The Apology Lott SHOULD Have Given
Below is the apology Trent Lott should have given, according to Quentin Langley, a reader of the daily News & Views email from Chuck Muth. (Go to ChuckMuth.com to subscribe to News & Views for yourself.)

Here's what Lott should have said:

I really don't know what I was thinking. As you know, I was brought up a racist, segregationist Democrat. I carried these views into early adulthood and worked for Democrats in Congress who were completely committed to the segregationist agenda. However, I saw the light, and left the party of Jim Crow for the party of Abe Lincoln.

When praising a man who was a big political wheel when I was just nine I suddenly found myself expressing a view far more suitable for Al Gore Senior or Senator Robert Byrd. Please be assured, just like Strom Thurmond, I have put the Democrat Party and its despicable policies behind me.

I don't know Quentin Langley, but he's right. And if Lott had given this apology, it would be the Democrats having to defend themselves today.

UPDATE: Ann Coulter is making a similar point today.

In 1948, Thurmond did not run as a "Dixiecan," he ran as a "Dixiecrat" – his party was an offshoot of the Democratic Party. And when he lost, he went right back to being a Democrat. This whole brouhaha is about a former Democrat praising another former Democrat for what was once a Democrat policy. Republicans made Southern Democrats drop the race nonsense when they entered the Republican Party. Democrats supported race discrimination, then for about three years they didn't, now they do again. They've just changed which race they think should be discriminated against. In the 1920s, the Democratic platforms didn't even call for anti-lynching legislation as the Republican platforms did.

Thurmond's Dixiecrat Party was not the only extremist spin-off from the Democratic Party in 1948. Henry Wallace, formerly FDR's vice president and agriculture secretary, left the Democratic Party that year to form the communist-dominated and Soviet-backed "Progressive Party." Much as Thurmond's Dixiecrat Party was expressly pro-segregation, Wallace's Progressive Party was expressly pro-Soviet.

Coulter notes that President Bill Clinton dedicated a room at the Agriculture Department to Wallace, a pro-communist Democrat. (Clinton, it should be noted, also has extensively praised former Sen. William Fulbright, a hardcore segregationist, in much the same way Lott praised Thurmond. But Democrats didn't try to rid their party of such racial insensitivity, while Republicans are desperately trying to rid their own party of that Lott.)

Good stuff.