Dick Armey Offers Advice to Republicans Upon his Departure.

Outgoing House Majority Leader Dick Armey had a message for Republicans on Friday: You are going to control American politics for a long time so you better be ready to do something with all that power.


Interesting, but if stories like this get any kind of play, that may not be the case:

http://bbs.clutchcity.net/php3/showthread.php?s=&threadid=47161

Having your Senate majority leader be portrayed as a massive racist isn't really good for the party.

Ten years later, Armey authored the Contract With America that was seen as pivotal for the Republican win of congressional control, the first time in nearly 40 years. He became majority leader and made sure 70 percent of that contract, which focused largely on personal empowerment, turned into law.


Wasn't this primarily Newt's doing? When did he leave the Congress? I know he was Majority Leader from 1994-1996, but I don't know if made it to 1998.

 

Newt made it to 98. He was pushed out because his party did so poorly at the midterm elections that year. His big gaffe was trying to win that election on the Lewinsky scandal, I believe.

Then that other fellow was Speaker for a week, before he had to resign cause he was an enormous hypocrite.

 

Are you sure it's just the article making the quantum leap?

Come on, aren't you the least bit curious what he meant by "all these problems" and why his colleagues gasped and then went silent?

Maybe you should check out the Council of Conservative Citizens website. The fact that he's spoken at their meetings and they are obviously supporters of his shows that it's not a quantum leap, but at least a fair assumption that Lott is a racist. Are you sure you want to stick up for ths guy?

http://www.cofcc.org/

Check out the "Grassroots Revolt against Black Supremacy"

While you're there, you may want to buy the book that exposes the truth about Martin Luther King jr. and why he doesn't deserve a national holiday.

Oohh, and check out the black prof(who said some pretty stupid things) on the front page. They said he was hired through affirmitive action, but the guy has degrees from Harvard and Oxford. I guess it's just because he's black that he got hired, lord knows that they'll let any ole idiot into Harvard and Oxford these days

Come on Ref, I don't know that Lott is a full blown racist, but he is definately closer to being that than a tolerant person. If that weren't the case, then why would he associate with these people at all?

 

Ridiculous. People take someting that Lott said at a gathering to celebrate Thurmond and then they couple that with statements made 48 years ago (when Thurmond's comments were a pretty prevalent thought - we HAVE come a long way, thank God)...and they use that to equal Trent Lott is a racist. Talk about your quantum leap in logic.


No more of a quantum leap than portraying a Democrat who's a military veteran that fought for his country as a anti-war coward because he didn't like the Homeland Security proposal. It worked for the Republicans. Accuracy is far less important than emotional impact for campaigns and party image.

And, as Oski pointed out, it's not just me making the connection that he's a racist.

 

While we mutually agree that accuracy should be accounted for, the attempt to mark the conservative party as racist is unfounded. Would it be a quantum leap for myself to make the association of a member of the democratic party and the KKK? As in KKK Byrd? I believe much can be looked into comments even though its easy for most here to assume Saddam has no nuclear weapons but find it much more easier to believe, without evidence mind you, that select republicans are racists. Even though no republican can be physically associated with the KKK the hipocrisy of the liberal party have a person who WAS a member of this absurd white supremacist group representing their party. But silly me, didn’t you know that Democrats can never be racist? Nevermind Al Gore, Sr.’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nevermind The Congressional Quarterly of June 26, 1964 which recorded in the Senate only 69% of Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act as compared to 82% of Republicans. All southern Democratic senators voted against the Act. Including everyone's favorite liberal and critically untouchable, current senator of West Virginia and former KKK member Robert Byrd. The funny thing is how many eat up the garbage that the democratic machine spews and takes it as the gospel. As they continue to claim they support minorities and the poor they place filthy rich, white people in house leadership seats ala Nancy Pilosi while the more respectible Harold Ford of Tennessee has to sit at the back of the democratic bus. But democrats can't be racist remember?

 

Wow, you are a very judgmental person. Hey since I hang out with gay people does that make me morally acceptive of their lifestyle? Of course not. Lott is unfairly being criticized. This is a ridiculous assertion.

 

You know, most of those Democrats who were against things like Civil Rights ended up switching parties. I'm guessing your a Republican X-Pac, well there was a time that they were the Liberal party. Would you have been a member back then?


Anyways, who mentioned the Rupublican party in the first place? We're talking about Trent Lott.

So you hang out with gays but you are morally against their way of life, ok. Well many of us accept homosexuals and don't think there's anything wrong with what they are doing. Now racists, on the other hand, I and the majority of people would say that their beliefs are wrong and immoral. So your analogy doesn't really make sense. I don't believe you or anybody should spend time and turn a blind eye to people who are immoral. The difference is what and who we find to be immoral.

 

Sort of like taking one aide's enthusiastic talk at a funeral and branding the whole thing a callous political event instead of a memorial service, eh Ref?

 

"We are now, and will be even more so throughout our lifetimes, the governing majority party. That's not a hope, dream or preference. It's a fact and we must come to terms with it."

I never cease to be amazed by people's short-sightedness. In my own lifetime, control of the government has see-sawed back and forth on a regular basis. With the country almost cleanly split, I see no reason that this back and forth control won't continue.

Whenever I think I've found myself standing on fixed ground, I remember the phrase "This too shall pass." Our leaders would do well to remember this also.

 

This entire post is a non-sequiter and irrelevant to whether Trent Lott is, or is not a racist. Well done.

 

He associates with the group, and its ideals. By appearing to speak before them, he lends to them a legitimacy they should not posses. Failure to criticize the more racist of those ideals is a tacit approval of them.

 

I guess by your logic we could say the same thing for certain Democrats. Since the Robert Byrd was/is a member of the KKK then that means he condons racism. Democrats historically have been the party of racist or race baiters.

 

You are right, to a degree. A Democratic administration allowed the incarceration of American citizens because they looked like the enemy... an absolute shame, even given the circumstances at the time. Southern Democrats established the Jim Crow laws, oppossed integration and the Brown decision. But Dems also integrated the military, put Marshall on the Court, and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1964. The same president that signed those acts predicted Southern Democrats would soon leave the party because of those acts and Republicans would then become the force in the South for a generation. He was right and nothing proves it more than the career of Strom... Democrat, Dixiecrat, revered Republican. LBJ worked for and signed the Civil Rights Act thinking it was good for his country and knowing it was bad for his party. (I'm not an unabashed LBJ fan, but I think this was the last truly great act of leadership we've seen in this country.)

What you fail to realize Phi, is that due to a number of historical influences, not the least of which was the Civil War and Reconstruction, prior to 1964 most current Southern Republicans would have been Democrats (just as Strom was) who oppossed civil rights and favored segregation. Lott is part of that ideological tradition. Byrd was also, but changed his mind and views and repudiated his past beliefs.

(You guys can talk about Byrd's KKK membership all you want, but the difference is that he lifted himself out of the gutter, while Strom and Lott and other Repubs chose to stay there.)

1964 was the pivotal year for modern American politics. We live with that legacy today and nothing has been the same since.

 

Yeah, I'm sure by trying to help people who represent a minority of the voting population, the Dems have really been making shrewd political moves to appease groups with low voter turnout in an amazing scheme to win positions in government. Jeeze, and all this time I thought I was voting for people who shared my beliefs and morals.


I don't know why, but this reminds me of a joke Dave Chapelle tells during his show. He's in a restaurant in Mississippi and as he's about to order when the waiter says "the chicken." Chapelle then says "I could not believe that, this man was absolutely right." Then he asks the waiter how he knew he was going to order chicken. The waiter replies, "Come on buddy, come on now buddy, now everybody knew as soon as you walked through the god damned door, you were gonna get some chicken. It is no secret down here that blacks and chickens are quite fond of one another." Chapelle then says that he was upset because he wasn't ready to here that, basically, all these years he thought that he liked chicken because it was delicious, but the reality is that he's genitically predisposed to like chicken.

Anyways, I thought that all these years me and other Dems were doing what we thought was right, but the reality is that we are so dumb, we are trying to get elected into government by appeasing minorities. Hey, I think that waiter may have been related to you Phi83.

Manipulating the poor, jeeze, lord knows that they just vote in droves during every election.