One of the very best things about major announcements like the capture of Saddam (besides the event itself, of course) is looking for all those "bad news" tidbits that are deliberately released in the shadow of the main event. It's usually at such times that everyone who has to admit to something distasteful rushes to air the dirty laundry. And why not? Why not "do the right thing" -- if possible -- at the wrong time. It's a two-fer.

In this case, there are probably plenty of juicy news morsels one might include. But the one I especially like is a small item today noting that the late Senator Strom Thurmond's family has admitted that he fathered an illegitimate, mixed-race child. The announcement from the family was brief and omitted crucial details. But we have a photo of the woman, who certainly bears the once-leading Dixiecrat's face. What's so interesting here is that Thurmond made his name as a leading advocate of segregation.

Here's what the man who would be regarded as a living legend said on the subject in 1948: "I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres into our swimming pools into our homes and into our churches."

And equally interesting is to do some math. Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a retired teacher, is 78. Thurmond would have been 101. That means, he had sex with a black woman when he was 23 -- before he built a political career around the notion of separation of the races. A racist would say that Thurmond simply learned his lesson. Anyone else would say that this new revelation proves not only that Thurmond was two-faced in the extreme, but that most people who preach hate and intolerance have something to hide. Who knows, maybe it will turn out that Rush Limbaugh, who advocated long prison sentences for drug abusers, was a pill-popping addict himself. Or that Newt Gingrich, who lectured Bill Clinton about propriety, might turn out to have been contemporaneously cheating on his wife with a staffer. Oh--we already know those things. Well, it will certainly be intriguing to see who's next in the hypocrisy hit parade.
- posted by Russ @ 4:28 AM

Happy Pull-Saddam-From-A-Hole Day to everyone. Wasn't it a little unexpected how dishevelled he looked? Being in one's home town, one ought not to look like Paul Bunyan.

Right away, I wanted to hear reporters and anchors discussing this, and trying to at least broach the questions of whether he'd been living in that hole for a while, why he didn't swallow cyanide, and all the other things that matter. Instead, we heard the usual nonsensical banter, in which the anchor asks the reporter something specific about the military operation, or any other random question that cannot possibly be answered so quickly. Better to pose the real questions that will need to be answered.
- posted by Russ @ 4:12 PM