Trent Lott vs. Harry Reid

Finally—I’m riled about something again! But I don’t know that there’s much of a point commenting on Trent Lott vs. Harry Reid. I, of course, think it’s horribly hypocritical to force Trent Lott to resign and then find nothing wrong with Harry Reid’s comments. When Obama was running for president, Reid said that he had a chance of winning because he was “light-skinned” and because he spoke “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Lott said, “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.” Thurmond was anti-civil rights at the time he ran—more than 50 years before Trent Lott made that statement in an event held to honor Thurmond. Lott (who was, incidentally, 7 years old when Thurmond ran for president) made a statement with no overt racism; our country has had so many problems during the last 50 years that it seems to me somewhat racist to assume that he was referring to racial problems. Reid’s statement, on the other hand, was overtly racist. Well, it would be in the mouth of a conservative. I, frankly, don’t consider either racist, but what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. Unfortunately, liberals—not liberals only but liberals definitely—are so hypocritical that an apology for a remark that they would certainly consider racist if it were from the mouth of a conservative is good enough, while an apology for a remark that was not overtly racist wasn’t sufficient and required the speaker’s resignation.


Many things about liberals frighten me; this hypocrisy indicates a blindness, a deliberate refusal to see, that I can add to the list.