Thurmond's dead

[ixnay]

At least he stayed alive long enough to take out Trent Lott with his 100th birthday.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Sava
South Carolina = Stupid People

You're skating your ass real close to the limit on snide remarks, Sava.

The man's dead, get some semblance of class. Or at least STFU.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Hey, I'm not a Xian, I don't forgive evil men. Thurmond never saw the light and was a force for evil up until he became a member of the walking dead. I'll feel exactly the same way when Helms shuffles off this mortal coil, just as I'm sure there will be plenty of people saying hallelujas when Castro dies.

So get off your high horses. I won't say this about many people, but I'm glad Strom is dead. Or actually, I would be if he was worth caring about anymore.

Perhaps I need to get you off yours, for a bit?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Sava
Unwarranted my ass... just look at his voting record for pete's sake!

Here's at least one black man whose life was put to an end by Strom Thurmond.

Sava, what you know about the south under Jim Crow you could write in a matchbook with a marker pen and still have room for your girlfriend's phone number.

Thurmond didn't kill that man, the whole nature of the south did.

Put a black man on a jury then, he'd be dead too.

Instruct the jury on self-defence, they wouldn't give a fair damn - and it's up to the defense lawyer and prosecutor to request jury instructions.

Not sentence him to death, he'd as likely be lynched, with ol' "****** lover" Strom strung up right beside him.

That part of the south's history was some meanass ****heel vicious. Strom later did repudiate his racist past, and did a lot of things to reverse it - not soon enough maybe, but he did.

Helms, on the other hand, is still a vicious, sewer-runnin' swamp rat.

[The Mad Monk]

Ex-S.C. Sen. Strom Thurmond Dies at 100
4 minutes ago Add Top Stories - AP to My Yahoo!

WASHINGTON - Sen. Strom Thurmond (news, bio, voting record) of South Carolina, a one-time Democratic segregationist who helped fuel the rise of the modern conservative Republican Party in the South, died Thursday.

The news came from Thurmond's son, Strom Jr.

Thurmond, the longest-serving senator in history, was 100

Thurmond, whose physical and political endurance were legendary — he holds the record for solo Senate filibustering — retired on Jan. 5, 2003 at the age of 100 after more than 48 years in office.

Age took its inevitable toll on Thurmond as he neared retirement, and he was guided through the Capitol in a wheelchair. Yet he wielded political power virtually to the end, prevailing upon President Bush (news - web sites) to appoint his 29-year-old son, Strom Jr., as U.S. Attorney in South Carolina in 2001.


Thurmond is "beyond criticism" in South Carolina, Furman political scientist Don Aiesi said as the senator's health declined and he underwent a series of hospitalizations late in his congressional tenure. "Strom is the most venerable of institutions here."


In a political career that spanned seven decades, Thurmond won his first election in 1928, to local office, and his last in 1996, to his eighth Senate term. "We cannot and I shall not give up on our mission to right the 40-year wrongs of liberalism," he said during his last campaign. "The people of South Carolina know that Strom Thurmond doesn't like unfinished business."


His voting record was pro-defense, anti-communist and staunchly conservative. His devotion to constituent services was legendary. He was a lifelong physical fitness buff, who shunned tobacco and alcohol and was known for his vigorous handshake. He had a storied, lifelong reputation as a ladies man.


Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 and won 39 Southern electoral votes as part of a states-rights uprising against President Harry Truman's support for civil rights. Nearly a decade later, he set the Senate record for filibustering when he spoke for a straight 24 hours and 18 minutes against a bill to end discrimination in housing.


Ironically, his presidential campaign sparked controversy more than a half-century later, when then-Majority Leader Treat Lott declared at Thurmond's 100th birthday party that voters of Mississippi were proud to have supported the South Carolinian when he ran for the White House. "If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either," added Lott, who was forced to step down as the Senate's Republican leader in the ensuing uproar.


Thurmond's racial politics changed over the years as blacks began voting in large numbers. He became the first Southern senator to hire a black aide, supported the appointment of a black Southern federal judge and voted to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.


His outlook seemed far different a half century ago, when he ran for president.


"I want to tell you," he declared in one speech in 1948, "that there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."


Thurmond grew up a Democrat — his father once ran for office — but switched to the GOP in 1964 to support Barry Goldwater's conservative campaign for the White House.


He said at the time he had made the move because Democrats were "leading the evolution of our nation to a socialistic dictatorship."


Like other Southern states, South Carolina had been a one-party Democratic state since the end of Reconstruction nearly a century earlier. Thurmond's switch anticipated a broader trend. By the 1990s, the South favored the GOP, and Republican candidates generally triumphed in statewide races in South Carolina.


The first time he ran as a Republican, in 1966, he won easily.





In 1968, Thurmond played a pivotal role in executing the "Southern Strategy" that helped Richard Nixon win the White House. The South Carolinian helped hold Southern delegates in line at the GOP convention when a charismatic conservative, Ronald Reagan (news - web sites), made a late play for the nomination. In the general election, he sought to blunt George Wallace's third-party candidacy in the South, arguing that anything but a vote for Nixon would help elect a liberal Democrat, Hubert Humphrey.

Born Dec. 5, 1902 in Edgefield, S.C., James Strom Thurmond — Strom was his mother's maiden name — was elected county school superintendent, state senator and circuit judge before enlisting in the Army in World War II. He landed in Normandy as part of the 82nd Airborne Division assault on D-Day, and won five battle stars and numerous other awards.

The war over, he returned home to resume his political career and won election as governor in 1946. His record was progressive by contemporary standards for a Southern Democrat. He pushed for repeal of the poll tax and boosted education spending.

He lost a race in South Carolina for the only time in his career four years later, when he challenged incumbent Sen. Olin Johnston for renomination. In defeat, he returned home to practice law.

But in 1954, Sen. Burnet Maybank died unexpectedly. When party officials tapped a state lawmaker to run for the post, Thurmond challenged as a write-in candidate, saying the voters, not the party's leaders, should decide who got the nomination. To underscore his credentials as an insurgent, he pledged to resign his seat before seeking re-election in 1956.

He won, the only person in history to capture a seat in Congress by write-in. Two years later, he kept his pledge to resign before running for the four years remaining in the term.

His presidential race and write-in victory behind him, Thurmond arrived in Washington with a nationwide reputation. The civil rights movement was gathering steam, but he held fast to his segregationist views for years.

He was a leader in drafting the Southern Manifesto of 1956, in which Southern lawmakers vowed resistance to the Supreme Court's unanimous school desegregation order. In 1957, he staged his record nonstop filibuster against housing legislation that he denounced as "race mixing."

Ironically, in earlier decades, Thurmond's segregationist views were more nuanced than those held by other Southern politicians.

As governor, he called for forceful prosecution after a black man, a murder suspect, was lynched by a mob. The result was a trial at which 31 white men were defendants.

His 1950 defeat came at the hands of an opponent who made an issue of Thurmond's gubernatorial appointment of a black physician to a state medical advisory board.

Like many one-time segregationists, Thurmond insisted the issue wasn't race but "federal power vs. state power" — though the state power he wanted to preserve was the power to segregate.

"The question of integration was only one facet of that matter," he said in a November 1992 interview.

Showing how much his world had changed, in 1977, Thurmond's young daughter, Nancy, 6, enrolled in a public school in Columbia, S.C., that was 50 percent black. The girl's teacher also was black.

Thurmond's first wife, Jean Crouch, was 23 years his junior. The couple married in 1947, and she died of a brain tumor in 1960.

His second wife, former beauty queen Nancy Moore, was 44 years younger than Thurmond when they were married in 1968. Thurmond was 68 when their first child, Nancy, was born. The couple had three other children before separating in 1991: Strom Jr., Juliana and Paul. Nancy died in 1993 after being struck by a car.

[Alexander's Horse]

I don't think its a good idea to speak ill of the dead. Its a courtesy most of us are going to want one day.

[Al B. Sure!]

anyone else amazed by how his son is only 29?

[MichaeltheGreat]

He married late and his first wife was beyond her childbearing years. She died of cancer, and he remarried a hot-blooded young thang a few years after.

[Al B. Sure!]

yes but he would have been 71...

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
yes but he would have been 71...

Yeah? And?

[Dis]

you know he was a human after all.

I see how happy you guys are about another man's death.

I thought liberals were supposed to be enlightened and treat everyone equally- no matter how bad of a person they are.

This just proves liberals are hypocrites.

[Al B. Sure!]

MtG:

it's amazing how women cease being able to re-produce in their 50's but men stay virile... but i didnt think into their 70's! i knew thurmond was a physically strong and able man but not that able...

[ixnay]

Originally posted by Dissident
I thought liberals were supposed to be enlightened and treat everyone equally- no matter how bad of a person they are.

This just proves liberals are hypocrites.

I think you're confused and have mixed up liberals and Jesus.

[LoneWolf]

Originally posted by Sava

Trash. Simple as that.

[Ben Kenobi]

to Boris and monkspider for showing exceptionally good taste. Just because you disagree with someone does not make it appropriate to celebrate the death.

Couldn't have said it better Shi.

People can change over their life, if it were not so, how could any of us improve?