Lovely editorial in the Washington Times that gives Trent Lott the drawing and quartering he deserves.
Mr. Lott's comments about the immigration bill are unfortunate in their own right. But his suggestion that talk radio is a problem that someone has to "deal with" because it makes it harder to ram the immigration bill through the Senate is even worse, because it raises the specter of reviving the "Fairness Doctrine" — the Federal Communications Commission policy (repealed in 1987 at President Reagan's urging) that effectively barred any serious political debate from occurring on the airwaves. The result of the demise of the "equal-time rule" has been the rise of issue-oriented talk radio — perhaps the one area of the media where conservatives dominate. So, liberals who say they believe so strongly in the First Amendment want to revive the doctrine in order to prevent talk radio from doing what is has done on the illegal-immigration issue: educate people about what has been jammed into this massive bill and how it affects their country.
Look: I know he's from Mississippi and the whole state is a dump (yes, I've been there on many an occasion). But is he the best the GOP can dredge from that swamp?
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