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June 29, 2003
Cheap shot on Ga Gang
On this week's Georgia Gang, Martha Zoller made a statement along the following lines: Strom Thurmond changed with the times, becoming the first senator to hire a black aide, not some New England liberal.
What a cheap shot. First of all, Thurmond was the first Southern senator to appoint a black aide, in 1971. Surely Mass. Senator Edward Brooke, who is black and was first elected in 1966 appointed a black aide before 1971 rolled around. In fact, maybe Brooke's black aide interacted with Thurmond on the floor of the Senate and convinced him to widen his own pool of applicants.
I'll never know if that's the case or not, but my own statement is conjecture based on historical fact, not revisionist claptrap which tries not only to paper over the racial record of Strom Thurmond, but also attempts to score another "and Southerners had a much better race record anyway point, which is the kind of thinking Southern pundits employ when they're feeling guilty about, on the one hand, worshiping Southern Conservative values, when on the other, so many of those values are expressed not in an intelligent stump speech but with a confederate flag.
Posted by Chris at June 29, 2003 04:51 PM
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