Trent Lott's Bizarro World
Up is down, ignorance is strength, helping the downtrodden is offensive, and Civil Rights equals "problems"
by Tamara Baker

Dec. 7, 2002 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- A little over a month ago, at Paul Wellstone's memorial service, Rick Kahn urged the Republican friends of the late Senator Wellstone to honor his memory by fighting for the things Paul fought for: aiding the poor and the average Joe/Jane, strengthening our health care system, caring for our veterans, and fighting racism.

This innocuous message so offended one Republican, Trent Lott, that not only did he walk up and leave, he talked Jesse Ventura and his wife into doing the same.

Now, we find that Trent Lott, in honoring the rabidly racist segregationist Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday, has said that he thinks that the nation would be better off if Thurmond had won the Presidency in 1948, when Thurmond's racism was at its height.

Here are his exact words:

"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."

By "problems," Lott means the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act -- laws that finally freed black men and women from the racist Jim Crow laws enacted by people like Trent Lott to keep blacks enslaved.

Thanks to the Washington Post article linked above, here's a little taste of what Strom Thurmond was saying about black people in 1948, the year Trent Lott says Ol' Strom should have become President of these United States:

Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, was the presidential
nominee of the breakaway Dixiecrat Party in 1948. He carried
Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and his home state. He declared
during his campaign against Democrat Harry S. Truman, who
supported civil rights legislation, and Republican Thomas Dewey:
"All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army
cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our
churches."

On July 17, 1948, delegates from 13 southern states gathered in
Birmingham to nominate Thurmond and adopt a platform that said
in part, "We stand for the segregation of the races and the
racial integrity of each race."

Remember, Lott is a longtime ally of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens, formerly the White Citizens Council, and has written columns for their newsletter, the Citizen Informer, in the recent past -- he only stopped when his role in their group was discovered a few years ago. (Do a Google search using "lott council conservative" and prepare to be disgusted.) And his early political life was spent working for the most racist Senators and Congressmen ever to stain the history of this country.

And, of course, when the Republicans asked George W. Bush to sic the IRS on the NAACP, the nation's most respected civil-rights group, it was none other than Trent Lott who made the gloating announcement of their plans for action.

And, of course, the usual right-wing and racist suspects, from NewsMax to the white-is-right Religious Freedom Foundation to the various American versions of the Nazi party all cheered Trent Lott for attacking the NAACP and black people in this way.

And we can expect these same groups to be cheering Trent Lott for attacking black people yet again.

In fact, at least one of these groups already has: when asked for comments on Lott's statements at the Thurmond party, Gordon Baum, CEO of the Council of Conservative Citizens, said "God bless Trent Lott."

I wonder: will all the prominent persons who professed to be offended at being asked to work against things like racism, be equally offended at being told by a known ally of racists that the fight against racism is wrong?

Or are they, too, part of Trent Lott's Bizarro World, where up is down, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, helping the downtrodden is offensive, and civil rights equals "problems"?