The Black Republican

Suggesting that Trent Lott is, "more delusional than we knew," Jeff Jacoby, writing in today's Boston Globe takes a stand on the former Republican leader's book (which we discussed last week) that a Black Republican could be proud of.

Who but a racist or a witless clod would claim more than 50 years later that America's problems were caused by integration and civil rights? Not even Thurmond, who had long since recanted his segregationist views, would have said such a thing.

That's the ironic part of all this. Lott persists in saying things like, "we wouldn't be in the mess we are today," in reference to Thurmond and the Dixiecrat platform, when there's no way any sane man can think he's doing anything less than pining for a return to tyrannical oppression based on race - even former Dixiecrats like Thurmond himself. This man is more than an embarrassment to the Republican Party, he's dangerous to the Republic, which is exactly why the Right blogosphere and editorial pages "returned him to the back benches."

If the Republican Party's conservative base had rallied behind Lott, he might have survived the storm. But it was precisely the base that was most upset by his words. Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, told The New York Times that the outrage on the right was "a product of decades of hard work that conservatives have done on racially charged issues out of idealism and principle. To have those positions tarred, even inadvertently, with this backwardness on race is extremely distressing."

Jacoby concludes by making the most polite suggestion possible against Lott's mental stability.

What Lott really believes none of us can know for sure. But anyone who proclaims that "all these problems over all these years" could have been averted if a segregationist had been elected president - that America would be better off, in other words, if Mississippi's bathrooms were still marked "white" and "colored" and its black citizens barred from voting - has obviously got a problem of his own.

I'm going to have to pick up Lott's book at the library (I don't want my hard-earned money going into his re-election coffers) so I can fisk it cover to cover. By our fourth anniversary, I hope we'll be able to say there's a real Republican - a Black Republican - in that seat.