Mychal Massie’s Jan. 16 WorldNetDaily column attacking Sen. Barbara Boxer’s comments to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was predictably rantlike. Also predictable was Massie’s failure to note one important fact: When Boxer noted that Rice had no children and thus would not pay a “personal price” for the Iraq war, she also pointed out that she herself would not pay a personal price because “[m]y kids are too old and my grandchild is too young.” Does that excuse Boxer’s remark to Rice? Not necessarily; but Massie’s failure to report Boxer’s full statement makes him an irresponsible columnist.
Similarly irresponsible: Massie, in his laundry list of attacks on Democrats, calls Sen. Robert Byrd an “unrepentant former Ku Klux Klan officer.” In fact, as Slate’s Timothy Noah points out, Byrd has apologized for his Klan past. Further, Massie glosses over Trent Lott’s comments that if Strom Thurmond had been elected president on his 1948 Dixiecrat segregationist ticket, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over these years” as “jocund comments made at a birthday party.” (By the way, Noah notes that Thurmond said as late as 1998 that “I don’t have anything to apologize for” regarding his racism; asked if he thought the Dixiecrats were right, Thurmond said, “Yes, I do.”)
Massie manages to keep his thesarus-plundering to a minimum this time, limiting himself to calling Boxer a “petulant harridan” and a “pettifogger.”