Strikes me The Democrat’s Tuesday editorial was a strange reading of history.

Trent Lott’s comments were made publicly, Harry Reid’s privately. Big difference. Trent said this country would have “avoided all these problems” if Strom Thurmond had been elected in 1948.

Your editorial writer likely wasn’t alive then but he or she must surely know that Thurmond ran on an out and out segregationist platform.

So Trent supported that! Come on. It was an outrageous comment and he rightly lost his position as majority leader because of it.

Did Democrats use the comment for political reasons to beat him over the head? Of course they did, but Republicans had the majority in Congress at the time and if they had voted then as they do now in lock stop they could have held onto Trent.

All of that said, I never felt Lott was a die hard segregationist. He was and is a decent man, and I certainly don’t think of him as a racist.

The Democrat sees Reid’s comments, apparently, as so racist that he deserves to be removed from his role as majority leader. Remember, he said those words in private and they made their way into a book.

And what he said, let’s admit, was entirely truthful if politically incorrect.

Can any intelligent person, black or white, Republican or Democrat, think that a much blacker man with pronounced black accent could have been elected? No way. And is Reid  a racist because he made that comment? That’s a real stretch.

Bill Slatter

Natchez resident