AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Wednesday 16 September 2009

The stated objections of Joe Wilson’s son to Carter’s scolding of his old man should help spinners on either side depict the exchange as a family feud between a couple of hillbillies. It’s worth remembering that Wilson used to work for Strom Thurmond, and that after Essie Mae Washington-Williams publicly acknowledged, after Thurmond’s death, that she was his daughter by a black maid that the 22-year-old Thurmond had impregnated when the woman was 16, Wilson was quick to denounce the woman for having sullied his mentor’s reputation. He later apologized, because these patterns repeat. But it’s hard no to think that it says a lot about a man’s mindset and values that, when he reflects on the fact that a powerful colleague had a daughter he kept a secret for most of his life while devoting much of his career working hard to deny her the basic human rights befitting a citizen of this country, he can’t contain his anger at the daughter he sees as an inconvenience who has stained a great man’s name because she had the poor grace to be born. Thurmond was part of a generation of politicians who, on the single most important and the most clear-cut moral issue of their time, disgraced themselves and proved themselves to have souls made of shit. It would seem to be a no-brainer that anyone who managed to be wrong on the issue of whites-only drinking fountain should never be trusted to decide anything else, but a lot of folks like Thurmond managed to have long careers and be treated with deferential respect after desegregation became the law of the land, even as having opposed the Vietnam War was being cited as reason enough to accuse people of treason thirty years after that unpopular war ended, even people who’d earned the right to criticize it by fighting in it. Phil Nugent

7 notes

  1. robot-heart-politics reblogged this from azspot
  2. azspot posted this

A GNT creation ©2007–2012