The

Michael Berry Show from the Texas Monthly 1997, Evan Smith, the editor wrote

From White House fundraisers to rogue IRS agents,

September's newsmakers in and around the nation's capital generously

served up their share of sound bites, or in the case of Arlington, Virginia, hotel

guest Marv Albert, unsound Bites. But no quote caused more teeth to be

bared than one allegedly uttered by second term U.S. Congress,

well, I'm on Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat from Houston.

Jackson Lee, whose district neighbors the Johnson Space Center Center is a member of the House

Committee on Science and so it was that she spent part of her summer recess

visiting the Mars Pathfinder Operations Center in Pasadena, California.

While there, according to an article by Sandy Hume in The Hill, a weekly newspaper that covers Congress, Sheila Jackson Lee

asked if the Pathfinder succeeded in taking pictures of the American flag planted on Mars by Neil Armstrong in 1969. Of course Armstrong planted the flag on the moon as any high schooler should be able to tell you, let alone a 47 year old Yale graduate.

Hume wasn't on the trip, so he didn't hear the question himself, but he says a

committee staffer did, as did Jackson Lee's Science Committee colleague Congressman Vernon Ellers of Michigan, whom Hume

quoted on the record poo-pooing the significance of her boo-boo-boo-boo-boo-boo. Such stories are of course old hat in an era of gotcha journalism

and this one surely would have gone away without much notice had it not been for what happened next.

Livid over Hume's article, Jackson Lee's deputy chief of staff, Leon Buck, wrote a letter

to the editor of the Hill accusing Hume who is white of racism.

You thought you could have fun with a black woman member of the science committee, Buck wrote, comparing the article with

racial slurs directed at Tiger Woods after the Masters. He also criticized Hume's

failure to quote, quote, the proper spelling of her name, a reference

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