So Bill Frist wants an apology from his Senate colleague, Dick Durbin of Illinois, for remarks that supposedly equated the U.S. detention facility for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with Nazi and Soviet death camps.
It's a particularly timely word that Frist invokes. So let's consider the question in a larger context.
On June 13, the Senate apologized for America's history of lynchings and for not acting as a body to denounce lynchings while they were taking place. This should have been uncontroversial, and for about nine-tenths of the Senate, it was. But eight Republican senators couldn't see their way clear to support this measure, originated by Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu and Virginia Republican George Allen. Most notably, both Mississippi senators, Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, opposed it.
Landrieu pushed the measure because she knows her state carries an indefensible legacy on the question of lynching, being among the five states with the most lynchings in American history. But even so, Louisiana is no Mississippi.
From 1880 to 1930, according to one study of that era of rampant mob justice, white hate mobs lynched about 2,500 African Americans -- one citizen a week, every week, on average for 50 years. The great state of Mississippi was the lynching leader, with 462 victims during that time. Mississippi also had the highest number of victims per 100,000, 52.8, making it proportionally the undisputed lynching champion. The number of lynchings began to fall after the 1930s, but another 119 people were lynched there through 1968.
This is not rhetorical hyperbole of the sort Durbin stands accused of engaging in. These are irrefutable historical facts. Yet to the senators of Mississippi, they invite no introspection, bear no scrutiny, and occasion no apology. "I don't think I'll get in the business of apologizing for acts that previous Senates took," said Cochran, who holds the Senate seat once occupied by James Eastland, one of the most virulently open racists in the Senate's history.
Yes, Eastland was a Democrat, and the Democratic history on this question is far from admirable, even putting aside the “Dixiecrats”; Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to speak out on behalf of an anti-lynching bill that Democratic Senators Robert F. Wagner and Edward Costigan pushed. But Democrats at least recognized that lynchings represented an American holocaust, and they apologized.
The right still loves to invoke, during these conversations, Robert Byrd, whose ugly racial history The Washington Post reminded us of on June 19. But with Byrd, it's just that: history. He has been apologizing since the mid-'70s, and he told the Post that "I don't mind apologizing over and over again." (Byrd, of course, voted for Landrieu's measure.) Cochran and Lott, on the other hand, leave their state's brutal history unexamined.
Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman gets lots of mileage out of talking about the GOP "modernizing" its message to reach out to black voters. If he really means it, he should have something to say about Lott and Cochran and the six other GOP senators for whom an apology for lynching proved too controversial. Funny how, to the right, Byrd's past is used as ammunition to try to counter columns like this one, while Mississippi's past is dismissed as too long ago to have relevance.
The Terri Schiavo autopsy, meanwhile, is only days old, and it has plenty of relevance. Will Frist now apologize for his questioning of Schiavo's medical diagnosis based on his viewing of a 4-year-old videotape? For forcing through private-relief legislation for Schiavo in part on the basis of that viewing? Of course he won't, but he will twist Durbin's words -- accusing him of attacking the military, when Durbin's anger was obviously directed toward civilians George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales -- and distort the meaning of what Durbin said. The "comparison" to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia was something of a bank shot, and the speech included eloquent testimony from a former member of Congress who'd been held in a Vietnamese prison camp for six and a half years and who said that he credited the Geneva Conventions and the standards to which the United States once adhered for helping to ensure his survival.
This week, undoubtedly, the anti-Durbin chorus will get louder and louder as those on the right try to use the Illinois senator to distract the media and change the subject from their multiple failures, and the failures of their president. But the evidence of those failures is growing too preponderant for even cable television to ignore, and the demands for apologies too blatantly hypocritical. From the ghosts of innocent, dead Mississippians to the freed U.S. citizen-captives of Guantanamo to the growing majority of Americans that believes this administration and Congress are failing badly, the protests against this un-American regime are also getting louder and louder. And this is the chorus that ought to be listened to.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
