A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

SQUISH! GOES THE WEASEL: Two moments from the Trent Lott interview on BET that should sink his leadership hopes. The first, Josh Marshall has already blogged about: Lott's dubious claim that he supports affirmative action, despite his many votes to the contrary. But according to the new, squeaky-clean Lott: "I'm for affirmative action and I've practiced it. I've had African Americans on my staff and other minorities, but particularly African Americans, since the mid-1970s."

Here's the other, and I wish I had the transcript to get his exact, stoopid words: he claims that the main reason he didn't support the establishment of the holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday was that -- get this -- he didn't know enough yet about the good things Dr. King did. Yeah. In 1983. News hadn't gotten out about the good stuff yet. Even though Lott grew up in America, and not on the moon. Senator Lott just didn't realize yet that Dr. King might have been a force for justice in the universe, or that the changes he brought into being were good ideas.

It would have been much more effective had he just said, "Look, I greatly respect and admire Dr. King, even though I didn't always see eye to eye with him. I didn't believe back then that we should have more federal holidays. But I didn't understand that the symbolic importance of the holiday was so great that it outweighed any monetary price that honoring Dr. King would cost, and for that, I'm sorry."

The truth. It works.

[P.S. Please, next time, someone stop me from poking around the BET message boards, okay?]


edited to add: here's the transcript:

GORDON: Let's talk about the King holiday.

LOTT: I want to talk about the King holiday. I want to go back to that. I'm not sure we in America, certainly not white America and the people in the South, fully understood who this man was; the impact he was having on the fabric of this country.

GORDON: But you certainly understood it by the time that vote came up, Senator.

LOTT: Well, but...

GORDON: You knew who Dr. King was at that point.

LOTT: I did, but I've learned a lot more since then. I want to make this point very clearly. I have a high appreciation for him being a man of peace, a man that was for nonviolence, a man that did change this country. I've made a mistake. And I would vote now for a Martin Luther King holiday.