A Small Victory

I cheered, had a flash of guilt, then remembered his politics and cheered again.

Only the good die young...

Bad karma speaking ill of the dead.

I got some Strom stories - I guess it all kinda depends whether they count as speaking ill of him or not....

Can't wait to here what Trent Lott has to say.

(That will be the first and only time I ever say that)

He looked just like Statler from the Muppet Show.

I thought he died ages ago. (That thing that appeared in Congress was clearly a dusty old extra from the set of MJ's "Thriller" video. Now it can be told!)

I was begining to think he would never die...

Goodbye to bad rubbish. Not even a hundred years could attone for his past. Now off to check Laurence........

maybe the recent supreme court decision did him in... afterall, the couple was interracial...

I think I'm still in shock... I was thinking at this point that he was like Keith Richards, or a robot, or both, that he just wouldn't die, or maybe he'd died already but wouldn't realize it, wandering Capitol Hill as a zombie who keeps getting re-elected.

Funny coincidence that Strom Thurmond and Lester Maddox die a few days within each other. I guess one set fo dinosaurs has entered extinction. Now, when will Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Walter Chronkite, Fidel Castro, and Yasser Arafat follow suit.

The guy is dead. How about some respect for his family? There are tons of people who hate "whites", do we say one word to them?

Ahem. Yes we do. Do you think for one minute that there would not be just as much celebration were Farrakhan to die tomorrow? A bigot is a bigot is a bigot.

The randy old goat will probably still find a way to get married again, too.

If you post a comment without a name and email/web address, it's as if it's not even there.

I didn't know Strom Thurmond could die - I thought he was, like, magic, or something.

First of all, I find some White folks paranoia about "reverse racism" to not really match up to reality. I'm the only White person on my street, I belong to a community organization that is almost entirely black and hispanic - and while people may talk about racism in the schools, in the police department, in the city administration - I have never had one person, not even the folks from the Nation of Islam who ocasionally sell their paper at an intersection near my house - say anything against Whites in generalor be anything less than neighboly to me and my wife. I just think its paranoid folks - and possibly closet bigots - who somehow interpret any discussion of racism actually existing as "hating Whites".

Secondly, even if my neighbor totally hates White folks, he doesn't really have the power to do anything about it. It's not the factt hat Strom Thurmond was a bigot that's the problem. My grandfather was a bigot too, but he didn't get to set State and Federal government policy for over half a century. A bigot who passes biggoted laws, or who makes biggoted hiring and firing decisions, or who controls the real estate in a city - is much more dangerous and downright evil than a bigot who just embarasses himself with a dumb comment now and then.

I thought that mean people never die. It's nice to see that they do... eventually.

At last, someone with the balls to say that Thurmond was a canker sore on the face of American politics. The wusses over at National Review Online are falling over themselves in reverence at the passing of this Great American Icon.

There are public figures the world is poorer without. Of recent deaths, Gregory Peck and (to a lesser degree) Dennis Thatcher come to mind. Then there are those whose absence enriches the world: Thurmond, Maddox, Saddam. And finally there are those public figues for whom we can only hope that they will soon meet their makers: Bill & Hillary, Yassir Arafat, ...

Maybe I should delete this and post it over at LGF...

Lyn

Actually, plenty of people have had their go at Thurmond. I don't really think it took "balls" to fall in with the crowd. (I'm not talking about news anchors or any public people like that either. I'm talking about what I have read in personal sites like this one.)

I had no particular love for Thurmond. I think that he was too old to keep being elected; he should have gracefully retired years ago. But by all accounts, whatever his personal feelings on race may have been, he seemed to have done an about-face on most racial issues -- even if it was just for political purposes. Whether you like it or not, most of the older congress-people were probably (if they still aren't) racist at one time. At one point not all that long ago racism was the majority view in society. Ask your grandparents. No one gets a halo here.

As for the guy who lives in the majority black neighborhood not encountering any racism -- lucky you. Of course, you don't know what goes on behind closed doors. I was the only white kid in a black school when I was seven years old, and I encountered plenty of black-against-white racism. Of course that was thirty years ago, but 1969/70 was supposed to be one of those watershed years where everyone of every color was supposed to have linked arms and started singing "We Shall Overcome" together. Someone forgot to give the kids who called me "Whitecracker" the memo. And there is still plenty of the same thing going on today -- or do you know anything about the agenda of the Nation of Islam?

And as for Farrakhan -- I don't think there will be as much "rejoicing" or anything when he goes to his reward, because he isn't in a position of as much power as Thurmond is, and it is unlikely that he will ever be, though who knows what the future holds.

He was such a youthful 100 too,

Now, if we could just get rid of that other senile, pathetic, racist relic of an anti-deluvian era by the name of Robert Byrd we would really be "shittin' in tall cotton"!

Having lived here in SC for 13 years in an extremely small conservative town where many of the inhabitants would send their teen boys (not the girls for some reason) each year to be little gophers for the senator, I have seen first hand the adoration toward the old racist, segregationist corpse. I figure they will keep sending the same types of elected officials to Washington D.C. and I will still hear things from the mouths of the inhabitants here like..."well I'll just send my boy over to cut your grass"...and I don't think they mean their sons. No wonder I never socialize here! Goodbye Strom and unfortunately there are more here just like him.

I should add to my last entry, that I doubt this kind of racist thinking is solely located in SC and I would be naive to even think it was. I have met those who are not like the Strom's of this world here in lovely SC.

I used to read you every day but ever since you said crap about Mike Savage I stopped. I know you probably don't care, but you're wrong. I even linked you at Free Republic you had fans from there going here.

Today I was looking up stuff about Mark Morford whom I hate, so I found you again. And you say unkindly things about Strom!

BTW, if you think I'm some Southern Trash you're wrong. I'm Jewish and live in San Francisco and have been through all the hip/boho crap you have (but you still hang onto it).

Maybe it's your "persona" to act mean even to our own side (Repub) but I don't appreciate it.

The true test is whether similarly honest things will be said on lefty blogs/boards about Byrd when the ol' Kleagle meets his maker.

Anyone want to give me odds on that?

I'm just thinking that maybe you've bought into someone else's opinions about Thurmond. Consider:

"Thurmond's segregationism seems to have been more a product of his times than a matter of genuine conviction. By the 1980s he had adopted moderate-to-liberal stances on some racial issues, voting for a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, for the 1982 extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and for the Civil Rights Act of 1991."

(Best of the Web)

There's more, but I think you're condemning the man of 1948 without considering the man of 1982 or 1991.

Hey, "Former Fan of Yours" -- great parody of a kneejerk rightwinger!

That... was a parody, wasn't it?

Yeah, they said the same thing about George Wallace, but I don't buy it as a defense. If he didn't believe all the segregationist claptrap that he spouted to get votes from poor whites, then he was a bounder who didn't mind riding into power on the backs of disenfranchised African-Americans when he knew what he was standing for was wrong

It's not meant to be a defense, Dark.

I've got to come down on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Or at least not talking too badly about the recently deceased. The man appears to have reversed his position on racial issues in his later years, and absent some credible evidence to the contrary, I'm going to believe that's true.

People do change, you know. I did. I grew up in the deep south, and was quite the racist and homophobe in my younger days. It's how I was brought up. Until I got to college, I really never knew any different.

Whether the Senator's heart truly changed on those issues, we'll never know. What we DO know is that the man stepped down off the judicial bench to enlist during WW2, and fought on the frontlines on D-Day and during the Battle of the Bulge. I'll salute any man who'll do that, and hope that he's found peace.

And besides, if Strohm wasn't sincere about renouncing his bigotry, you can take some small comfort in knowing he's got a date with St.Peter right about now, and that shit aint gonna be pretty.

My job has a huge stake in that Medicare legislation that the Senate stopped debating while the old coot croaked. Damn it.

speaking ill of the dead is in poor taste. strom for a period of his life said and believed in some awful things, but he was a war hero and whether it was thru political expedience or a true "conversion" he embraced civil rights, got rid of poll taxes, was one of the first senators to hire numerous blacks to work in his offices, he helped out people both white and black in SC and so on.

i like your blog but kicking a corpse is pretty classless.

stalin, hitler, (hopefully soon arafat and castro) fine, but strom doesn't deserve this.

I think "Former Hen of Yours" are friends.

Now that hen mentions it...

P'KAW! P'KAW! AWK AWK AWK!! Speak nicely of ex-Senator Zombie!! AWK AWK AWK!! P'KAW!

A response can be found at this link

Andrea, if it wasn't a defense, then it was an alternative view, as was mine. All this "don't talk badly of the dead" crap comes from the time when our ancestors thought that the spirits of the dead would be able to hear them talk about the recently deceased, and then be motivated for some sort of astral vengence. I actually am honoring him by speaking the thoughts I had of him while he was alive, and do not excrete a honeyed praise of him from my own fear of death (to paraphrase the writer Rex Stout).

'Nuff said.

andrea thank you for your intelligent criticism of what i said. it's people like you that make the internet a wonderful place to exchange ideas.

yay! The innernut rewls!

But seriously, Dark, no -- "not speaking ill of the dead" does not merely stem from some hoary old ancestral superstition (thanks for labelling people who disagree with you as superstitious idiots), but from rules of common politeness and standards of how one behaves in public. Unless, of course, you would like to claim that rules of common politeness and standards of public behavior are no more than "superstitions" and that it would be better if society dropped all that stuff and "let it all hang out." That's been tried already; you may be too young to remember, but I'm not.

In any case, the prohibition against speaking "ill of the dead" does have certain qualifiers. For instance, if the dead person died in or soon after acts so reprehensible as to remove from them that one final grace of being at least not having their grave spat upon. Example: Hitler, Osama bin Laden, etc. The question is, did Thurmond deserve this special designation? Because what I have not seen established here are any recent actions of the late senator that indicated he deserved such an unkind send-off. (By recent I mean within the last, oh, twenty years or so.) I realize that his entire record on race matters is not good, but like I already mentioned he seemed to have either made a turnaround or at least stepped back from many of his previous views. So what's the deal, people? What had he done to you lately?

Strom (first name basis now that he's dead, y'know) had a past. In later years he did some good things too though. I think you'll find that - like most people - he wasn't the evil bogeyman his enemies wanted him to be, and he wasn't the knight in shining (white) armor that his champions wished for either.

Wow, I feel sorry for people who judge other people by the color of their skin, but to celebrate the death of another human is pretty shallow. People may be pissed about Strom and the things that he has done and about how long he was able to keep being reelected but they MUST remember that he WAS elected. All in all, I just find it deplorable that you are celebrating death

Jumped into Normandy at the age of 48 as a battlion commander with the 101st Airborne. Did a fair bit to kill Nazis. This doesn't excuse everything he did or said, in my opinion, but volunteering to go catch bullets for his country ought to count for something, shouldn't it?

All this joy in human death, you people frighten me! I believe I'll put a few more locks on my doors.

Eat shit and die, you half-baked hussie!!!

Make it your guiding principle to do your best for others and to be trustworthy in what you say. Do not accept as friend anyone who is not as good as you. When you make a mistake do not be afraid of mending your ways.