Melder's Musings

For those that like to label the Washington Post "liberal," you'll actually enjoy Thursday's glowing, fawning recount of Trent Lott's "little bump."

It is anything but liberal.

In the absence of both sides of the story, and with everybody already familiar with what Lott said in December 2002 (which generated today's story), here's a brief rundown of what the Post left out.

• In 1998, Lott's connections to the racist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) were revealed by several mainstream media outlets. The CCC is the successor to the notorious white Citizens Councils, whose history dates back half a century to the 1950s when the groups were referred to as the "uptown Klan." In December 1998, Lott denied any personal knowledge of the CCC, falsely claiming through a spokesperson that his links to the group amounted to a single speech made over a decade before he'd entered the Senate. But the facts showed otherwise: In 1992, Lott praised the CCC as the keynote speaker at its national convention; in 1997, he met with top CCC leaders in his Senate office; his column appeared throughout the 1990s in the group's newsletter, which once published a cheerful photo of Lott with CCC members who were also his close relatives. Lott was also the guest of honor at a 1982 banquet hosted by a Mississippi chapter of the old white Citizens Councils.
• Lott's legislative record demonstrates that his connections to the CCC were no fluke. In 1978, then-Representative Lott was behind a successful effort to re-instate the citizenship of Confederate President Jefferson Davis (Associated Press, 6/2/78).
• In 1981, Lott prodded the Reagan administration into taking the side of Bob Jones University and other segregated private schools that were suing the Internal Revenue Service to restore tax exemptions withdrawn a decade earlier because of the schools' discriminatory racial policies (Washington Post, 1/18/82).
• In 1982 and 1990, Lott voted against extending the Voting Rights Act, the law passed to insure that minorities-- especially Southern blacks-- had access to the voting booth.
• In 1990, he voted against continuation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the crown jewel of civil-rights legislation that desegregated education and public accommodations.
• In 1983 Lott voted against a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., and in 1994 he voted to de-fund the MLK Jr. Holiday commission.
• Lott's 2002 support for Thurmond echoed a statement Lott made in 1980: "You know, if we had elected [Strom Thurmond] 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today."

None of this history is mentioned in the Post's profile of Lott, whom the paper calls "one of most of the colorful figures in the Senate." In an interview on CNN (4/14/05), Lott called it "a very nice article."

Indeed, it's hard to see anything in the Post's profile that Lott would find objectionable.

My thanks go the folks at FAIR for keeping the truth on the table.