He’s a white son of the South and that’s enough to justify a lynching
Attorney General Nominee Jeff Sessions Illustration by Greg Groesch/The Washington Times
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Dishonest media attacks against President-Elect Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, won’t derail his confirmation. But it’s important to discuss where they come from because not everyone who realizes their origin is comfortable with that conversation.
The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times spent more than a month working on stories that were exclusively about Jeff Sessions and race, to run before Mr. Sessions’ Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Their aim was clear: to try to define Mr. Sessions as a caricature, stepping straight out of the segregated south and into the Department of Justice, ignoring his 20-year career as a United States senator.
There’s only one reason why large news organizations invest so much time, energy and money — they sent reporters to Alabama, each of whom spent a week there — to do these biased stories, and it’s time someone said what it is. The reason is because someone, somewhere, deep down doesn’t believe a white man from Alabama should be the attorney general of the United States.
It’s crucial for the attorney general to have an effective working relationship with national, state and local law enforcement. It’s also important for the senators who will be judging Mr. Sessions to know that Americans’ respect for law enforcement is at a 50-year high. This contrasts deeply with the low approval ratings the public consistently registers for Congress.
Additionally, that full picture would include Mr. Sessions’ 20-year career in the U.S. Senate, where he consistently worked with leading Democrats to pass meaningful bills, including landmark legislation that was signed into law by presidents of both political parties.
In 2003 Jeff Sessions and Ted Kennedy — yes, that Ted Kennedy — led the drive to pass the Prison Rape Elimination Act. It was signed into law by President George W. Bush.
In 2010 Jeff Sessions and Dick Durbin — yes, the same Dick Durbin who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and will be asking questions of Mr. Sessions — led the drive to pass the Crack Cocaine Fair Sentencing Act. Mr. Sessions actually first introduced that bill in 2001 and never gave up on it over nine years.
He held strategy meetings in his office with organizations such as the NAACP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). The bill was signed into law by President Obama and afterward the LCCR issued a news release praising Mr. Sessions and his colleagues on both sides of the aisle.
In 2011 conservative Sen. Jeff Sessions and liberal Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut led the drive to pass the Finding Fugitive Sex Offender Act. It also was signed into law by President Obama.
None of these achievements, nor the aforementioned endorsements, were found in either of these stories, each of which were thousands of words long. Jeff Sessions will be the next attorney general despite the national media’s anti-white, anti-southern racism, and the country will be better for it.
• Ken Blackwell is the first African-American to be elected statewide in Ohio (secretary of state and state treasurer), and is a former mayor of Cincinnati.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/3/a-media-noose-for-jeff-sessions/