Top Stories Friday 13 Dec
Digby, in Atrios’ comments writes on
who exactly broke the Trent Lott story and why it took so long for the “liberal media” to notice:
Jim Lehrer was clearly puzzled tonight as to why this story took so long to find it’s way into the media. Nobody seemed to know. But, I do. It’s because this is a political story about “character” that didn’t originate from the Mighty Wurlitzer with tidy talking points for a platoon of paid talkers to spew en masse on radio and TV. The press no longer even looks for this stuff on its own. It simply waits for it to come to them.
Tom Tomorrow got e-mail from a reader:
The occasion is the signing of the Spence / Warner Defense Spending Bill in October of 2000, and the remark–which is made by Lott to a woman standing behind Senator Thurmond, who is himself in the process of signing the bill–is NOT directed
to the senator himself, but is offered as an aside (furthermore, this event was in no way intended as a tribute to Thurmond, as the birthday celebration was, and thus seems not to have been inspired directly by any attempt to please Mr. Thurmond w/o any actual endorsement of Thurmond’s Dixiecrat platform, as Lott has claimed the birthday tribute was). The remark is exactly as follows, and though spoken off-camera, is quite audible: “Yes…he should have been elected in 1947…or 1948, it was”.)