Kilpatrick (at right) presided over the meetings of the Richmond News Leader's editorial board during the battles over school desegregation following the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown

James J. Kilpatrick, erudite racist and TV comedian

By Scott V. Sandiford
Justice Correspondent

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As word spread through the Nation's Capital of the death of well-spoken race baiter James J. Kilpatrick, the response was virtually unanimous: "Who the hell is James J. Kilpatrick?"

Time has a way of catching up with even the most indefatigable bloviators, so those among you younger than, oh, let's say, 40, probably don't remember when his Poindexter-like dome was a weekly fixture at the end of "60 Minutes," where Andy Rooney today rests in peace.

He had a long-running shtick with Shana Alexander, a woman of more moderate political views, in which she would make some modest unexceptionable point, i.e. Nixon was a dirty crook, and he would respond with a hissy fit.

But the tedious back-and-forth, although ripe for parody, wouldn't by itself earn Mr. Kilpatrick a place on the Spy's obituary page.

No, his real infamy was earned two decades earlier, when he served as the editorial page editor of the Richmond News Leader in the aftermath of the Brown decision, which held that state-mandated segregation (such as prevailed in Virginia) violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

At that time, the states of the old Confederacy had a choice: would they obey the law or would they defy it?  The outcome was preordained in backwater hellholes like Mississippi, but it was hoped that in more civilized precincts, which Virginia purported to be, the upright white citizens brigade would comply without stirring up a boiling cauldron of hatred.

Thanks to fine Southern gentlemen like Kilpatrick, it didn't work out that way in Old Virginny.  Instead, like the miserable Byrd hacks that had the Commonwealth in a death grip, he resurrected pre-Civil War doctrines of "interposition" and "nullification," pursuant to which states that didn't feel like complying with the Constitution, including its Article VI, wouldn't have to.

As a result, Virginia was paralyzed by entirely unnecessary racial conflict, and, after many years, the schools were in fact desegregated, allowing Virginia to rejoin the human race.

Kilpatrick was smart enough (we think) to know (or in his case remember) that we had fought a great Civil War, ending in the capture of the very city set forth in the name of his newspaper, precisely to settle this question, and that the traitorous Commonwealth of Virginia was allowed to rejoin the United States on the condition that it accepted the Fourteenth Amendment.

Years later, having reinvented himself as a right-wing newspaper columnist, he tried to drop his past racist incitement down the memory hole.  According to The New York Times, when asked whether he had any regrets over his absurd trumpeting of an evil cause at a crucial time, he responded as follows:

“I was brought up a white boy in Oklahoma City in the 1920s and 1930. . . . I accepted segregation as a way of life. Very few of us, I suspect, would like to have our passions and profundities at age 28 thrust in our faces at 50.” 

Well, sure, we probably said some things when we were 28 that we now wish we hadn't (sorry about that, Junie Jo Prewitt!), but they didn't involve fomenting insurrection or pouring great carloads of salt into the raw, festering racial wounds created by our ancestors.

Presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama wouldn't think much of Kilpatrick's obstinate refusal to atone for his vile words and deeds, because they had charity for all and, unlike Kilpatrick and his ilk, malice toward none.

But they don't publish the Spy, so we'll content ourselves with recording history's verdict on this pompous coward:  what an asshole.

Before Ted Stevens sent $200 million of U.S. taxpayer money to Juneau, the Alaska State Capitol was a modest structure

Cranky old gonif Ted Stevens, 86

By Robert F. Scott
Travel Editor

TED STEVENS INTER- NATIONAL AIRPORT – If you seek Ted Stevens's monument, sit at one of the many bars at Anchorage's palatial airport and look around you. Enjoy it; you paid for it.

Ted Stevens, whose six terms as Senator from the most primitive corner of the United States came to an unlamented end due to his bribery conviction, had the typical hack's view of government taxes and spending: he was against taxes and for spending, at least on his backward home state. If that didn't make too much sense to you, well, as Sen. Stevens was wont to say, "Go f*** yourself."

Thus, the Senator who voted for several rounds of Bush tax cuts, all paid for with borrowed money, also threatened to bring down the Senate should it dare to save an iota of lost revenue by canceling a $452,000,000 bridge connecting Ketchikan, Alaska with an almost-uninhabited island.

After his defeat, his many felony convictions were reversed by the white criminal's friend, the D.C. federal courts, on various grounds, including supposed prosecutorial misconduct, none of which cast any doubt on the evidence proving that every Senator had a price, and Ted's was all things considered not unreasonable – a Barcalounger here, a reshingling there. Then again, in the state he represented, indoor plumbing is a big f****in' deal.

Old Ted was if nothing else a man of principle.  The principle was that the taxpayers of 49 states should pay to provide Alaskans with the public facilities that they were too chintzy to finance themselves through, for example, an income tax or the state's share of its immense oil wealth.

We don't begrudge building roads and airports in the trackless wasteland of Seward's Folly. It's just that the rest of us would like some of it too. For the Alaska Railroad, Ted plucked a cool (and shortly thereafter permanently frozen) $250,000,000 out of the Treasury. Eight billion for "high" speed rail for the 99.7% of Americans who don't live in the Arctic? Ted said NFW.

In just the last decade of his career, he directed over $3,500,000,000 of your money to his tweaking constituents. If you want to know where it went, click here.

To the inevitable whine that this page constitutes a breach of good taste on the grounds that the subject of its obloquy is in no condition to respond, we can only say we're doing our best to follow in Teddy's snowshoes.  He was proud of his reputation as a "mean, miserable SOB." His words, not ours.

A few examples should suffice. After his first wife died in a 1978 air crash, perhaps suggesting a need for some regulation of Alaskan bush pilots flying under IFR (I Follow Ridgelines), he blamed the other Alaska Senator for her death on the grounds that said Senator had delayed some legislation Stevens was pushing. Citizens Against Government Waste? "Psychopaths." House Republicans who stripped out some juicy bits of pork he had tagged for Alaska? "Sons of bitches" who should be shot.

All of this wretchedness might be lost to history, except that Sen. Stevens forgot that the Internet was more than a series of tubes – it's also an infinite array of file cabinets that will store the records of Ted Stevens's malfeasance until the end of time or Google (likely to be contemporaneous events).

Still there's got to be something nice we can say about the late Senator from Alaska. Wait a minute – we've got it! He wasn't the nastiest Republican politician in Washington. After all, Ted never compared the 1.4 billion adherents of Islam to Nazis. Hell, if there had been any mosques in Alaska, ol' Ted would have sent out paving crews and linemen, and, as with every other achievement in his long career, sent the bill to you and me.