Topic: Newsmax
In a Dec. 7 NewsMax column attacking Jesse Jackson and other critics of Michael Richards' N-word tirade, who he portrayed as "living in Bizarro World," Steve Malzberg wrote:
But Jackson has gone beyond Richards racist comments and has used incident to blast the republican's for re-electing Sen. Trent Lott to a leadership position. Jackson has once again raised objection to Lott's remarks made at a birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond which were racially divisive, forcing Lott to resign as incoming Senate majority leader back in 2002.
Lott apologized back then, but let us assume apologies are not sufficient for Jackson, unless he's making them.
It's curious that Jackson would chose to reignite the Lott story. After all, I fail to recall Jackson's outrage when in in 1993, at a birthday party for former Sen. William Fulbright, President Clinton gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the segregationist.
Fulbright was against the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, against the Voting Rights Act and against the Civil Rights Act.
Ah yes . . . Bizarro World at its best.
But the comparison of Lott and Clinton is misleading and irrelevant. As we've repeatedly noted, unlike Lott's statement that if Thurmond had won his segregationist Dixiecrat presidential run in 1948, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over these years" -- which Malzberg strangely doesn't detail -- Clinton never implied support for Fulbright's former segregationist views.
