Barry Farber
Tuesday, Dec. 31, 2002

So, already by Christmas the Republicans took their newly revealed "racist" Trent Lott and chopped him off like a hood ornament and left him folded up in the glove compartment like a paper napkin full of forgotten fruitcake.

Nice crisis resolution, huh? Neat image management, right?

Not so fast.

One problem. Trent Lott is NOT a racist.

Nobody believes Lott is a racist. His enemies don't believe that. His friends don't believe that. And nobody believes Trent Lott believes America would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948.

What everybody DOES believe is that Lott maladroitly gave his enemies the right to say, childhood-game fashion, "You SAID it and – ha ha – we can prove it!" Lott's true feelings – and actions – regarding racial issues fell off the bottom on the relevancy charts.

The Republican Party just turned and ran from what they feared would be dreadful political trouble down the road. That fear turned the quality of intra-party justice from King Solomon to King Kong.

Am I the only one troubled by this Republican unconditional surrender to an obviously phony charge?

Can anybody name the last Democrat tossed by his teammates into the crater of a live volcano no matter how racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American or clinically insane a comment he or she uttered?

Please don't misunderstand; I don't hold that Democratic loyalty to their rogues and fools as a role model. There simply wouldn't BE a Democratic Party if they jettisoned their own according to every political correctness breeze, real or artificial, the way the Republicans did. So let's stick to Republicans and Trent Lott.

In sticking to Trent Lott, let me quickly point out that I'm not talking about Trent Lott; rather, I'm talking about so much MORE than Trent Lott.

You hear Republicans ratifying their firing squad by saying, "I never thought much of him as a leader anyhow." Not even a nice try, folks. That doesn't in the slightest excuse the way you handled things.

"By the fifth or sixth apology he'd abandoned every principle that makes me a Republican in the first place," goes the refrain; and that's just as irrelevant as the justification preceding.

The key question, rather, is, What does the Trent Lott affair now say about the Republican Party? I suggest it says something that was better left as a vague suspicion or, better yet, never thought of at all.

It says: "These are my principles; and if you don't like them, fear not. I have others." It says, "These are our leaders, and we won't surrender them – unless you attack." Instead of a political army guided by courage and conviction, we now see the Republicans as a nudist in the middle of a barbed-wire fence.

Republican political fragrance finishes first. Trent Lott's innocence finishes last.

Delete, please, any notion that my feelings owe to some good-ol'-boy affinity with the Old South, and double-click on the fact that, at the age when Trent Lott was figuring out ways to keep his national fraternity lily-white, I and my hearty band of white Southern activists were (successfully!) rallying the student body of the University of North Carolina to overthrow the university administration's policy of making our first four black students sit in the Jim Crow section of Kenan Stadium instead of sitting with the rest of us students.

That's important to ME but, likewise, irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Dogs aren't the only ones who smell fear. We all do. The beautiful woman smells the fear of the nervous nerd asking for a date. The boss smells the fear of the insecure worker asking for a raise. And the voter smells the fear of a political party – even one controlling all three branches of government – that so quickly sacrifices a leader who did NOT mis-think, who did NOT mis-act, but who merely mis-SPOKE.

Trent Lott's birthday party remark about Sen. Thurmond was breathtakingly brain-dead.

(It was not unprecedented. President Gerald Ford said in debate to Jimmy Carter in 1976 that the Soviet Union did not exercise domination in Eastern Europe. And he no more believed that even as he was saying it than Lott believed America should have elected Strom Thurmond. Trent Lott's mysterious brain failure only cost him the party leadership in the Senate. Ford's probably cost him the presidency!)

If you should ask me, "Why, then, do they say things they don't believe?" you prove to me you've never competed in the public arena without a script.

Hear and heed, now, Republicans. All your friends and all your foes now know where your buttons are and exactly how high and how quickly you will jump when they're pushed.

Here's how the Republicans SHOULD have handled it.

Lott himself should have instantly announced that he would have preferred Republican Governor Tom Dewey win the election of 1948; next choice, Democratic President Harry Truman; and in no way and in no wise would he have favored Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond. End of statement; but, admittedly, not end of story.

I would then have leaked that a "steaming" President Bush had abruptly canceled his meeting with the Prime Minister of Macedonia or Paraguay for a closed-door session alone with Trent Lott. Let lower-level aides then leak that the sound of White House breaking furniture reached but did not exceed the decibel level of a routine Clinton marriage quarrel in that meeting.

Let the nation know that the president in no uncertain dimension let Trent Lott know where the bear sat in the buckwheat and let the no-comments begin with Trent Lott exiting that meeting.

When the Democrats inevitably closed in for a blood-lunch, let some high-but-not-top-level Republican official tell them: "It's all over and done with as far as we're concerned. And, by the way, we have a great idea for the Democrats.

"We all have shortcomings. Let THEM take care of THEIR Jesse Jackson's 'Hymie-town,' Al Sharpton's 'diamond merchants' (Jewish businessmen) intruding into Harlem, the gracious racist Sen. Byrd's white-nigger-black-nigger soliloquy, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's 'Bush knew in advance about the Israeli-planned-9/11 attack' and Sen. Patty Murray's 'Bin Laden is more popular than we are because he builds and we bomb.'

"We, for our part, will make clear who we think should and should not have won the election of 1948."

The "big fear" of Republicans was stated often and bluntly while Lott was busy apologizing. "In the next election, unless Lott is drawn, quartered and fed to the donkeys, every Republican candidate in 2004 will face TV commercials beginning with Trent Lott's endorsement of Strom Thurmond followed by footage of Dixiecrat Thurmond in 1948 blatantly appealing for segregation."

As a usual-but-not-always Republican voter, I say bring it on. Such an absurd backward reach in 2004 would never rekindle what would then have become a minor upscuddle way back in 2002. I insist that either the Democrats in 2004 would never have used it OR it would have blown up like a grenade in their faces.

I never made it all the way up to be a scientist. But in grammar school I loved watching a fire die when the oxygen was cut off. I would have loved to see this fire die the same way.

Republicans, particularly conservatives, have an occupational hazard. Lots of people do. Those who work at computers hours on end get carpal tunnel syndrome. Football players retire with bashed-up knees.

Conservatives, for their part, get drawn like seafaring victims of the mythical Lorelei onto the treacherous rocks by the power of liberal seduction. "I am a conservative," the syndrome goes. "Therefore, when I commit a liberal or an anti-conservative act, the liberals will love me."

There are, indeed, many voters who welcome the Republican annihilation of Trent Lott. BUT THOSE ARE VOTERS WHO WOULD NEVER HAVE VOTED FOR TRENT LOTT OR ANY OTHER REPUBLICAN ANYHOW!

Those voters the Republicans intended to woo by sacrificing Trent Lott are precisely the voters who say to the Democratic Party, "No matter what you do that I dislike, I shall always be FOR you." And to the Republican Party they say, "And no matter what you do that I LIKE, I shall always be AGAINST you."

So, GOP, you called no attention to your brotherly proclivities. You called attention only to your cowardice.

In Gore Vidal's hit play "The Best Man," the protagonist, aching head in both aching hands, says, "I don't mind being a bastard. But why am I such an INEPT bastard?"

Vidal is far from my political lodestar, but he came across with a good line.

It's not that Republicans are cowards.

It's that they're such INEPT cowards.

Barry Farber's daily radio program can be heard on Talk America Radio Networks, www.talkamerica.com.

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