Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [102]
Bang! A single shot ripped through Kerry’s spine, exiting out his chest. His knees buckled; he was dead before he hit the deck.
Bush, his M-16 still smoking, grinned. “Yeah, I got a question. Anybody here see that? I didn’t think so.”
“Well, I certainly did,” Gore said indignantly. “And I plan to make a full—”
Bang!
As dawn broke over Vietnam, the party aboard Swift Boat PCF-73 was just getting into full swing. The men were ebullient. They were going home, or at least to Saigon. So they thought. It was only Stoner Will who noticed that the sun was rising on the wrong side of the river. But he didn’t care. He had heard about the hash in Cambodia, and he was eager to try it out.
THE END
30
Fun with Racism
Strom Thurmond is dead. The news came in just this morning as I sat down to write a chapter on the Bush family’s close ties to the House of Saud, and, through them, to Osama bin Laden. Instead, to honor Thurmond’s memory, I have decided to write on a topic close to his heart: racism.
You’ll remember the ruckus caused by Trent Lott’s ill-considered remarks at Thurmond’s wild hundredth birthday party. Toasting the senator, Lott said, “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”
The New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and the rest of the liberal media were all there. But none found this bald nostalgia for segregation remarkable enough to report on. NPR’s Weekend Edition preferred to run another of Lott’s well-crafted tributes: “Somebody once said, and I’m not quite sure where I got this, but I heard it, and I loved it, and it applies to Strom Thurmond: ‘Youth is a gift of nature. Age is a work of art.’ This, ladies and gentlemen, is a work of art.” Sweet, don’t you think? It’s that old media bias for the “Awwwwww” moment.
Unfortunately for Lott, C-SPAN cameras captured the event for everyone to enjoy. While the “liberal” media filed it as a heartwarming human interest story, some more discerning viewers were aghast at Lott’s paean to the Dixiecrats. Thanks to a few bloggers, the story took hold, and the controversy was up and running.
In some ways, I thought the whole thing was a little unfair to Lott. The Dixiecrat platform wasn’t just about segregation. It also included a pro-poll-tax plank and a plank against anti-lynching laws. Plus, it called for stronger anti-miscegenation laws. Many people think of anti-miscegenation laws as being the same as segregation, but they’re not. Miscegenation is about the “mongrelization” of the white race, which to this day is considered by some to be a crime against nature.
One of the things that I was most puzzled about during the Lott controversy was that no one asked Thurmond what he thought about Lott’s comments. He was not invited on any of the major network news shows. Some may say this proves that they have a liberal bias after all. But my friend Norm Ornstein has a more sinister theory. Ornstein, a senior scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, believes that Thurmond may have died as long as three years ago, and that the Republicans have since been pursuing a Weekend at Bernie’s strategy because the governor of South Carolina is a Democrat and the GOP wanted to keep the seat.
Once the controversy had gained momentum, almost no one was willing to defend Lott’s remarks. Some conservative commentators couldn’t resist using their de rigueur reprimands of Lott as a jumping off point for malicious distortions of the history of U.S. racial politics.
Sean Hannity was the poster boy for this conservative tic. “Segregation is the legacy of the Democratic Party,” Sean would say over and over again. He and his clansmen (including Ann Coulter) based this on the true but fatuously disingenuous factoid that a higher percentage of Republican senators