John Cornyn Wins BuzzFlash's GOP Hypocrite of the Week Award For Pretending Trent Lott Was 'Innocuous,' Not Racist

John Cornyn

Welcome back to BuzzFlash's GOP Hypocrite of the Week.

Seems like bringing up a time when your leader resigned in utter disgrace for being exposed as an unrelenting bigot is a strange way to show one's moral superiority. But Republicans will take any chance they get to call for the resignation of Democratic leadership.

Such was the case with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this week. When a new book came out quoting Reid as having said President Barack Obama's electoral success had something to do with his "light-skinned" complexion and his lack of a "Negro dialect," Republicans equated it with former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's comments in 2002 about how the country wouldn't have the problems it does today had segregationist Strom Thurmond been elected president in 1948.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) took the Republican grievance to MSNBC's "The Daily Rundown" where he proclaimed it showed the extent of the "double standards in Washington D.C. these days."

Now, we should mention here that Cornyn is but one cog in the faux outrage factory that is the modern Republican Party; plenty of conservatives have picked up the Reid resignation memo and run with it. But the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Take a look at this video, and you'll see why "Big John" was the best representative to shoulder the responsibility of being BuzzFlash's GOP Hypocrite of the Week:

First, let's set straight the facts of the resignation. Lott finally "resigned" at the end of 2007, some five years after making the remarks for which he lost his leadership position. He gave up his leadership role weeks after making those public remarks, only to come back and become Minority Whip in 2006.

Furthermore, as The New York Times noted at the time, Lott was "ousted" from his leadership position by the White House; he did not gracefully resign as Cornyn and his buddies would like us to remember it. Yet Cornyn, with his talk of the 2010 elections, seems content for viewers to think he's calling on Reid to resign from the Senate entirely.

Asked whether he had asked Lott to resign, Cornyn said that because he "came to the Senate roughly about the time that occurred" that, uh, "this is not about me."

Oh, OK. So if it's not about you, what is this thing about?

"What this is about is [Reid's] hypocrisy and hypocrisy of folks on the other side when Trent Lott said something that was far more innocuous than the racially tinged comments that Senator Reid made," Cornyn insisted.

Let's play apples to apples for a minute, Senator. So Reid says something that can be described as a (however regrettable) fact of American political life. To paraphrase: A black candidate has an easier time getting elected to national office if he is of lighter complexion and does not speak with an accent. Lott said that the nation would have been a better place if a racist man who believed black people should not hang out in the same room as white people, had been president.

Yeah. Totally innocuous.

Putting the remarks in context, Reid uttered his comment in an interview, at a point when he didn't realize he was speaking on the record. Lott pronounced his "innocuous" statement in front of a large crowd and television cameras.

Furthermore, Lott's remarks came after years of carousing with White Supremacist groups and making other poorly-veiled racist remarks. He had even said almost the exact same thing as he did at Thurmond's birthday bash two decades earlier in 1980.

As historian Ralph Luker said at the time of Lott's second flap:

His remarks at Thurmond's birthday party were no mere slip. They remind us that segregationists of the heart are alive and well, serving even in seats of power.

The fact that Cornyn tried to make this non-story into a case of double standards just reminds us that the GOP hypocrisy machine is also alive and well, handing out nonsensical talking point memos to those in seats of power.

Remember our motto: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.

Catch up with you soon.

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This is John Cornyn's fourth GOP Hypocrite of the Week Award. He also won on Dec. 18, 2009, Feb. 13, 2009 and April 7, 2005. You can see a list of all previous nominees here.

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