of Senators who, by the same standards, must go as well.
Steven I. Weiss 1:39:00 AM
|