December 21, 2002
Lott Feeding Frenzy in Retrospect
"Bonfire of the Vanities" by Frank Rich in The New York Times is a noble attempt to enumerate the many ways that the political sacrifice ritual of Lott is absurd. Of course the task of explaining how colossally stupid and hypocriticlal the whole ritual is goes beyond the humanly possible, but Rich made a nice try.Lott was no more racist than he had always been, was certainly no more racist that John Ashcroft or than a great many Republicans, including Bush, who notwithstanding his token Blacks Rice and Powell, signed execution orders for a great many black men who were being killed because they were too poor to afford justice. And he never spent more than 15 minutes reviewing their cases, he said.
Jeb Bush, as he piled on, said Lott would "hurt the Republican party," and as Rich points out, he wouldn't hurt the party if he was an anomaly. He hurts the party because he draws attention to what the party is by being too obvious about it.