Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: willcousa who wrote (328561)	12/12/2002 8:02:37 PM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 769667

December 11, 2002 The Honorable Trent Lott Republican Leader S-230 The Capitol Washington, D.C. 20510 Dear Senator Lott: I was astonished by your remarks at last week's birthday reception for Senator Thurmond. You claimed that the country would have been better off, and "wouldn't have had all of those problems," if other states had followed Mississippi and had supported the Dixiecrat Party ticket in the 1948 presidential election. Your callous comments were incredibly insulting, and outrageous for any American to make - let alone the prospective Senate Majority Leader. The recent revelation of your similar endorsement, during the 1980 elections, of Senator Thurmond's Dixiecrat campaign is a chilling confirmation that your remarks last week were not a spontaneous slip of the tongue. President Bush and the Congress currently seek to promote patriotism and to explain America's basic values to the world. Especially at such a time, your remarks are so un-American that they disqualify you from continuing as the Majority Leader of the United States Senate therefore, I must call on you to resign. I realize you have apologized to anyone whom you might have offended through "a poor choice of words." That only compounds your slap in the face of all African Americans. Even after you had seen how much you had upset the public, you did not disavow what the Dixiecrat Party stood for. Whatever your choice of words, the plain intent was clear. The Dixiecrat Party's agenda was to preserve segregated schools, segregated public facilities, and segregated armed forces, and to prevent African-Americans from voting. Were you suggesting that America would have been better off if President Truman had not desegregated the armed forces? Were you suggesting that America would have been better off if the Nation's modern the civil rights legislation had been blocked - if we had no Voting Rights Act, no Civil Rights Act of 1964, no Fair Housing Act and no African-American elected officials in Mississippi? Even worse, your limited acknowledgment that only some people might have been offended by your remarks portrayed gross insensitivity to millions of Americans. In addition, a key question for the 108th Congress is whether civil rights laws will be enforced and strengthened, or whether the attempts will be made to undermine them. You no longer have credibility on this crucial issue. Yours truly, John Conyers, Jr. Ranking Member throw the bum out CC

To: willcousa who wrote (328561)	12/12/2002 8:03:12 PM
From: Skywatcher	Respond to of 769667

Fire Trent Lott New York Times \| Editorial Thursday, 12 December, 2002 here are 51 Republican members of the United States Senate. Surely they can find someone to be majority leader besides Trent Lott. Mr. Lott was in full-bore apology mode yesterday, trying to explain why, at Strom Thurmond's 100th-birthday party last week, he publicly bemoaned the fact that Mr. Thurmond had not won the 1948 presidential election, when he ran as a segregationist protest candidate. We have since learned that Mr. Lott said much the same thing in 1980, at a campaign rally for Ronald Reagan in Mississippi. Mr. Lott, at that time a congressman, said that if America had elected Mr. Thurmond president "we wouldn't be in the mess we are today." The incoming majority leader certainly was in a mess of his own by Monday, and his first attempt to dodge the controversy began with the classic words of the non-apologetic apologist, expressing sorrow if anyone had taken offense at his remarks, and making an oblique reference to "discarded policies." Discarded is a term best used for worn socks or outdated computers, not poll taxes and lynchings. After being yelled at by practically everybody, including conservative Republicans, Mr. Lott got the message, and yesterday called his remarks "terrible." He also asked an interviewer plaintively whether he was supposed to tell Mr. Thurmond he wished he had lost. Southern white politicians who lived under segregation and the civil rights movement either repress the thought that anything terrible went on in their region or remember it all the time. They are especially sensitive to the fact that people whom they loved and honored did -- or at least endorsed -- awful things. Coming to terms with it makes them wiser politicians, and perhaps better people. The birthday party controversy is only the latest evidence that Mr. Lott, the second most prominent elected official in the Republican Party, has never figured any of this out, or come to grips with the bad old days in his state. If he had, he could never have said that his state was "proud" of having given its electoral votes to Mr. Thurmond in 1948 -- at a time when most black Mississippians were barred from voting and sometimes killed for making the attempt. No one has put more effort than George W. Bush into ending the image of the Republican Party as a whites-only haven. For all the disagreement that many African-Americans have with his policies, few can doubt Mr. Bush's commitment to a multiracial America. But unless the president wants to spend his next campaign explaining the majority leader's behavior over and over, he should urge the Senate Republicans to get somebody else for the job. CC