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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Sunday, December 15, 2002
13:19 - A whole Lott of nothing

(top) link
My brief take on the whole Trent Lott thing--

Now, I'm not trying to defend the man, and I do think he really ought to resign, now that the statement about Thurmond is actually out of his mouth. It was thoughtless, and he should have known better. Now he has to set an example and take his medicine.

But-- and this is without knowing much of the context, so I may be basing this poorly-- I'm not convinced that what he in fact meant was that "segregation forever" would have been better for the country.

Let's see-- you're at the 100th birthday party of an old, old politician. You stand up to say a few kind words about him and his career. You recall in your mind that he'd run for President in 1948. So you say, "Hey, too bad you lost, huh? The country probably would have been better off."

It takes two levels of contextual awareness for the statement to mean the speaker agrees with Thurmond's 1948 Presidential-candidacy platform. The first level is to know that he'd run for President. The second is to know that he'd run on a segregationalist platform.

I don't think it's beyond plausibility that Lott simply forgot-- or didn't know-- about the second-tier implication. I suspect he said it because it's polite to remember Thurmond's careeer highlights; and only in the seconds afterward did the historically astute in the audience start to cough and clear their throats and look uncomfortable. I think it could well have just been a stupid, ignorant gaffe, that Lott didn't mean at all the way everybody is assuming he meant.

Like the press conference a few days ago where Ted Turner talked about his fortune having gone from nothing, straight up, up up, "till it was as high as, y'know, as the World Trade Center... . . ...uh, and then, like the World Trade Center, it came crashing right back down again. . . ...Wait, that's terrible." It wasn't premeditated; he was just on a roll, and it came out wrong. But Fox News broiled Turner for it (two guys discussing seriously whether Turner actually meant to compare his fortune to the 9/11 attacks, while the bottom of the screen flashed statements like 1999: TED TURNER CALLS CHRISTIANITY "A RELIGION FOR LOSERS" and 1984: TED TURNER SAYS THAT HAITIANS "BREED LIKE CATS" and 1995: TED TURNER SAYS THE POPE SHOULD "GET WITH THE TIMES"). Good Christ, you people.

But I didn't see it live-- all I saw was the offending quote taken out of context-- so I could be wrong.


UPDATE: And I am, according to Joshua Micah Marshall, via Judson. Though this viewpoint isn't exactly at odds with what I've said.



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© Brian Tiemann