Hillary = the Next Trent?

On his radio show today, Sean Hannity and guest Jeannine Pirro, who is challenging Hillary Clinton for her Senate seat, tried to equate Clinton's attendence at a birthday party for one-time KKK member Robert Byrd with Trent Lott's speech at an observance of Strom Thurmond's birthday, in which he pined for the days of segregation.

I don't know whether any speeches were given at Byrd's celebration, or what Hillary may have said there; I'll go out on a limb and just assume it wasn't anything pro-segregationist. However, this is a good excuse to remind ourselves of what Trent Lott said of Thurmond, who in 1948 ran for President on a pro-segregation platform against Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey:

"I want to say this about my state: 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 all these years, either."

Oh, and speaking of Robert Byrd: boy, I'll bet Bush and Cheney and pretty much everyone in the White House are sorry they didn't heed Byrd's warnings about the risks of rushing to war, don't you imagine? Since the administration was just as bamboozled by that bogus intelligence as anyone else? Gosh, they must feel just awful about so much as having considered going to war now, given the massive intelligence failures and all.

And that Robert Byrd fella happened to be right all along — who'd've thunk?

Now might be as good a time as any to recall some of Byrd's prose, too — this bit from the eve of the passage of the war resolution:

"We are rushing into war without fully discussing why, without thoroughly considering the consequences, or without making any attempt to explore what steps we might take to avert conflict. The resolution before us today is not only a product of haste; it is also a product of presidential hubris. This resolution is breathtaking in its scope. It redefines the nature of defense, and reinterprets the Constitution to suit the will of the Executive Branch. It would give the President blanket authority to launch a unilateral preemptive attack on a sovereign nation that is perceived to be a threat to the United States. This is an unprecedented and unfounded interpretation of the President's authority under the Constitution, not to mention the fact that it stands the charter of the United Nations on its head."