Pat Shannan's MUSINGS
The Senate Majority Wimp
To all those puffed with righteous indignation, why did he not just say:You can kiss my grits! Apologize? Never! Any fool can see that "all these problems" are the progeny of an ever-expanding central government destroying state's rights. The nation has gone to Babylon in a hand-basket. Now if you bubble-headed news people find something racist in that, then ask the FBI for its suppressed report on which 13% of the population perpetrates 87% of the crimes in America.
Jim Trafficant probably would have. However, Trent Lott is a phony conservative who has always gone along to get along, but don't say he doesn't have the strength of his convictions. He displayed it with his slithering, whimpering grovel with six (at last count) apologies for speaking his true but unguarded feelings. You see, Trent Lott's only conviction is his desire to stay in office.
Lott has always been but another two-faced politician, speaking what is expedient at the moment. In 1994, a Mississippi friend of mine wrote to his senator expressing his concerns and fears about the passing of the Brady Bill. Senator Blowhard sent back a letter harping on his "solid" constitutional stand to guard the 2nd Amendment rights of the individual and reasserting his "conviction" that the people should always have the right to keep and bear arms. Two years later, Trent Lott voted for the Brady Bill.
Lott was instrumental in preserving the presidency of Bill Clinton - stonewalling the impeachment hearings by limiting the witnesses against Clinton to three. What a penetrating investigation that was! How could a leading member of the opposing party be persuaded to do such a thing? A payoff - political or otherwise - was almost certainly going on behind the scenes.
It wasn't the first time. In 1993, when Clinton appointee Janet Reno was about to be confirmed by the senate as the new attorney general, Republican Senator Trent Lott appeared on CBS-TV's "Face the Nation." When the host asked if Lott thought he believed that Janet Reno's nomination would be confirmed, the Senator replied that he wasn't sure because their Senate Judiciary Committee was looking into some very serious allegations regarding Reno's personal life.
Indeed they were. Reno was ". . . a falling down drunk, who had `fixed' a half dozen DUI tickets of her own while Florida's State Attorney," according to Jack Thompson, her political rival back home. She also was a closet lesbian who had been caught in the parking lot of a Fort Lauderdale shopping mall with an underage girl, both in various stages of undress - a very blackmailable secret for a sitting attorney general.
John Bliss, Republican staffer on the committee, told Thompson that five Dade County Police Officers were ready to testify that they, separate and apart from each other, had pulled over Janet Reno for driving under the influence. Each time she had pressured them not to fill out an arrest form. They didn't because they knew to arrest Janet Reno would mean the end of their law enforcement careers.
Although now armed with the facts, the Republican Senators - Lott, Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Hank Brown, Arlen Specter, and Alan Simpson - according to Bliss, "did not want to mess with that Anita Hill crowd again." The invertebrate committee members preferred that someone first "leak" the story to the press. That way they could publicly say that they did not want to raise this issue but now it was in the public domain.
So Bliss asked Thompson to go to the media and tell reporters of the five incidents. Thompson gave the facts to David Cay Johnston of the NY Times, but the story never ran.
Lott and the other Republican Senators wilted. Senator Orrin Hatch opened the hearings by lambasting Jack Thompson with an apology to Janet, ". . . for the behavior of your last Republican opponent in Dade County for spreading scurrilous rumors about you."
"They all were cowards," said Jack Thompson, "and the Republican opposition evaporated, all because nobody on the panel had the courage to ask Janet Reno whether or not she had a drinking problem."
Now, Trent Lott has amplified this politically correct spinelessness with his recent backsliding lapdog appearance on Black Entertainment Television, where he licked the boots of his oppressors by endorsing Affirmative Action "across the board" and criticizing his own vote against a MLK holiday.
A coward dies a thousand deaths.