Right now it’s the second from the last on the list (Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday tribute, Dec. 5.) Lott comes after Dole, about 1/2 way through the hourlong clip.

I encourage all of you to see it for yourselves rather than to take other people’s word for what it looked like he meant.

I, for one, still believe that he is a racist and is pro-segregation, based on his record and his history of making such comments. But I must admit that when I finally saw it, it was much less dramatic than I had imagined from the media reports.

Radley’s comment is gutless, spineless, and cowardly.

If you’re going to shower me with love, at least get my name right.

It’s “Radley.”

Yours,

Rodney Balko

BOOM! You are a racist. It must be so.

Rodney’s comment is gutless, spineless, and cowardly.

“[s]o in the presence of all this condemnation, who will speak up for
Lott?

Why, the paleolibertarians, of course! Ever eager to balance that
precarious line between defending racists and espousing racism (and
occassionally teetering over it), leave it to the Lew Rockwell crowd
take up the “keep Trent Lott” banner. Predictable.”

I don’t know how one reading your comments can avoid the implication
that my article is an example of Lew Rockwell columnists teetering over
the line and espousing racism. Additionally, you claim that I
have “taken up the ‘keep Trent Lott’ banner.” However, I have said
nothing of the sort.

I’m a little confused as to why you’ve chosen to charactize me
as “espoucing racism,” or even defending racism. All I did in that
little article on lewrockwell.com was compare the rhetorical
similarities between Al Sharpton, Jonah Goldberg, et al.’s responses to
the debacle. I wasn’t sticking up for Lott or whatever he intended to
mean, though I do think the whole thing has been blown a bit out of
proportion (thus my sarcastic comment, “The Horror!”; I’m unsure how
anyone could interpret those two words that as an endorsement of
racism). If you want to call me a racist (I am not), you ought to have
something to back up that very heavily-loaded slur. Lott’s comments
are questionable, and may cause his demise (which is fine with me); I
just didn’t think they merited some of the over-the-top repsonses in
the Jeremiad that ensued. Can reasonable people disagree about that
without calling one or the other a racist? The jump from my piece to
endorsement and defense of Lott or racism seems farther than logic will
take you.

For the record, I think state-sponsored racial segregation is postively
evil, and private racial segregation only has the fact that it isn’t
sponsored by the state to make it slightly (barely) less evil–but it
is still evil. If, somehow, what I wrote necessarily contradicts those
positions, let me know. You may claim that Lew Rockwell, the man or
his website’s contributors, disagrees, but that isn’t true, nor is it
relevant to the very broad brush with which you have painted me.

In fact, we had better demand the resignation of many, many Democrats, for the REAL damage they have done to minorities in this nation through the policies they have managed to implement — far more than anything Lott has managed to do!

You can see right through the righteous indignation like it was mosquito netting … people on both sides of the aisle are making a mountain out of a molehill to advance their political agendas, especially the losing party in the last election.

From an independent conservative …

Lott is right. We’d probably have a whole different set of problems if in 1948 Thurmond had been able to convince half our country that he should be President.

What really gets me here is the fact that the Republicans actually are denouncing him. That is pretty stand up to do the right thing like that. But compare that to Democrats, no matter what happens they always rally around their man. How many Democrats called for Condit to resign? How many Democrats renounced Clinton for lying under oath?

Ouch, Radley. Ouch.