Once more, without feeling

I watched Trent Lott make his 4th “apology” on C-SPAN today. And why not a 4th? If Arnie can make another Terminator movie, Mel another Mad Max movie and Sylvester another Rocky movie, why can’t Trent return to the scene of his former triumphs?

Naturally, it looked about as sincere and believable as his “hair.” He mouthed the words he had to mouth, but, like Rock Hudson in a Doris Day movie, didn’t exhibit any of the sentiments that should have been behind them. Nor did he seem to understand the importance of the issue, rather like Cardinal Bernard Law talking about paedophelia--and hey, Bernie, don’t let the choir boy hit you in the ass on the way out--he doesn’t understand why people are getting worked up about it. Paul Krugman’s column in the Friday NY Times suggests that The Republicans present two faces: their national leader pretends tolerance, like Shrub yesterday, but display their real attitude by keeping around people like Lott and by appointing those judges. Krugman notes that Bush didn’t follow up his rebuke of Lott by calling for him to step down. Like Bernie Law, he’d like to forgive Lott his sins and go right on with business as usual.

R’s use a lot of coded words that the media never bother decoding for the rest of us. I don’t know if I commented during the 2002 elections how often Bush mentioned to R audiences the need to get a R Senate in order to confirm his judges. They knew he meant abortion, I assume the reporters knew it too, but no one ever translated it.

Still, the Cardinal and Kissinger stepping down in the same day ain’t bad. Trent would be gone too if Mississippi didn’t have a D governor.

Russia bans the use of any alphabet but Cyrillic for languages within its borders. Evidently Chechens, Tatars and other separatists have been moving towards Latin script.

The CIA (motto: assassinating Fidel Castro since 1958) has been given a list of terrorists to kill.

Speaking of not learning from past mistakes, the US has called for early elections in Venezuela. Hey, once you support a coup, you really don’t have a right to say anything about elections.