I never knew foot tasted so good

Yesterday, I posted a bit about Senate GOP leader Trent Lott finally having an apologize dragged out of him after making implicitly racist remarks at the 100th birthday party of follow GOP Senator Strom Thurmond. The remarks, along with their context, in question were this:

At issue are three sentences in Mr. Lott's tribute last Thursday to Mr. Thurmond, a South Carolina Republican who ran for president in 1948 on a Dixiecrat platform opposing "social intermingling of the races." With Mr. Thurmond by his side, Mr. Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said:

"I want to say this about my state: 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 all these years, either."

Well, it turns out Lott and Thurmond are quite the duo, with the younger often celebrating the segregationist past of the older. According to the Washington Post (by way of Common Dreams), Lott apparently forgot to take his human decency pills during a 1980 speech because...oh hell, you read it.

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported Lott's earlier comments in a Nov. 3, 1980, report about a rally for the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan in downtown Jackson at which Thurmond was the keynote speaker.

Thurmond, according to the story, told the gathering of 1,000 people that the country "cannot stand four more years of [President] Jimmy Carter. . . . We've got to balance the budget. Jimmy Carter won't do it, but Ronald Reagan will do it."

Then Thurmond declared: "[We] want that federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of the states." For many supporters and opponents of civil rights, the phrase "state's rights" stood for the right of states to reject federal civil rights legislation.

After Thurmond spoke, Lott told the group: "You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today."

Thurmond ran as the Dixiecrat candidate for president in 1948 on a platform calling for the continuation of segregation in the South.

(On edit: Lott again defends himself, saying he never meant any sort of racist affront, but c'mon Trent. Words mean things. If you meant you liked Thurmond's economic plan, then you should have stood up and said that, not leave yourself open to speculation that you approved of Thurmond's platform of a segregated America. Doing something like that only solidifies the appearance that the GOP could care less about minorities. It's smug, it's caustic and he should of known better.)