Important Announcement

I have relocated my blog presence to http://www.greenfieldgerbil.com/~matt979/ and am switching to Movable Type.

I am in the process of relocating posts. By the time you see this everything from February 1 onward should be there. By a day later I may or may not have all of my archives migrated.

Please set your bookmarks accordingly.

What's been posted here to this point (and comments, if relevant) will probably stay but as archival sources go this blog is deprecated. The "official" archival source (alas, excluding comments) will be on the new site.

Thank you for reading!
Matt

P.S. Many thanks to blogger for getting me started. The time had come where Movable Type functionality made more sense for me.

Against gratuitous mudslinging
I suppose here's as good a place as any to apologize for my role in villainizing Bill Clinton over the non-scandal portion of his scandals. There were many allegations that were just silly. To set the record straight...

Vince Foster committed suicide.
The Clintons didn't make any money off of Whitewater.
etc.

Now, there actually were some scandalous things about that administration. Mostly philandering but also some deeply suspicious campaign funding schemes (the Buddhist monks and so on). Unfortunately, and a bit ironically, I think all the frivolous scandal charges made people just roll their eyes when the real misbehavior came out.

Likewise, over on the main blog (in a comment) M.S. wonders how Lott got to be Senate Majority Leader in the first place given everything unsavory about his past and his outlook on life. I remember hearing dirt about him way back when and I remember wanting reflexively to come to his defense, the same way many Democrats reflexively came to the Clintons' defense. The problem is that when I heard the dirt on Lott, I'd been hearing "dirt" about nearly any Republican with a pulse, most of it coming from the same sources -- Carville, Begala, and so on.

Long story short, the more people sling mud, the harder it is to convince anyone that there's somebody whose dirt really should disqualify him from politics.

Final post here
Whether we come from poverty or wealth... we are all equal in the eyes of God. But as Americans that is not enough--we must be equal in the eyes of each other.
--Ronald Reagan, via Mickey Kaus

By the way
If a certain person doesn't resign by Monday I'm taking this blog down* because there'd just be no more point in keeping it.

No, that's not a threat, because it's not as though this would actually motivate anyone who has the power to be worth motivating.

Rather, if he manages to stay in power I might as well give up. (In fairness I also thought that about Clinton four years ago.)

*- Just Outer Sunset, not the whole thing. I just wouldn't have occasion to talk politics.

UPDATE: He's staying. I'm apoplectic. Even Kissinger knows when to bow out.

I'm removing the comments widget feature from this weblog; it's more useful elsewhere. Eventually I'll delete the weblog but might as well leave this post up long enough that you know what happened.

Seriously, if people are going to be that way, then my thinking about or following politics isn't worth the effort.

Would you rather...
Two things were on my mind at once today, both involving situations with a good outcome or a bad outcome. So I asked myself, would you rather... and it turns out my first choice is for Lott to resign. If he does that then I'm content with the other situation taking care of itself.

More on Lott: here's where it gets nauseating
What he said.

Who should be the next Senate Majority Leader?
Calling all wonks...

I've seen lots of web-based support for Bill Frist but I'm wary whenever I hear too many political insiders get really really doe-eyed over someone I don't know much about.

Because he's so well-spoken I'd like to see Mitch McConnell but the practical side of me thinks the best choice is probably Chuck Hagel. I wouldn't mind giving the entire South a pass (odd that other commentators who claim to be doing this still mention Frist) and even though I have old-home-state allegience to Don Nickles, this is a time where we really need a mainstreamer and not someone out on the flank.

So (unless a lot of people have favorable memories of McConnell from the campaign finance reform debates -- I didn't watch, but apparently people thought he argued extremely intelligently for being on the "wrong" side) I guess I'll back Hagel. My support and several dollars will get Chuck Hagel a cup of coffee.

The Willie Brown machine rolls own
Bad news in today's runoff elections for SF superviser positions.

In my district, I do suspect that the biggest reason Ma won was because she's Chinese and Dudum isn't. It's a shame since it obscures the other issues, most importantly who will vote with whom. I suspect none of you really care.

Bye-bye, Trent! Bye-bye!
Scram. Vamoose. Don't let the door hit your cracker ass on the way out.

Just follow the link; no more needs to be said.

Meta-smugness
Not that I have any pretensions of being a mainstream pundit. (Maybe when I started this blog offshoot I did, at least I'd become one of those people on famous people's blogrolls, but I never got around to writing to the big guys until I became a nuisance, or whatever it is that gets people noticed. These days I assume I'm writing for the same two people, or whoever else drops by from the personal weblog.)

Still, in hindsight as crude as the tone was, I love seeing my Friday night posts and having them be marginally ahead of most of the on-line punditry. Obviously not all of it: since I don't watch C-SPAN, it took Instapundit's referral to Atrios and Joshua Micah Marshall for me to know that Lott had said what he said. All the same, it's reassuring that when I was being apoplectic, Postrel and Sullivan and eventually the NR staff would become just as apoplectic.

Still more about your favorite topic and mine
(I guess the lack of disagreement is bad for discussion purposes since it leads to a lack of comments. Blah.)

Howard Kurtz (WaPo media critic) points out just how fast the on-line world was on this story, or just how slow Old Media is, depending on your perspective.

The latest call for Lott not to run for Majority Leader: National Review again. I bet I'll get a modest amount of amusement/zen when William F. Buckley's column about it comes out just before Christmas.

Instapundit (full-disclosure: he's the source of every link in this post) mentions the Paul Krugman column. I didn't bother to follow the link since I can guess what Krugman says, especially when Reynolds summarizes it. His own paragraph of Instacommentary:

Quite a few readers suspect that Dems didn't want to make too big a deal out of this because (1) if Lott steps down, they lose an issue for the next election; and (2) Lott's well-established ineffectiveness as majority leader is an asset to the Democrats. Me, I'm not a conspiracist: I think it's explained by laziness, chumminess with a frequent source, and the near-complete inability of the allegedly well-equipped mainstream media to react to a political story over a weekend.

Also, Instapundit gets real live hate-mail. It's issues like this that divide me from the right flank. These people are so angry, and I can see exactly why they're angry, but in this case they're so so wrong. There's a slope somewhere that isn't nearly as slippery as they think it is.

After all, you'll do a lot better at blowing frivolous partisan charges out of the water if you don't become so partisan yourself that you defend every yellow dog on your side. Or, in Reynolds's words:
I think the fact that conservatives and libertarians are criticizing Lott adds credibility, just as I think the comparative silence of many mainstream lefty pundits on people like [Cynthia] McKinney detracted from their credibility.

Could it really be that there are people who don't understand why Lott's comment was so offensive on his face, why calling it just a "slip of the tongue" just defies common sense?

James Lileks is shorter and funnier
"(bottom line: moron. Thanks for making me agree with Al Sharpton. Step down as Majority Leader. Thank you, come again)"
--his own executive summary (scroll to the bottom) of his Trent Lott column

Is this the end?
I'm not sure whether I buy the apology -- I'd have much preferred a stronger wording, since his statement came out exceptionally weaselly -- but now I merely hope against hope that the GOP ousts Lott rather than necessarily claiming they're morally obligated to. In a perfect world, he'd have enough of a sense of honor to bow out (of the Majority Leader race, not necessarily the Senate proper)*.

I agree word-for-word with the Instapundit post on the subject. Speaking of which, even after the apology (such as it is), here's another line from Instapundit that I missed the first time but wholeheartedly agree with:

Lott needs to apologize at the very least, and he probably ought to step down as Majority Leader. His remarks have shown him to be, at best, too imprudent for a position of such responsibility.

*- I don't know if people will think this is too harsh or not but the best recent comparison is Al Campanis. In hindsight I think Campanis was deeply shafted but I also think there was no way around it. Assuming he honestly didn't mean what his words sounded like he meant, Lott having to step down is in some sense deeply unfair, yet (I become more convinced of this even as I type it) it's the only option.

CNN, welcome to the party
Better late than never, the best Old Media web news presence starts to cover the story.

New material here:
1. Daschle's commentary is remarkably charitable. I'll tip my hat to him.

2. Gore's rebuke appears to be what made this CNN-newsworthy. His answer seems to be the most reasonable one, which still doesn't make him any less of a media whore.

3. Lott's non-apology continues to disqualify him:
My comments were not an endorsement of his positions of over 50 years ago, but of the man and his life.

Some simple yes-no questions that somebody needs to ask him:
Does he endorse those positions? (His statement implies a "no" but explicitly saying it would be helpful.)
Does he withdraw his comments? If not, why not?

Lott backlash backlash
I do have to say that here's where I get really uncomfortable:
But one thing is clear: what he said could easily have been said by a racist, pro-lynching segregationist. And the burden of proof is now on Lott to say otherwise.
--the latest from Andrew Sullivan

That's where things start to look like an Inquisition, and Lott and his apologists end up with an out: Instead of addressing the substance of the remarks, they simply object on principle to Political Correctness or whatever.

It's not just that a pro-lynching segregationist could have said what he said; it's that he explicitly endorsed (well, 50 years after the fact) a presidential ticket that was formed by and for racist, pro-lynching segregationists. Nor does he face a "burden of proof" so much as a simple moral duty to say, No, that's not what I meant.

If he can't even do THAT, then it doesn't look good.

Bonus Islamofascism Rant!
This is exactly the problem that Muslim activists have when fundamentalists, radical imams, suicide bombers, and the like do evil things in the name of their religion. I don't for one minute believe that all or even most American Muslims thought that September 11 was a Good Thing, nor does making them grovel about it do much good. On the other hand, every time I see someone from CAIR complain about stereotypes, yet very conspicuously fail to say even a minimal amount of diplomatic things, the problem speaks for itself.

My comments are idiotic
That's what this guy says in this set of feedback to this post.

Looks like I've been dissed by a real, live quasi-celebrity. And at that, one who really really likes himself.

I think capital-F Federalists would do a lot better for themselves (ourselves?) if they could argue convincingly that racism and nativism had nothing to do with their thoughts and actions. Being on the wrong side of the civil rights movement was one of the worst things that could have happened to a movement like that.

I will say I'd much much rather live with racial equality and an oversized government than ideological purity and lynching. I didn't appreciate the WSJ comments (post right below this one), since they seemed to go without saying, until realizing that there are actually people on the right flank who'd disagree with them.

And people wonder how Republicans let themselves be demonized.

WSJ on Lott
Actually just the Best of the Web feature of Opinion Journal, the WSJ editorial page's online sibling.

Senate GOP leader Trent Lott is under fire from indignant Democrats and mortified Republicans for a comment he made at Sen. Strom Thurmond's birthday party last week. "I want to say this about my state," declared the Mississippian: "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, either."

Thurmond, of course, ran in 1948 as a segregationist and carried Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina along with Mississippi. If the rest of the country had followed the lead of these four states, we'd have had a lot bigger problems than we did.

True as far as it goes. In a perfect world they too would be calling for his resignation but I'll take small reassuring signs for now.

Quoting With Corwyn's Permission
(The e-mail mentioned two posts below, about moderates banding together to avoid both Lott and Daschle...)

> Date: Mon, 09 Dec 2002 10:47:58 -0800
> From: "Corwyn Hopke"
> Subject: Re: so why does ANYONE vote GOP?
>
> Hrm, I wonder -- is there anyone in the Senate who could pull a "Willie
> Brown"? What I mean is, get all the Senate Democrats to vote for,
> say, Lincoln Chafee for Senate Majority Leader? I don't think Chafee would
> accept -- he clearly doesn't want to be a Democrat (or he'd have switched
> back when it would have been politically advantageous) and he's liberal
> enough that this sort of coup would practically make him considered a Dem.
> But what about McCain?
>
> What I'd really like, of course, is for someone to get all the non-Bible
> belt Republican Senators and all the non-Commie Democratic Senators to join
> forces and back, say, Frist, or Lugar (given the emphasis on foreign
> policy, Lugar might not be a bad choice -- nobody in the Senate knows
> foreign policy as well as he does.)
>
[football paragraph snipped]
>
> Anyway, the moderate NE Republicans have a TREMENDOUS amount of power right
> now, thanks to the electoral trifecta. Any two could get together and say,
> "Um, nope, we don't want him as majority leader. And I'm guessing Daschle
> will back me up on this. We don't want him as chair of that committee.
> Oh, you disagree? Let me ask Tom what he thinks." The conservative
> Republicans would gain very little by cooperating in the past, when we had
> a split government. And the moderate Republicans would also have little to
> gain, since it wouldn't really change the balance of power at all and
> they'd run the risk of being screwed if things changed. But now. Now,
> there is everything to be gained on both sides.

Reason
New weblog here. I don't think anyone reads this who doesn't read my main blog but just in case.

Some sort of centrist coalition
I got a great e-mail from Corwyn (exactly 50% of the known regular audience knows Corwyn) wondering how much clout McCain and the Northeastern trio (Chafee and the Maine delegation?) might have if they simply announced their refusal to vote for Lott. His analysis gets into more detail; I want to get his permission before quoting from it. (Despite my already quoting his football paragraph without his permission.)

QOTD
"My personal belief is that he’s pretty well explored that. I don’t know why he needs a committee."
--John Glenn on John Kerry's new presidential exploratory committee (formed to determine whether he should run), as seen here (second item).

National Review doesn't disappoint
Doesn't really reassure me either but it's a start. Here's David Frum's take for what it's worth:

I for one do not believe Trent Lott is a racist or a segregationist. My guess is that his speechwriter gave him note cards with a few jokes, and that when Lott finished reading them, he launched himself into what he probably intended to be nothing more than a big squirt of greasy flattery.

But that’s not what came out of Lott’s mouth. What came out of his mouth was the most emphatic repudiation of desegregation to be heard from a national political figure since George Wallace’s first presidential campaign. Lott’s words suggest that one of the three most powerful and visible Republicans in the nation privately thinks that desegregation, civil rights, and equal voting rights were all a big mistake.

These would be disgraceful thoughts to think, if Lott thought them. If Lott thought them, any Republican who accepted his leadership would share in the disgrace. So Lott needs to make it clear that he does not in fact think them. He owes his party, his state, his country, and his conscience something more – something much more – than a curt “I am sorry if you were offended.” If he can’t do that, Republicans need to make it clear that Lott no longer speaks for us.

You can think of the saturation coverage here as my way of making clear he doesn't speak for me.

Lott and "Piling On"
One man's opinion, via Instapundit. He compares reaction to Lott's speech to reaction to the Wellstone memorial speeches. Glenn Reynolds's response pretty much covers it:
There may be a payback angle in some quarters, but it just might be that both events were appalling, and that some of us were, thus, appalled by both.

Even beyond that, I always feel just enough compunction about using (or unwittingly distorting) a story for partisan end that I end up assuming other people have similar compunction. That's why I held off on really lighting into the Wellstone memorial. I was privately relieved when other people actually did see the outrage that I saw.

On the Lott thing, I knew about it only because of this post. (Aside: It's possible to use expletives sparingly and effectively. From memory of the headline, I found it in his archives by searching on 'shit'.) It's still flying under CNN's radar and absent from Yahoo!

(You can get plenty of coverage on Google, now officially the world's best source for in-depth coverage of news stories that you already know enough about to have search terms.)

As of Friday night, I didn't see any of the widespread outrage that I'd have expected. I'd like to think that, as directed against a big-name Republican, outrage from me carries more weight than outrage from Paul Begala or whoever.

UPDATE: Who's the opportunist? It's exactly who you'd have guessed, although in this case I'm not rolling my eyes at him so much as everyone else who was so afraid to speak up that it created the vaccuum for him to step into. Now you know the angle will be Jesse's just a media whore, sort of the opposite of the Nixon-in-China phenomenon.