Life is Like A Box of Chocolates...

...and "stupid is as stupid does."  Trent Lott -- probably just trying to sound effusive about fossilized Senator Strom Thurmond's retirement -- has made himself the poster-boy for racial insensitivity.  And Democrats, roused from licking their wounds and seeing an issue they can finally get some traction with, have turned him into the Grand Wizard of the Klan. 

By most accounts Lott is a decent fellow who's evolved (as many politicians have in both parties) from a garden-variety bigot in college to a relatively unpredjudiced Legislator.  Even Jim Jeffords (the formerly Republican Senator) says he's "a man of honor and good conscience."  The Gnomon is pretty sure Lott has no desire to see blacks working the plantations again.  And he's apologized profusely.  But you have to wonder if he has any appreciation of how much the segregation and bigotry of 1948 was a knife in the back of the american ideal.  And how much blacks truely suffered in those days.

On the other hand, face it: Democrats are cynically milking this for all it's worth.  Everytime they go into hystrionics like this, it belittles the issue of racism and the agonizing struggle by both blacks and whites to overcome it.  Civil Rights should be a blazing torch of freedom, not a political football.