So remember at a birthday party for Strom Thurmond when Trent Lott said "You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today." And then he was forced to step down from leadership because of it?
This comment seems a lot worse and far more prejudiced. Trent was just trying to give praise to an old friend at a birthday party. Biden was making a totally politically incorrect racist comment.
So where is the at least equal outrage? Where is the media reacting at least as much as they did at Trent? All I want is just at least the same sort of reaction even though this statement is far worse.
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If this would have been a Republican Senator the press would have been all over it! I really don’t think it’s a big deal. But when the press will jump down one party for something but give a total pass to the other it is wrong.
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Um . . . Lott said "The country would be a better place today". Which seems more like a slip of the tongue than anything else, and I'd say there shouldn't have been a media circus over that.
This just isn't that offensive. Also, Biden isn't as much in the public eye as Lott and Thurmond were.
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Maybe so. But I see little difference between republican and democrat anymore. Sure, there are stated differences in policy/opinion/etc., but they're all cut from the same cloth and are basically useless to regular people. All of this party bickering is used to keep us sidetracked from the real issues.
I just can't watch news anymore...
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Biden is the Ranking Democrat in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is considering a Presidential run in 08 so I think he’s a bit in the public eye.
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“In 2004, Senator John Kerry referred to Sikhs as terrorists and Senator Hillary Clinton jokingly referred to Mahatma Gandhi as a gas station owner"
Those statements I find offensive.
“In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7/11 (a chain store) or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking,"
That I can see how some could find it offensive, if he had just removed the 7/11 and Dunkin Donuts I think it would have been ok. But even then, every Dunkin Donuts I have been in lately has been run by an Indian family.
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I agree that the comment is inappropriate and offensive, although I would say it's not quite as bad as Lott's comment, if you can rank these things. I can't watch the video from work and the article doesn't say -- when exactly did he make the comment? I didn't hear about Lott's until quite awhile later. I would expect that this will get stirred around a little in local and partisan news before it's picked up by national mainstream media.
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Jay, I believe at least one Democrat, and one from your very own state, was blasted for views he stated in the past.
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Well, not really. They welcome him now. How you can reform from being a member of the KKK is beyond me. I don’t find that very forgivable.
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It made it into the mainstream media. On the WB's morning show they had an Indian-American guy that was on the sound crew or something like that tell Senator Biden that he'd be happy to serve him a Slurpee, shoved right up his white @$$.
It's pretty pointless Jay. Rush will put his spin on it- knowing him he spent an hour today on the very question you asked, "Where's the uproar?! Where is it?!" Give the senators aides a few hours and it will have been a pro-immigration sentance taken out of context. Yawn.
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I thought Dunkin Donuts was Indian-owned, no? I mean, the corporation itself; not just the franchises.
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Lott 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."
He was trying to give a compliment to Strom on his birthday. What he said was not directly offensive. You have to dig and read into it to find it offensive. Dig pretty deep I might add.
What Biden said was directly offensive. Biden said this to an Indian basically somehow trying to be funny about the stereotype of all 7-11’s having them working there. I really don’t see how the two are even comparable.
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If Lott meant that the country would have been better off had segregation not ended, then his comment was far worse.
I don't think that he meant that, but, if he didn't, he was ignoring pretty much the entire context of Thurmond's run for the presidency.
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quote:Originally posted by SoaPiNuReYe: No one cares about Biden...
You’re right. No one cares. And it’s a double standard.
Lott was trying to pay a compliment to an old colleague and friend. Nothing said was meant to endorse segregation, just pay respects at a birthday party. Anyone saying otherwise is just looking to find something.
If this comment Biden made had been from a Republican the press would be calling for their head. That is my biggest point.
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What Dagonee said. I never particularly cared about Lott or Thurmond -- who expects them not to cater to racists? -- but I never particularly cared about Lott's comment, either. If he should have been thrown out, I don't imagine it would have been difficult to do so for corruption rather than indistinct racism.
This was at least as racist as Lott's comments, but not, I think, as insulting. If Lott implied support for segregation and white supremacy, that's an insult to the very humanity of black people. If Biden says Indians work in Quick-E-Marts, he's implying they're hardworking immigrants. Rather like saying you can't go to a UC without speaking Chinese or pick some strawberries without speaking Spanish. Yeah, it's stupid, but the insult is less dire.
Still, I'm stumping for Gore in 2008. Good lord, I like that guy.
\has an Indian girlfriend \\can't wait to see her reaction to Indians-make-slushies Biden \\\not that there's anything wrong with that
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I’m still a little baffled by this double standard. But I think I understand it better than I used to. For one thing I read Orson Scott Card’s introduction to his anthology “Future on Ice” and the double standard started to make some sense. Basically he said that right and wrong doesn’t matter to a lot of people. What matters to them is what side you are on. If you are on my team, then you can do whatever you want and I will support you. The only thing considered wrong or immoral is not supporting the party line. That is the big unpardonable sin. Anything else is just a peccadillo at worst and we will spin it to make it look good or at least unimportant.
But if you are on the opposing team, any spin I can put on your words or actions, in order to discredit you and make you lose, is fair game. Lying, cheating, whatever it takes is ok just as long as you lose.
OSC said that both sides of the political spectrum do it.
Secondly, I’d sit there day after day listening to the news and seeing the shenanigans of the Democratic party and their apologists, and I’d think, “What a bunch of hypocrites!”
Then one day it dawned on me that they were not hypocrites. It occurred to me that you have to have actual moral standards and then go against them in order to qualify as a hypocrite. When you change your morals almost as often as you change your shirt, the label “hypocrite” just can’t stick on you.
Yes, yes, I know. There are Republicans who are members of the Moral-Of-The-Week club too. “If the shoe fits, stick it in your mouth -- so we don’t have to listen to your spin anymore,” is what I’d say to all these bureaucrats and news media weenies. But of course they are not listening to me.
So anyway, I think some of the current shenanigans give even more credence to what OSC wrote. The sort of double standard that is the subject of this thread has been going on for years. But we also now have a lot of people to whom winning the war against the Republican party is much more important than winning the war against terrorism.
I know. I know. Someone is going to jump on me for my snide comment and write that, for the Bush Administration, keeping the oil people happy is more important than winning the war against terrorism. Or some such. Yes, yes, don’t bother. I’ve heard it all before and I’m not buying it. I’m not impressed.
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quote:But we also now have a lot of people to whom winning the war against the Republican party is much more important than winning the war against terrorism.
I think I'll put that on bumper stickers; both parties can buy them to proudly show their support of their cause.
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Are we winning the war against terrorism? I mean, I know that we invaded Terroristantanople and that many of the Terrorist population are trying to convince the King of Terrorvania to surrender, but it seems like many of the Terrorist citizens want to keep fighting.
Thank God the Republican party has prevented the whoremongering Terrorist loving Democrats from having their way and torturing all American children and their puppies.
Keep up the good fight Samuel Bush. You may not be impressed, but I sure am.
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quote:But if you are on the opposing team, any spin I can put on your words or actions, in order to discredit you and make you lose, is fair game. Lying, cheating, whatever it takes is ok just as long as you lose.
OSC said that both sides of the political spectrum do it.
Cheating doesn't seem to be as much of an outrage as what's legal in politics.
I guess what drives the whole Support Our Side mentality is that it becomes progressively easier and easier to be drawn into worldview traps that paint the Other Side with broad strokes that infers stupidity and malice on the other side, tenably or not.
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Biden was careless and insensitive, as was Lott in his remarks; but I agree that an endorsement of Thurmond's whole racist political agenda (implied) is worse than Biden's ham-handed attempt to demonstrate Delaware's good relationship w/ the Indian community.
The camera didn't really show the reaction of the individual he was speaking with; I wonder what he thought of the remark? I suspect he was rather stunned.
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quote:Originally posted by Jay: Well, not really. They welcome him now. How you can reform from being a member of the KKK is beyond me. I don’t find that very forgivable.
The NAACP gave Senator Byrd a 100% score on civil rights. Possibly people feel that the several decades he's spent working for civil rights outweighs a mistake he made 60 years ago.
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quote: Well, not really. They welcome him now. How you can reform from being a member of the KKK is beyond me. I don’t find that very forgivable.
Hugo Black was a member of the KKK as well, and he was one of the greatest civil-rights justices on the Supreme Court. From Wikipedia:
quote:During his tenure on the bench, Black established a record sympathetic to the civil rights movement. He joined the majority in Shelley v. Kramer (1948), which invalidated the judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants. Similarly, he was part of the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Court that struck down racial segregation in public schools. He was burnt in effigy by segregationists back in Alabama.
However, he also wrote the court's majority opinion in Korematsu v. United States, which validated Roosevelt's decision to intern Japanese Americans on the West Coast during World War II, a decision roundly criticized today. He stated that, while race-based internment was "constitutionally suspect", it was permissible during "circumstances of direst emergency and peril." In dissent Justice Frank Murphy accused the government of "fall[ing] into the ugly abyss of racism."
As tot he Japanese internment, undoubtedly a dark mark on his civil rights record, it's worth noting that Earl Warren (author of the Brown decision) was instrumental in the internment plan.
This excuses neither of them, but it does make it clear that committing a gross injustice does not prevent one from becoming a champion of civil rights later in one's life.
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Biden's comment--"Segregation exists. Lets laugh about it."
Lott's comment--"Gee I wish good old segregation still existed."
But I think the big difference is the whole Right Wing Media. When Lott made his reference, several people got upset, and the Right Wing Media went into a frenzy of explanations, excuses, and attacking anyone who thought it was innapropriate. The liberal media, much smaller, attacked. The moderate, attempting impartial media just enjoyed broadcasting the arguments.
This time, while the Right wing Media is attacking, their audience is mostly made up of conservative supporters who see this as just another liberal mistake.
The liberal media has decided to remain quiet.
The moderate media, which is the biggest media segment, has no fun and profitable shouting match to broadcast, so has moved on to other stories.
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quote:So where is the at least equal outrage? Where is the media reacting at least as much as they did at Trent?
I think you are misunderstanding why the media was outraged by Lott's statement. I don't think it was the statement itself rather than the implication that Lott may be racist. Who cares if some statement is made that can be twisted out of context? But if there are real racist feelings behind it, then there is a real problem.
Having said that, I think the difference between Lott and Biden is that it is much easier to imagine Lott being racist than Biden. The media won't make a big deal about this quote because nobody would believe Biden is really a racist - everyone would know it is just a slip of the tongue that could be twisted around by conservative foes. In the case of Lott, there were many people who actually DID think he was a racist (regardless of whether or not anything in his statement actually suggested that - which it did not.)
That is the difference, I suspect. If Biden had held the political positions that Lott did on racial issues, the reaction might be worse.
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quote:Biden's comment--"Segregation exists. Lets laugh about it."
Lott's comment--"Gee I wish good old segregation still existed."
That is exactly issue. That's why Dean can talk about blacks being represented on the Republican convention hotel staff rather than in the convention, and it's also why people get nervous when Carolina schools want to hang a confederate flag from their administration building.
As long as conservatives refuse to acknowledge the difference Raven pointed to, you all are going to see a pernicious double standard everywhere liberals talk frankly about race.
I'm not saying that you should stop making a thread everytime you see an article about it. But from now on, you can't be surprised, because Raven explained the issue very simply.
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Honestly, I lump all southern Republicans into the group of jackasses who endorsed Nixon's southern strategy, and if they weren't elected at the time, I make a guess as to whether they would have endorsed Nixon's southern strategy. Lott fails that test.
I do the same with California politicians and prop. 187.
I guess that one of the perks of being a voter and not a procedural institution is that I don't need evidence.
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The first time I clicked the link, a proxy authentification opened up for my university... How wierd. I had the proxy thing set in my browser and forgot about it... hmm
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