Who Doesn't Like Irony?

One can't help but appreciate the delicious irony of the rescue by the US Navy of the Iranian fishermen. It would have been a good story in any case, but the timing, and the fact that the rescue was made by the very carrier that the Iranian government had been upset about having in the area, could not have been more perfect. To do something magnanimous and make an irritating would-be foe look ridiculously puny at the same time...it is just such a feel good story. Not less so for coming on the heals of the spy drone fiasco.

The only upsetting aspect of the story is the knowledge that we named a carrier after John Stennis. (It turns out that NASA also has a Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.) I accept the fact that people can grow and their opinions can change, and that we should celebrate it when that happens, but that doesn't mean we need to develop amnesia about what happened earlier. It is a reward to the South for being so reliably pro-military spending.

The following is from Wikipedia.

Civil rights record

Like most Mississippi politicians, Stennis was a strong supporter of racial segregation. In the 1950s and 1960s he vigorously opposed the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and he signed the Southern Manifesto of 1956, supporting filibuster tactics to block or delay passage in all cases.

Earlier, as a prosecutor, he sought the conviction and execution of three share croppers whose murder confessions had been extracted by torture, including flogging.^[3] The convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case of Brown v. Mississippi (1936) that banned the use of evidence obtained by torture. The transcript of the trial indicates Stennis was fully aware that the suspects had been tortured.

As time went on, Stennis became more supportive of civil rights legislation. He supported the 1982 extension of the Voting Rights Act,^[4] though he voted against establishing Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a federal holiday.^[5] Stennis campaigned (along with Governor Bill Allain) for Mike Espy in 1986 during Espy's successful bid to become the first black Congressman from the state since the end of Reconstruction.