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Flame » in reply to and Miller didn't know this going in? What planet has he been living on?

You're falling for the stereotypes
Larry J — (archived)

What I think we're seeing in Zell Miller is this natural trend for people, as they get older, to become more conservate and often downright mean and greedy. I know nothing about the man's earlier life and political convictions but I can assume, since he was a Democrat, that his platform was built around social causes and diversity.

It looks like you're falling for the old "conservatives are mean and greedy" stereotype. It simply isn't true any more than Democrats all being for social causes and diversity.

I grew up in the South during the 1960s. I got to see Democrats in action, men like George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Bull Conners. In case you're not familiar with that era, Democrats were the ones who passed the infamous "Jim Crow" laws throughout the South. They were the ones making racial discrimination and segregation the law of their states, and they were the ones who turned the fire hoses on peaceful protestors in places like Birmingham. They were the ones, like Senator Byrd of West Virginia, who were in the KKK.

It was a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who sent in the 101st Airborne into Little Rock to enforce school desegregation as mandated by the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision.

It was due to Republicans that the landmark Civil Rights Act was passed in the early 1960s. Democrats like Fullbright and Al Gore, Sr. not only opposed the act, many of them fillibustered against it. Even LBJ admitted that the CRA would never have passed without the strong support of Republicans.

Into this picture, let's look at Zell Miller. He was the Lt. Governor of Georgia for 16 years, including under Lester Maddox. No doubt he has some racial ugliness in his political past. However, he was also the governor who removed the Confederate flag from the statehouse building. If he was such a problem Democrat, then why did James Carvelle help him become the governor of Georgia, and why was he the man who gave the keynote speech for Clinton during the 1992 DNC convention?

Miller spoke with passion. That's quite different from the PC tainted political speeches we've heard for the last decade or so where the operating philosophy is "God forbid we might offend anyone anywhere!"

He may well have been loaded for a fight going into the Mathews show, especially after the disgraceful manner Mathews treated Michelle Malkin the week before (and the lies that Mathews repeated about it to Miller). When Mathews asked the asinine question about whether Miller literally believed that Kerry wanted to defend the nation with spitballs, Miller made Mathews look the the idiot he is. When I heard that, I had to laugh out loud. That alone is worth defending Miller, not that he needed it IMO.

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