Jay Reding must be so very confused. Back on the first thread last Monday re: American Renaissance magazine, Jay informed us that we were all wet about these dixiecrat scumbags holding an influential spot in the mainstream GOP Southern Strategy to appeal-to-racism-to dominate-the-electoral-map.
He said in response to the comment "Take a gander, kids. We'll be seeing more of it..."
No, we won't. The paleocons are (thankfully) a dying breed. The GOP won because they took their message to the center. Trying to lump these nutballs in with the current conservative movement is like trying to say that the Shining Path is representative of contemporary liberalism.
Jay Reding
Trent, unfortunately proved him wrong on the first point. He IS the majority leader, so it's hard to say that he is out of the mainstream. He was elected, after all, by the members of his Senate caucus to represent them. Lott's views are well known, so It's pretty clear that the GOP doesn't have a problem with pandering to racism to get votes. If the Majority Leader of the Senate and all of his GOP colleagues don't get it, it's pretty clear that a goodly number of the Red State GOP enthusiasts don't either.
But, surely it can't be that the Republicans could actually be more extreme than the Democrats, could it? Aren't the Democrats the wacked out, fringe dwellers who don't understand Heartland American values and disdain everything good and wholesome and pure? After all, it's the GOP that has moved to the center (which is why they won the unprecedented landslides of '00 and '02)
Of course the Democrats are more extreme. Why, Tom Daschle said just the other day that if only Che Guevara had prevailed in the western Hemisphere we'd be in a lot better shape than we are today. And I could swear that Nancy Pelosi was quoted back in 1998 speaking to a Shining Path convention in San Francisco as saying, " you represent the right principles and the right philosophy and if the Democratic party stays on the right "shining path " our children will be the beneficiaries."
See, even if Trent Lott (the second most
powerful elected official in the Republican party) is an unreconstructed Dixiecrat racist , you have to understand that he's actually a centrist because the Democrats would then be led by radical Marxists revolutionaries.
By Jay's logic, anyway.
digby
And David Neiwert brings this ADL story about Lott and the CCC to our attention.