December 12, 2002

Desperately Seeking a Clue I

Desperately Seeking a Clue

I was going to try to make this a Lott-free day, but Krauthammer's Lott Must Go column is too good to pass up:

This is not just the kind of eruption of moronic bias or racial insensitivity that cost baseball executive Al Campanis and sports commentator Jimmy the Greek Snyder their careers. This is something far more important. This is about getting wrong the most important political phenomenon in the past half-century of American history: the civil rights movement. Getting wrong its importance is not an issue of political correctness. It is evidence of a historical blindness that is utterly disqualifying for national office

Read the rest.

Favorite line: 'the point is not just what King and his followers did for African Americans, but what they did -- by validating America's original promise of freedom and legal equality -- for the rest of America. How can Lott, speaking of "all these problems over all these years," not see this?'

Exactly. That's why the attempts to exculpate Lott by pointing to this or that gaffe by this or that other political figure are so weak. All the errant comments by all the Byrds, Jacksons, Clintons in the world wouldn't mitigate this colossal failure of understanding, this absence of moral sense.

One of my readers, who has in the past challenged me on my tendency to over-react to Leftist idiocy, wrote the following terse email today: "who's more unamerican, Lott or Chomsky?" The answer is that we're talking about two different things. Chomsky is anti-American, not un-American. In fact, though I don't approve of it, there is a sense in which Chomsky's kind of anti-Americanism is the opposite of "un-American": convoluted, asinine, unconvincing, disingenuous, ill-conceived and -willed it may be, but it rests, remotely, on a kind of idealism, a vision, however warped, of a better America and a better world. I believe this worldview is wrong in practically every respect. But it's not wrong in the same way that Lott's (apparent) worldview is. I never thought of it in these terms before, but I have to say that Lott is indeed "more un-American," in that he has failed to grasp the essence of what makes America great. And, as appallingly, he seems unable to fathom why so many people, conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, "of color" and otherwise, find this kind of un-Americanism unacceptable and shocking.

Congratulations, Trent: it takes some doing to come off worse than Noam Chomsky.

Judging from the transcript of his radio interview with Sean Hannity (via Andrew Sullivan) Lott thinks he's going to be able to ride this out. I still doubt it. And for the sake of everybody, including the GOP, I still very much hope he doesn't.

Posted by Dr. Frank at December 12, 2002 10:17 AM | TrackBack