Robert Byrd served in the Ku Klux Klan and filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So why are leading Democrats eulogizing him as a great American? Read my inaugural "Decoding the Left" column in Human Events to discover why being a Democrat means never having to say you're sorry. The dirty secret of the Democrats is that the party of Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson was once the party of George Wallace, Theodore Bilbo, and Bull Connor.
Excellent article.
The double standard prevails here because the Dems have figured out that buying people off with (their own) other people's money will always give them a pass.
The ultimate pass on racism, sodomy, criminal activity, murder (see Fat Teddy K) is interpreted as they can't be all bad, because look how much they care about the poor and down troden.
Allowing for that destructive behavior to be masked, the ever complicit press is the real story.
And it still goes on. Eric Holder's Department of "Justice" drops an open and shut (and already won) case against the Black Panthers for voter intimidation in the face of overwhelming evidence. Yesterday there was some DNC dweeb spokesman on the radio who wouldn't "defend" their actions but tried to put the moral relativity spin on it.
"Well, there were cops outside polling booths in other districts 'intimidating' Black voters...".
Not only does he equate yelling, "Kill all Crackers" with lawful representatives of his own government giving voters a chance to cast their vote in peace but he suggests that blatantly racist activity is okay because...well...just because. (and he couldn't site any documented cases of these police bulls intimidating voters or yelling racist epithets)
Sometimes there's just not enough spin in the world...
Good observation NR. I was thinking about this very thing last night how the same party that spearheaded racist movements and politics initially is still in the racism 'business' and is now the party of another kind of ugly racist mechanism.
In current times, some may call it 'reverse racism' but it's just the same old prejudice and hate as before with a difference in hue.
And there is a more insidious side to this new and improved racism: reparations.
More affirmative action through government programs in the guise of racial quotas, and even more government money for programs that benefit the few at the expense of the many.
The ‘Stimulus’ was initiated not only as a Democrat slush fund to support unions and prop up failed municipalities, states and federal programs, but also a lot of the money was slated to go to minority and progressive pet projects. Just look at the guts of this new Banking and Finance bill and it is clear that the party that caused the first financial meltdown due to lending ‘fairness’ policies, is doing it again in the name of helping minorities. Provisions of which are essentially the same thing as the Community Reinvestment Act, picking winners and losers based on color and rewarding lenders for affirmative action hiring.
The first words out of the new Attorney General’s mouth after his appointment was that we needed an honest dialogue about race. He had no such intentions and was setting the tone for a Justice Department that is and will be anything but colorblind. He and the ‘Post Racial” President don’t want an honest dialogue – they want government forcing quotas, absolving criminals based on race and redistributing money to cure some imaginary ills that will never go away in their minds.
“He once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean?” eulogized Bill Clinton of America’s longest serving senator. “I’ll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and the hollers of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn’t have and he spent the rest of his life making it up.”
Which other prominent West Virginia politico of the period running from 1942 to the present had a history of Klan membership?
What Clinton does not say is that the 2d incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan (1915-44) underwent a rapid demographic collapse after 1924. At the time Bird joined, there were likely only a few hundred members in West Virginia. Joining the Klan was a very unusual thing to do at that time in any part of the United States. He was given a position of leadership in his local Klavern in very short order; it is a reasonable inference that he was handed that task because he was the only one willing to take it on; you rise quickly in small and anemic organizations. Recall also that West Virginia is part of the upland South. Localities in the upland South generally have black populations that are small (2% of the total in my grandfather's home county) and not important factors in patterns of local conflict.
In 1942, it was the mode to regard blacks as a sort of permanent guest-worker population, to address them by their Christian names as if they were children, and to regard them as a priori unsuitable as supervisors, personal friends, or neighbors. Klan-style hatred was, however, very atypical, and it would not get you elected too many places outside of Mississippi.
