Strom Thurmond - DEAD

[Hamel]

Either way, welcome to politics. Bill Clinton got the same thing. The only difference was that he wasn't successfully removed.

Clinton got nailed for crimes he committed not a bonehead statement. And I'm convinced that the only reason he escaped charges on most of the other stuff is he was simply good at hiding evidence. Whether you think he deserved impeachment or it's up to you. But he did perjury himself and obstruct justice.

He answered the question using the court's definition of sex, so he didn't even perjure.

[MKSheppard]

As far as I'm concerned, Strom Thurmond was an enemy of the country.

Sure

Making a Supreme Court Justice wait outside your office while you yack
it up with someone from South Carolina who dropped by is a treasonous
offence

Or spending the first hour or so of work every day writing out letters to
the newly married in South Carolina or the bereaved widows/husbands
down in South Carolina is treasonous.

[Coyote]

This might stir the pot a bit.....

Strom Thurmond had a Black daughter?

http://www.blackcommentator.org/21_re_print_pr.html

[Iceberg]

Either way, welcome to politics. Bill Clinton got the same thing. The only difference was that he wasn't successfully removed.

Clinton got nailed for crimes he committed not a bonehead statement. And I'm convinced that the only reason he escaped charges on most of the other stuff is he was simply good at hiding evidence. Whether you think he deserved impeachment or it's up to you. But he did perjury himself and obstruct justice.

The real crime was getting somebody - anybody - in a position where he was forced to reveal details about his sex life under oath.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Marina's defense of someone attacking him is utter hypocrisy, no way around it. She should also realize that a healthy chunk of those "seditionists" who protested Vietnam were veterans who had returned from the war and had seen first-hand how are involvement was wrong. So are these veterans now contemptible, since you don't agree with them? My uncle was joined by grandfather, who fought the Nazis, in protesting the war, because they knew it was unjust. If you want to blame anyone for divisiveness in our nation due to Vietnam, blame the fucktards who got us involved there in the first place.

I'm not going to argue the facts of this, but rather make a comment on the thread in general as it's reached this point:

My own defence of Thurmond--a deeply flawed individual--was based purely on the idea that those who had done good for their nation deserved some sort of recognition for that, or in his case, a measure of peace after he had died, which ought to be accorded to all soldiers who have suffered the hardship of war and then are laid in the ground.

There are certainly exceptions to this, ones which are worthy of being exceptions, but I do not believe the actions of Strom Thurmond are of a sort of contempt which rises above the human ability for forgiveness, especially after the length of time in which he clearly had not participated in the sort of actions of which he was previously notoriously guilty. There is no higher power, we must assume, to judge him--and so then we are limited to his own actions, and unlike Lott, nothing betrayed his changed demeanour, of which I am aware, to be false.

One can perhaps argue that my attempt to draw a distinction between service in war, and service in the political realm, is hypocrisy. And, if as Scarpia desires to do, I believe, it is the intent to extend a measure of respect over all the dead--I am quite willing to concede my error, bourne of the partisan and nationalistic excitement of the moment, those same dark recesses of the soul which fired the Parisian mob to cheer when heads were so gaily seperated from bodies during the revolution, that led me to defend Manji in his own exhultation at Wellstone's death. I would, after all, much rather have society polite, rather than crass.

But I think that a distinction should be held: nobody can deny that to risk your life is the utmost risk, and, thus, should confer the utmost reward. Reality prevents this from being one that, in general, most military servicepersonnel can enjoy in the here-and-now; but the measure of respect accorded to a country's army, is that thing which provides the reward in an unseen way, and, indeed, further sustains it in that unenvied task of upholding the State when the cruel ends of fate demand that War should decide its survival or ruin.