In another lame attempt by a Democrat to rewrite history to whitewash a sordid past, Robert Byrd is selling a book telling people about his joyous days as a recruiter and local leader of a group whose favorite pasttime was cross-burning and lynching.

Looks like an interesting book…

In [his book], Byrd says he viewed the Klan as a useful platform from which to launch his political career.

Most politicians begin with the mundane, “I want to help people.” Byrd took the progressive approach of, “I want to hang people.” Nice touch.

He described it essentially as a fraternal group of elites — doctors, lawyers, clergy, judges and other “upstanding people” who at no time engaged in or preached violence against blacks, Jews or Catholics, who historically were targets of the Klan.

But…

By the time Byrd began organizing for the Klan during World War II, the organization had largely morphed into a money-making fraternal organization that was virulently anti-black, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic.

Just an oversight, I’m sure.

Confronting the issue, Byrd went on the radio to acknowledge that he belonged to the Klan from “mid-1942 to early 1943“… He said that after about a year, he quit and dropped his membership, and never was interested in the Klan again.

See, all you haters. He was just lost in youthful indiscretion of a year or two, then changed his ways forever….

…or not:

Byrd said in the Dec. 11, 1945, letter — which would not become public for 42 more years with the publication of a book on blacks in the military during World War II by author Graham Smith — that he would never fight in the armed forces “with a Negro by my side.“ Byrd added that, “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”

and…

[Byrd’s handwritten] letter was dated 1946 — long after the time Byrd claimed he had lost interest in the Klan. “The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia,” Byrd wrote, according to newspaper accounts of that period.

Byrd makes no mention of the letter in his new book, I wonder why.

During his [1958] Senate campaign, he told a newspaper reporter that he personally felt the Klan had been incorrectly blamed for many acts committed by others.

It’s such a shame when “good guys” get blamed for the acts of bad people.

Poor Robert Byrd is really a friend to blacks in America, despite his youthful indiscretions with an organization known to lynch them. Really, he’s a friend to blacks in America since he renounced his membership a few years before writing letters calling blacks “race mongrels” and “throwbacks to the wild”. If we close-minded folks just see past that “brief” time in Byrd’s past and look to all the wonderful things he’s done in the Senate, we’d see he truly is a beacon of light for minorities in America. Things like…

Byrd … joined with other southern Democrats to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

and…

Byrd filibustered the [Civil Rights Act of 1964] for more than 14 hours…

and…

He criticized most anti-poverty programs except for food stamps.

and…

in 1967, he voted against the nomination of Thurgood Marshall, the first black appointed to the Supreme Court.

“To imagine someone who was a member of the Klan in his youth who managed to become the majority leader of the Senate, it’s really quite striking,” said congressional scholar Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution….

Well, that is unless you remember which party he belongs to.

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Others:
Michelle says, “Just read it”… undoubtedly with a smirk.

George W. Bush Granted Lifetime Presidential Appointment

Well, not really… but Liberals are sure to feel the same nausea when they see this real headline:

Senator What a Dick Durbin’s comments Tuesday have stirred up the hornet’s nest of the blogosphere with folks weighing in on both sides. Liberals seem to have a very warped sense of what torture really is… and they seem to dismiss real torture by our enemies while screaming to the world about non-torture interrogation techniques used by our military against islamofascist assholes that want us all dead. For instance:

The examples Durbin gave before he equated our soldiers to nazis:

“detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor with no chair, food or water.“

Markos “Kos” Zuniga and his verbal-diarhea-spewing blog had this comparison of Gitmo:

The torture that was so bad under Saddam, is equally bad under U.S. command. And Dick Durbin had the balls to say it so on the Senate floor.

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

For what it’s worth:

Nazis - About 9 million dead
Soviet gulags - About 2.7 million dead
Pol Pot - About 1.7 million dead
Gitmo - zero dead
Gitmo - five instances of Koran abuse by prison guards
Gitmo-15 instances of Koran abuse by prisoners

Durbin was probably just looking for five minutes of fame as we enter the next election cycle. Well, his comments are going to reach millions, that’s for sure… compliments of AlJazeera and other enemy-friendly propaganda machines.

Update 4: June 16th, 2005 - Washington, D.C. - Senator John Thune today called on Senator Dick Durbin to apologize for his inappropriate remarks made on the Senate floor Tuesday regarding U.S. Marines serving their country in the War on Terror. �Equating American Marines to Nazis is irresponsible and wrong. Senator Durbin owes our men and women in uniform an apology.� � Senator John Thune (Hat tip: Matt)

I’m not going to add my commentary, I’ll simply post items straight from news sources and you can draw your own conclusions:

A dozen prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to “the battlefield” to fight against the United States, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Wednesday. “There are several people that we have released that we know have come back and fought against America because they have been recaptured or killed on the battlefield,” he said after meetings in Brussels with European Union officials.

Former President Carter called for the United States to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison to demonstrate its commitment to human rights.

Joe Biden said that the United States should shut down the military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan called the Guantanamo detention center “the Gulag of our time,” referring to the notorious prison camp system of the Soviet Union.

Vice President Dick Cheney says Guantanamo won’t be closed.

“It’s crucial to remember that the preventive detention of enemy combatants has never been thought of as a criminal matter in which a full-blown trial would be held,” said Michael Wiggins, a Justice Department lawyer.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld offered a lengthy rebuttal Tuesday to recent calls to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, arguing that intelligence gleaned from suspected terrorists held there has stopped planned attacks and led to more arrests.

Hillary, Are You Paying Attention?

Canada’s Supreme Court has ruled that “Canada’s vaunted public health-care system produces intolerable inequality.” While 3 judges wanted to declare outright that the national health-care system is unconstitutional, the full court stopped just short… Why is this important? Because the Canadian system closely resembles a plan Hillary unveiled in 1993.

The Canucks are proving that government takeover does not make a system immune from simple economics. It’s ironic that an icon of the “pro-choice” Left would support a system that prevents citizens from seeking their own private care.

Boy are the liberals gonna be pissed they supported the idea of our Supreme Court considering international law when formulating their opinions.

I promised I wouldn’t comment on the Jackson trial because I’m sick of hearing about it. But now that the jury is on parade, I’m struck by the comments of the jury foreman, Ray Hultman:

Jurors may have acquitted Jackson of all charges of molesting a 13-year-old cancer survivor, but not all of them were convinced the King of Pop had never molested a child.

… Prosecutors presented testimony about Jackson’s allegedly improper relationships with several boys in the early 1990s, including the son of a maid who testified that Jackson molested him during tickling session between 1987 and 1990. Another, Brett Barnes, took the stand to deny that he was molested during sleepovers at Neverland.

But Hultman said he believed it was likely that both boys had been molested. He said he voted to acquit Jackson in the current case because he had doubts about his current accuser’s credibility.

“That’s not to say he’s an innocent man,” Hultman, 62, said of Jackson.

Did Tom Sneddon just try the wrong case, or was the jury just starstruck?

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WHO THE HELL CARES?

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“For a group of people so obsessed with being treated exactly like everyone else, they sure whine when they are being treated like everybody else“

Cllr Boothroyd - a planning committee member - slammed the council’s inflexible planning rules and argued that allowing flags to be hoisted outside gay bars would not set a precedent across the rest of the borough. “This decision was wrong in planning law, bigoted in practice and gives Westminster Council an appalling reputation for insulting the gay community,” he added.