Look Who's Talking

John Cornyn: living proof that everything's bigger in Texas. Including our idiots.

You know an argument is well and truly stupid when John Cornyn's in its corner holding a towel. The Texas Senator is arguing that Harry Reid's use of the archaic phrase 'negro dialect' is more racist than Trent Lott's remarks praising ex-Klan Democrat Robert Byrd back in 2002. OK, let's compare. Trent Lott famously said:

"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 the years, either."

Clearly Lott was extolling the virtues of the early 60s Klan-friendly, Dixiecrat status quo and bemoaning the fact that the 'rest of the country' didn't vote for it. Yet somehow, he'd have you believe there was nothing racist about that. (This could make sense if you've recently experienced serious head trauma or your intelligence quotient rates in the low 70s but otherwise not so much.)

Harry Reid, on the other hand, was endorsing a black man to run for president and not promoting a system of institutionalized racism that would have prevented Obama from voting let alone running for office. In Byrd and Lott's world, Obama could have found himself hanging from a tree for looking at a white man funny in the street. In Reid's world, he gets to be president. But Reid is the racist?

So would Cornyn also call The United Negro College Fund racist because it has that awkward word in its name? I wonder if helping more black folks go to college is as racist as helping them run for president?

Then there's The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League founded by that arch white supremacist Marcus Garvey. There's the Negro League Baseball Players Association whose racist agenda is to "honor and celebrate the significant contribution of Negro Leagues players to baseball and American history" Then there's the The National Council of Negro Women which is presumably both racist and sexist.

Maybe someone in the Senate could break out a flipchart and explain some of this stuff to Cornyn?