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J O E+C O N A S O N + ++ L E F T + H O O K | PAGE 2 OF 2

No doubt Lott has assumed that the Council of Conservative Citizens sounds sufficiently innocuous to save him any embarrassment. And he isn't alone in supporting the CCC -- the group's November national meeting in Jackson, Miss., was addressed by Gov. Kirk Fordice. (Indeed, CCC gatherings regularly enjoy the patronage of Republican candidates.) After all, what's wrong with being "conservative"?

But a review of the CCC Web site shows that it is a front not only for old-fashioned Southern racism but for modern neo-fascism as well. The leader of the CCC's Washington, D.C., chapter is Mark Cerr, an immigrant from the United Kingdom who was active there in the neo-fascist National Front and its successor, the British National Party, and whose real name is Mark Cotterill. The top link on the CCC site is to Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, the leading fascist party in France. Other links lead to openly racist and fascist sites -- one of which leads in turn to the National Vanguard, perhaps the most bloodthirsty neo-Nazi organization now active in the United States. (Its leader, William Pierce, wrote "The Turner Diaries," a notorious work of fiction that looks forward to an American Holocaust, with Jews swinging from lampposts and blacks slaughtered in the streets.)

What ought to be even more disturbing to Republicans is the CCC's attitude toward Abraham Lincoln, the supposed patron saint of the Grand Old Party. Page after page on its Web site disparages the Civil War president in the most disgusting terms, calling him "a tyrant, surely the most evil American in history." Lincoln was "ugly," "dirty," "grotesque" and a homosexual, too. (Aside from blacks and Mexicans, the CCC seems most hostile to gays and lesbians.) The only "morally defensible position" ever taken by Honest Abe, according to the CCC's writers, was his tepid support for returning freed slaves to Africa.

Naturally, the CCC despises Clinton. In one essay by a writer named Millard, the president is described as an "Oreo turned inside out," ironically agreeing with author Toni Morrison's assertion in the New Yorker that he may be "America's first black liberal President."

In fact, racial animus has motivated some of the most active and angry Clinton-bashers from the beginning of his presidency. Among the most notable is "Justice Jim" Johnson, a former judge who made his mark in Arkansas as a leader of the White Citizens Council in the '50s. Johnson played a cameo role in history when he stirred the violent mob outside Little Rock's Central High School during the integration crisis that forced President Eisenhower to dispatch federal troops. Clinton entered Arkansas politics in 1966 as an opponent of Johnson's unsuccessful campaign for governor -- an affront the unrepentant segregationist never forgot. Johnson's more recent credits include his appearance in the discredited "Clinton Chronicles" videos marketed by Rev. Jerry Falwell, which accuse the president of complicity in drug smuggling and murder.

To these die-hards of the extreme right, impeachment is vindication, and they don't care whether the Republican Party is ruined in the process. But if Trent Lott and Bob Barr want to wax indignant over the president's sins, they ought to take better care of their own moral hygiene. Stanley Crouch, the author and columnist for the New York Daily News, asked pertinently the other day whether "Republicans will be constantly asked from now on about these men and their association with unreconstructed Southern racists the same way that black politicians are always asked about Louis Farrakhan."

Don't hold your breath, Stanley; most American media remain far too invested in deposing Clinton to ask hard questions about his adversaries. The answers might be just a little too disturbing.
SALON | Dec. 22, 1998

Joe Conason's Left Hook column appears every other Tuesday in Salon. Research assistance for the article was provided by Bonnie Simrell.

Bookmark http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/cona/