Trent Lott

Question: What is more cringe-inducing than a celebrity funeral? Answer: Two back-to-back celebrity funerals. The ghoulish twin spectacles last week memorializing Aretha Franklin and John McCain brought out the worst in family, friends and frenemies. No matter your partisan affiliation, these vulgar exercises in self-indulgence should serve as object lessons on how not to depart with dignity.

The slander of President Ronald Reagan’s legacy by liberal gay activists continues. After ignoring his influence in stopping California’s Prop 6 as governor, President Reagan is painted as a homophobe unwilling to acknowledge or help gays during the height of the AIDS crisis. This characterization of a conservative legend has been debunked but that still hasn’t stopped the liberal gay activists…

New York Times national reporter Jackie Calmes spent a semester at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University studying "conservative media," and this week issued an exhaustive 16,000-word report with the oh-so-objective title, "'They Don't Give a Damn about Governing' -- Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party," blaming the "far right" for killing the moderate, pragmatic GOP,…

Apparently PBS has decided to make like MSNBC and spend more time dissecting the Republican Party’s problems real, imagined, and/or overblown. On Monday’s PBS NewsHour, anchor Judy Woodruff announced that the program would begin “a series of conversations about where the Republican Party goes from here.” The first installment, a discussion with former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.),…

The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty is trying to help the Republicans on the front page of Friday’s paper. It's not labeled "Analysis," but "Politics Debrief." The alliance between the “agreeable” GOP and the media is getting more transparent. “What will it take to save the Republicans from the self-destructive impulses of the tea party movement? That the government shutdown was a political…

Serious question: if he ever had it, has Ed Schultz totally lost it?  There's lots to be said about the Occupy Wall Street movement.  But of all the cockamamie comments, of all the nutty non sequiturs, surely Ed Schultz's takes the crazy cake. On his MSNBC show tonight, Schultz claimed that what lies behind Republican criticism of Occupy is . . . racism.  In a beyond-bizarre analogy, Schultz…

Curtis Wilkie is a former Boston Globe reporter who once wrote a book with Whitewater crook Jim McDougal, and once claimed Bill Clinton’s 43-percent victory in 1992 was some kind of “mandate.” His latest book is on currently imprisoned trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs. On NPR’s Morning Edition Wednesday, Wilkie didn’t talk about Dickie’s Democrat friends, only about how former Sen. Trent Lott and…

On Monday’s The O’Reilly Factor on FNC, during the show’s regular "Reality Check" segment, host Bill O’Reilly highlighted the double standard exhibited by President Barack Obama and other prominent Democrats in the way they reacted so strongly to former Republican Senator Trent Lott’s praise of former Senator Strom Thurmond at his birthday celebration in 2002, and the President's recent more…

The Los Angeles Times has been doing its best to dismiss Senator Harry Reid's racist remark about Preisdent Obama as a minor transgression while portraying Republicans calling for his resignation as political attack dogs. This coverage stands in stark contrast to the paper's coverage of the controversy surrounding former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott in 2002 (h/t Patterico)."GOP…

"Harry Reid is no Trent Lott," argues Newsweek's Ben Adler in a January 11 The Gaggle blog post by the same name.Of course, nowhere in his brief blog post does Adler acknowledge the media's role in why that double standard is in play. Instead, Adler defends Reid, praising his "frank political assessment":

I'm still having trouble understanding Harry's liberal dialect. Any help? (cartoon after page break):

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in 2002 agreed with former Sen. Trent Lott's (R-Miss.) decision to resign his leadership role after Lott made what some felt were racist remarks at former Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party."He had no alternative," said Reid at the time claiming, "If you tell ethnic jokes in the backroom, it's that much easier to say ethnic things publicly. I've always practiced…

The media continue to have Obama's back after his ridiculous claim tire inflation could be a substitute for oil drilling in a speech at a rally in Missouri on July 30. MSNBC anchor Alex Witt is the latest in a long line of media personalities expressing irritation that McCain is using the presumptive Democratic nominee's tire inflation comment in his campaign against Obama. Witt interviewed…

Trent Lott, once a favored whipping boy of the mainstream media for unfortunate and poorly-worded comments at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday bash, is now being hailed by the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman as a great statesman as he exits the U.S. Senate. Weisman's page A4 profile, "As Lott Leaves the Senate, Compromise Appears to Be a Lost Art," paints a picture of a U.S. Senate descending…