November 15th, 2006
Me, today:
Frankly, this is an area where I sincerely hope I’m wrong. Nothing would make me happier than to learn that our invasion of Iraq was not a counterproductive waste of life, and did not further destabilize an already-unstable region of the world, and did not further fan the flames of anti-Americanism and Islamism. If standing on a mountaintop and proclaiming “Hitchens was right, I was wrong!” made it so, and made the sacrifices worthwhile, and made the war winnable, I would do it in a heartbeat. But that’s looking more and more like wishful thinking.
From comments here.
Categories: Bloggin, Iraq |
4 Comments
November 15th, 2006
Gee, and people wonder why the GOP has such a hard time winning minority votes:
Sen. Trent Lott, ousted from the top Senate Republican leadership job four years ago because of remarks considered racially insensitive, won election to the No. 2 post Wednesday for the minority GOP in the next Congress.
Lott returned to the center of power by getting the position of vote-counting GOP whip, nosing out Sen. Lamar Alexander. Sen. Rick Santorum told reporters that Lott beat Alexander by a 25-24 vote.
After an intense evening in which both men lobbied colleagues during floor votes, the Republican caucus elected Lott, a one-time whip and majority leader, by secret ballot. Lott will be the GOP’s second-in-command to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was elected unanimously to be the Senate minority leader in the new Congress.
Notice how CNN downplays those comments? Trent Lott said this about segregationist Strom Thurmond:
Here is what Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said yesterday at Senator Strom Thurmond’s birthday party, according to ABCNEWS’ O’Keefe. “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead we wouldn’t of had all these problems over all these years, either.”
This is what Thurmond ran on. This is a more verbose accounting:
“I want to tell you, ladies and gentleman, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”
—Strom Thurmond, then-governor of South Carolina, in a speech from his 1948 “Dixiecrat” presidential campaign. To hear an audio clip, click here.
And, by the way, Trent Lott wrote for and/or allowed to his writings to appear in the magazine of a racist organization in the 1990s.
This is the man the GOP Caucus in the senate choose as their number two leader. So much for the new GOP.
Categories: Politics |
21 Comments
November 15th, 2006
This weekend, I’ll be going down to New Orleans to visit a friend who lives there. It will be my first trip down there post-Katrina. One of the things my friend suggested we do is take a quick drive through some of the hardest-hit areas, so I can see it first-hand, understand it on a better level, get a better feel for the scale of the tragedy, and see just what has and has not been done in the fifteen months since.
My question for the peanut gallery is, at what point does this cross the line from education and understanding into exploitation and voyeurism? What’s appropriate and what’s not? Feel free to comment with your thoughts.
Categories: Education, Katrina, Privacy, Travel |
5 Comments
