To the reader who supplied the tape that forced Trent Lott’s resignation as Majority Leader. Lost your email, got a message for you. Contact me. (Those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about — the short story is that Trent Lott resigned after that tape passed through this website and was run on MSNBC. Oddly this crucial coup-de-grace is never mentioned in summaries of the incident, which just credit the blogs, usually Josh Marshall. Josh recognized the significance of Lott’s comments about the desirability of a Thurmond presidency immediately, and the blogs kept the story alive, but what brought Lott down was one TMW reader in the midwest with a long memory and a tape of Lott making exactly the same comment several years prior. But that doesn’t fit so neatly into the power-of-blogs narrative that’s been constructed since.)
BY TOM TOMORROW