PEOPLE SEEM TO BE NOTICING
Instapundit
Sen. Chris Dodd's racially insensitive comments, as the story is breaking into traditional media:
WASHINGTON, April 7 (UPI) -- <font size=4>A mini-scandal has erupted in Congress as some Senate Republicans question whether comments made by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., were racist.
In a speech on the Senate floor last Thursday marking Sen. Robert Byrd's 17,000th vote in the body, Dodd said the West Virginia Democrat, member of the Ku Klux Klan before taking office and opponent of the 1964 Civil Right Act, "would have been right during the great conflict of Civil War in this nation."
Dodd's comments struck some as similar to remarks made by former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., that led to his losing the position.
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Read the whole thing. Strangely, though bloggers on the
right were swift to condemn Trent Lott's comments,
bloggers on the left don't seem to be condemning Dodd's
with anything like the same degree of energy. As Jeff
Goldstein notes, some are even trying to defend Dodd's
comments.<font size=4>
Jeff Goldstein - MaxObfuscate, You Listen!
Distinguished "progressive" economist and anti-war ideologue Max Sawicky, in an effort to airbrush Christopher Dodd's recent Byrd-inspired brainfart completely out of existence, puts on the rhetorical high hat and waves his hand dismissively:
The effort to cook up an analogy between Chris Dodd/Robert Byrd and Trent Lott/Strom Thurmond needs a few sentences.
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Robert Byrd is a great senator. His hands shake, but he is still sharp. Strom Thurmond was a great segregationist. In his final months as a senator, he was more out-of-it than in. Among other achievements, Byrd was a prime mover in blocking balanced budget amendments that would have screwed up the nation's finances even more than the Bush Administration has. Thurmond evolved from a segregationist to a garden variety political hack. Byrd's association with the KKK ended over fifty years ago. Trent Lott's remark, not for the first time, reflected nostalgia for Thurmond's glittering racist past. Comparison over. Can we please move on to the next canard?
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Well, no, Max, we can't just "move on" -- not on your misleading terms. First, the proper comparison here is between Lott and Dodd, not (as you would have it) between Byrd and Thurmond. Arguing that Byrd is more deserving of praise than Thurmond misses the point entirely, and does nothing to address the rhetorical overlap between Dodd's remarks and the remarks for which Lott was publically flogged. Which is the precise crux of the matter.
Second, you locate in Lott's remark a "reflected nostalgia for Thurmond's glittering racist past," yet you fail to account for similar Dixi-fied allusions in Dodd's mush-brained encomium. Which makes me wonder: have you even read the damn thing, Max? Because behold! Thus spake Dodd!
It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my view, would have been right at any time. He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation's 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true [instructive emphases added]
"He would have been right during the great conflict of
civil war in this Nation"? Sounds like "nostalgia for a
glittering racist past" to me -- at least, judged by the
same standards that allow you to elevate Lott's blather to
such hyperbolic heights. And then there are those other
inconvenient moments "in this Nation's 220-plus year
history" that saw good ol' boys like Byrd blocking school
entrances or polishing off big plates of buttered grits
before heading out -- dressed as pointy-headed ghosts --
to agitate against the mud people by setting Jesus-shaped
fires in the dead of night...
Here's Dodd again, this time during the Lott dustup:
If Tom Daschle or another Democratic leader were to have
made similar statements, the reaction would have been very
swift," Dodd said. "I don't think several hours would have
gone by without there being an almost unanimous call for
the leader to step aside."
[...] "Mainstream Republican thinking over the last 40 years has been opposed to an awful lot of the civil rights legislation," he said. "So this isn't just about Trent Lott, it's about a party that needs to come to terms with this view here -- that you go to the South, you say one thing to one group of people and another thing nationally."
[...] Dodd agreed that the Republicans should make the decision about Lott but added that if the senator were to stay, a move to censure him "takes on more of a reality."
"But it ought to be bipartisan," he said. "It ought not to be Democrats versus Republicans."
Works for me, Chris. Let's get on with it, shall we? After all, making political hay out of dippy flatteries lavished on erstwhile segregationalists is something we should all be able to enjoy, regardless of party loyalty. Am I Right?
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In other Sawicky-related news, Max expands on his earlier charge that Glenn Reynolds is an internet communist exposer and the evil overlord of a modern day cyber HUAC.
[hat tip: Henry Hanks. More from John Cole.
update: <font size=4>Bryan Preston wants to know why Josh Marshall -- one of the internet's loudest voices in the campaign to pillory Trent Lott -- is remaining silent on Dodd's comments. One theory is that Marshall is "an unabashed and unprincipled partisan" whose prior outrage "was motivated by [...] the (R) after Lott’s name." Another is that the news of Dodd's comments has yet to make it up John Kerry's ass. Either works. |
