Robert Byrd: KKK Member

"He once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, what does that mean? I'll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollows from West Virginia. He was trying to get elected," former President Bill Clinton said of Sen. Robert Byrd.

"And maybe he did something he shouldn't have done come and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that's what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There are certainly no perfect politicians," he added.

I am such a fool. To think that till now I considered KKK members racist trash. Thank you Mr. Clinton for setting me right and letting me know that KKK membership was a form of political strategy designed merely to help poor Southerner boys get elected.

Let's see, the Nazis were simply "following orders,", Stalinists had the NKVD and gulags simply as a tool for industrialization and achieving a future workers paradise, and West Virginia had the KKK as an affirmative action tool for poor white boys who later on would bring home the bacon and have dozens of buildings and highways built as monuments to pork, and to immortalize the Byrds, after whom these monuments were named. 

This excuse by Clinton, who is another poor white boy who was "helped" in his political career by the racist William Fulbright.  For the youngsters among you, Fulbright was a senator and  opponent of Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and the Civil Right Act of 1964, and a virulent denouncer of Israel and American supporters of the Jewish state. But, what the heck, if it can help you get elected, you have nothing to worry about. As long that you are not a Republican.

And so it is that the "venerable" New York Times headlined the obituary for Byrd in the following manner:  Robert Byrd: Respected Voice of the Senate, Dies at 93.  Let's contrast this words with the obituaries of Strom Thurmond and Jessy Helms; another two segregationists who differed from Byrd only in their party affiliation.  Thurmond's obituary was: Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100, and Helms's obituary included in the third paragraph : "Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86."  You had to read 19 paragraphs in the NYT obituary of Byrd before his past affiliation was mentioned.

And so it goes.  Democrats can be racists and segregationists, Al Sharpton can talk about white interlopers in Harlem, Jessee Jackson can talk about Hymietown, Black Panthers can intimidate voters in  Philadelphia, but they don't really mean it.  They are just trying to help poor boys get elected.