"He's from What Virginia?"

Periodically Andrew Sullivan drives me nuts. He's a smart guy, a good writer, he's savvy, and he's a conservative I take very seriously because of these things. However, yesterday he wrote the following (his permalinks are not functioning very well, so I'll just block quote)

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE:"It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my view, would have been right at any time. He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation's 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true." Senator Chris Dodd, hailing former Klan member and active anti-gay bigot, Robert Byrd, on the floor of the Senate. Byrd would have been perfect during the Civil War? Wrong side, Senator Dodd. Wrong side. How much do you bet that Dodd's remarks will get one smidgen of the media attention Trent Lott's hailing of Strom Thurmond did?

Let's see, Andrew: What, precisely, was Lott praising in his speech(es) [he'd done it before] for Thurmond? He was praising Thurmond's actual stances, indeed his actual candidacy, as a Dixiecrat. Byrd's KKK affiliation is loathsome. I strongly oppose his stances on homosexuality. But to ascribe a Civil War view to Byrd is absurd. At the least it is anachronistic. Beyond the fact, of course, that West Virginia (not to complicate things, but WV is Byrd's, you know, home state) broke off from Virginia rather than secede, it is ridiculous to equate what Lott actually said with what Byrd might have thought had he been alive and a political figure 150 years ago. It is even more absurd to implicate Senator Dodd with bad motives for praising a Senator today based on Sullivan's interpretation of the Senator's views on the Civil War as opposed to what Lott had to say about Thurmond's actual views and actions. Never mind on top of this that Lott's statements simply served to cause some to look at Lott's less than savory views on race. If we find that Dodd has Lott's background on the very issues for which he is praising his fellow Senator, then Sullivan's analogy is apt. Since we won't, and since to my knowledge Sullivan has not yet gotten his"Kidnap Current Political Figures, Take Them Back In Time, and Make Them Take A Stance On The Issues" Machine off the ground, let's chalk this one up to bafoonery. Keep this one in mind next time Sullivan goes off shrilly denouncing someone else's supposedly half-baked conceptions.