Word: lott
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Then Washington turns into Gaffeland, and what happens next can be comic. Both kinds of gaffe--regular and supersize--set the stage for festivals of disingenuousness and outright dishonesty. In some ways, the most honest reaction to the brouhaha has been that of Lott himself. His position has been, "Oh, c'mon, I didn't mean it." And surely he didn't mean it, at least consciously. Even if he is a racist, he had no reason to want to say so. Lott must sincerely and understandably feel blindsided. Since when are the fawning remarks of some politician at another...
...gaffe is when a politician tells the truth (as someone once said), Senate Republican leader Trent Lott's bizarre endorsement of white racism and segregation does not qualify. An authentic gaffe is more like Lawrence Lindsey's comment that a war against Iraq could cost $200 billion, which got him fired as President Bush's top economic-policy adviser. Nobody at the White House disputed the figure--they just didn't want it brought up. This is called being off-message, and in Washington that's much worse than being, say, wrong. Lindsey's replacement, investment banker Stephen Friedman...
...Lott's comments, by contrast, were certainly not the truth. But they may have revealed a truth. The suspicion is that they bubbled up from his id and escaped through his lips when his guard was down, thereby exposing an important and deeply distressing moral flaw in Lott himself. This process is too serious to label a gaffe. So let's call it a supergaffe. A supergaffe is when a politician says what he really thinks...
...then there are Lott's critics. The politicians and pundits trampling one another in a scramble for the microphones in order to say how deeply offended they were at his comments, how saddened they are by the man's transgression or how urgently they wish his removal from the Senate leadership--or, if possible, from the solar system--can be divided into two categories. Call them Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats, by and large, are sincerely offended by what Lott said. But they are delighted, not saddened, that he said it. And they are utterly insincere about wanting...
...Republicans, by contrast, are completely sincere about wanting Lott to be gone, but they are generally insincere about the reason. They want him to be gone for the same reason the Democrats want him to stay: the sooner he's gone, the sooner this nightmarish issue goes away. No one can doubt that Republicans are saddened by the public revelation that Lott shares the views of Strom Thurmond. Yet there are good reasons to doubt that all of them are as offended as they let on, starting with the fact that Thurmond himself has been a Republican Senator in recent...