This is about Scalise, but it's by no means only about Scalise

Apologizing for things in which you had no part and that you could not possibly have prevented is ridiculous.

Regret, on the other hand, is by no means impossible.

If your neighbor is injured in a mugging you may sensibly regret that happened to him, even if you were not the mugger and you could not have prevented it.

<Aside.>

On the other hand, if you barely know him you won't really regret it, will you?

What if he lives pretty far up the street?

What if you don't even know the victim of the mugging, but read about it in the newspaper?

When reading such faits divers, do you really pause to regret each and every traffic accident, drowning, fall from a tree, lost cat, or gangland murder you read about?

If you found out that some great, great, great grand-uncle of yours fell off a roof and was killed 150 years ago, would you regret it?

What if he was wrongly imprisoned for life?

What if he was hanged for a crime for which he was later cleared?

Would you regret it, or would that just make an interesting story to share at parties?

God, what a lot of codswallop.

Maybe you could write a novel.

</Aside.>

But apologize?

Only if you had some part in the mugging!

Still, it's an ill wind, as they say.

Who Regrets Slavery? Not Steve Scalise

Well, who should we expect to regret it?

Black Americans descended from slaves most likely would never have been born, or anyway born Americans, had their ancestors not been brought here for slavery.

Should they regret their ancestors were kidnapped and enslaved?

Any number of white Americans who trace their ancestry to colonial Virginia are descended from wretched criminals of the lowest social order, sent here as a punishment, no doubt some of them wrongly.

Should they regret that their ancestors were thus punished?

In fact, most people born here are descended from people whose lives were so awful in the Old Country they basically fled here.

Should we regret our ancestors had it so bad in the Old Country that they were forced to flee into a godforsaken wilderness?

Pshaw.

Even more idiotic is the notion that you might regret, or be expected to regret, horrid things that happened to my ancestors, ages ago, even if your ancestors made them happen.

Crazier still if those long ago perpetrators were only of the same race as you, but not your ancestors at any remove at all.

Or vice versa.

Again, a story for a cocktail party or a new novel.

Otherwise, all of this is just nonsense.

But enough coy dancing around.

It is pretty clear the underlying issue is reparations, and SS was refusing to take the first step toward some sort of public admission that today's white Americans morally if not legally owe reparations to today's black Americans.

Good for him.

I'm pretty sure BooMan and most other liberals would, if pressed, support that moral claim and project for reparations, though I do not.

And he and they know perfectly well that's what's up when black people propose such official expressions of white people's "regret."

Afterthought.

After the Civil War, some of the Radical Republicans proposed breaking up the slave plantations and distributing the land to the freed slaves.

That was not done.

American blacks and their friends might well regret it was not done, the former more poignantly than the latter.

And in any case if I agree to regret that some white person 150 years ago was not forced to give his land to his ex-slaves, that's a far cry from admitting I owe his descendants something to make up for that.