Posted on: Thursday, December 12, 2002

EDITORIAL
Sen. Trent Lott not fit to be Senate leader

"I want to say this about my state," said Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, of Mississippi. "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 the years, either."

The remark was spoken in honor of the retiring Sen. Thurmond on his 100th birthday. Lott was referring to Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign, in which he ran on a single platform: preservation of racial segregation.

Said Thurmond during that campaign: "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches."

Clearly the majority leader of the U.S. Senate has no place endorsing segregation in the 21st century. Even Thurmond appears to have reformed.

Now Lott says it was a "poor choice of words," but it's not the first time. Pointing to Thurmond during a 1980 Jackson, Miss., campaign rally, Lott said, "You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today."

Lott's outrageously misguided praise of Thurmond is strikingly similar to an offhand remark by Adm. Richard Macke, talking about the gang-rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by three U.S. servicemen in 1995.

Said Macke: "For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl." Meaning if they had hired a prostitute, "we wouldn't be in the mess we are today."

Macke's career was finished — properly so. Mississippians have a right to have Lott represent them if they wish. But the top majoirty leadership job in the U.S. Senate, like the military's Pacific commander, is too sensitive for a man so tone deaf. No matter whether Lott's remark was mean or dumb, he should step down.