More conservatives have called for the Majority Leader’s resignation:
Linda Chavez: “Despite Lott’s apology — which came belatedly, only after criticism within Republican and Democrat ranks began to mount — there is no way to explain away his words. Nor were his comments last week the first time he’s gotten into trouble on the race issue. In 1999, Lott addressed a local rally of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that has espoused racist positions. At some level, Lott appears to be comfortable in such company and, perhaps, to harbor nostalgia for the South’s segregated past. In a free country, Lott is entitled to his views. But the party of Abraham Lincoln should reject such views and anyone who holds them as its Senate leader.”
Cal Thomas: “Trent Lott might as well be a Democratic Party mole, placed among Republicans to cause his party severe political damage. Republican senators, some of whom have wanted to move in a new direction, must now decide whether Lott is a hindrance to the party. Will it be politics as usual, or will Senate Republicans clearly break with the past and proclaim not only to black Americans, but to all Americans, that their party is the party of emancipation, not segregation?”
Charles Krauthammer: “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 last 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.”
Thomas Sowell: “Anybody can put his foot in his mouth but making it a habit is too much, especially when you are in a position where your ill-considered words can become a permanent albatross around the necks of other people whom you are leading.
That is the situation now, in the wake of Senator Trent Lott’s latest gaffe, his widely publicized statement that we would have been better off if Senator Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948. Senator Thurmond ran on a platform of continued racial segregation.
Does Senator Lott have any idea what racial segregation meant to black Americans — and, indeed, to many white Americans, whose support was essential to passing the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s that did away with Jim Crow in the South?”