Mugged (32 page)

The only Democratic segregationist in the Senate to become a Republican—Strom Thurmond—did so eighteen years after he ran for president as a Dixiecrat. He was never a member of the terroristic Ku Klux Klan, as Hugo Black and Robert Byrd had been. You could make a lot of money betting people to name one segregationist U.S. senator other than Thurmond. Only the one who became a Republican is remembered for his dark days as a segregationist Democrat.

As for the remaining dozen segregationists, only two—Hollings and Eastland—were what you’d call conservative Democrats. The rest were dyed-in-the-wool liberals taking the left-wing positions on issues of the day. Segregationist beliefs went hand in hand with opposition to Senator Joe McCarthy,
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opposition to the Vietnam War, support for New Deal and Great Society programs, support for the United Nations, opposition to Nixon and a 100 percent rating from NARAL. Being against civil rights is now and has always been the liberal position.

The media intentionally hides the civil rights records of lifelong, liberal Democrats to make it look as if it was the Republican Party that was the party of segregation and race discrimination, which it never was. If Senator Joe Lieberman ever becomes a Republican, someday liberals will rewrite history to accuse Republicans of being the party of partial-birth abortion. (Lieberman is a member of two of the world’s smallest groups: Orthodox Jews for Partial-Birth Abortion and Democrats for a Strong National Defense.)

Delusionally carrying on about the Lott contretemps at Thurmond’s birthday party,
Newsweek
’s Jon Meacham declared: “Trent Lott and the GOP grew up together in the South. They both have a painful secret.”

First: The Republicans most definitely did not grow up in the South. They only began to win a plurality of House votes there in 1994—coincidentally, about twenty years after the Democratic Party went insane. Reagan barely won Mississippi in his landslide election of 1980 and Mississippi didn’t elect a Republican governor until 1991.

Second, when Lott was growing up, he was a Democrat. He was a Democrat through college. He was a Democrat after college. Indeed, Lott was a Democrat his entire life, until he ran for Congress in 1972—the year the entire country, except Massachusetts, went Republican. Indeed, until 1972, Lott had been the administrative assistant to a congressional Democrat. Then, the Democratic Party ran George McGovern for president as part of a strategy to turn the party into a group of far-left kooks from places like New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Lott became a Republican the same year that New York, California, Illinois and Minnesota became Republican, albeit more fleetingly.

Meacham also said Bush had distanced himself from Lott by “evoking Lincoln—the only port a Republican president has in this kind of storm.”
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Liberals seem to think Meacham is an intellectual, so he must be a monstrous liar because that is preposterous.

Here are a few other “ports” Republicans have “in this kind of storm”:

Republicans passed the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery, with 80 percent of Democrats voting against it.

Republicans enacted the Fourteenth Amendment, granting freed slaves the rights of citizenship—unanimously supported by Republicans and unanimously opposed by Democrats.

Republicans passed the Fifteenth Amendment, giving freedmen the right to vote.

Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, conferring U.S. citizenship
on all African Americans and according them “full and equal benefit of all laws”—unanimously supported by Republicans, who had to override Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s veto.

Republicans passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867.

Republicans sent federal troops to the Democratic South to enforce the constitutional rights of the newly freed slaves.

Republicans were the first targets of the Ku Klux Klan, during Reconstruction.

Republicans continued trying to pass federal civil rights laws for a century following the Civil War—most of which the Democrats blocked—including a bill banning racial discrimination in public accommodations in 1875; a bill guaranteeing blacks the right to vote in the South in 1890; anti-lynching bills in 1922, 1935 and 1938, and anti-poll tax bills in 1942, 1944 and 1946.

A Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House in 1901, making him the first black American to do so.
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Republican party platforms repeatedly called for equal rights, demanding in 1908, for example, equal justice for black Americans and condemning all devices that disfranchise blacks for their color alone, “as unfair, un-American and repugnant to the Supreme law of the land.”

Republicans called for anti-lynching legislation in their presidential platforms throughout the 1920s, while the Democratic platforms did not.

Republicans demanded integration of the military in civil services in their party platform in 1940; again, the Democrats did not.
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Republicans endorsed
Brown v. Board of Education
in their 1956 presidential platform; the Democrats did not.

Republicans sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to enforce the Court’s school desegregation ruling to stop the Democratic governor from blocking the schoolhouse door.

Republicans fully implemented the desegregation of the military, left unfinished by a Democratic president.

Republicans introduced and passed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1957 opposed and watered down by Democrats.
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Republicans reintroduced and passed another civil rights bill in 1960, maneuvering it past Democratic obstructionism, with all votes against the bill coming from Democrats.

Republicans created the Commission on Civil Rights.

Republicans voted in far greater numbers for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than the Democrats, though this was the year Democrats finally stopped aggressively opposing civil rights bills.

Republicans effectively desegregated public schools throughout the nation in the first few years of the Nixon administration.

Republicans desegregated the building trades, introducing, for the first time, racial quotas and timetables for those doing business with the federal government.

Republicans appointed the first black secretary of state as well as the first black female secretary of state.

Republicans appointed one of two black justices ever to sit on the Supreme Court, over the hysterical objections of Democrats.…

Meanwhile, the Democrats passed the Violence Against Women Act and think they’re civil rights champions.

Bill Clinton smeared the entire South in his comments on Lott’s toast, saying: “I think what they are really upset about is that he made public their strategy,” adding, “How do they think they got a majority in the South anyway?” Clinton won six southern states in 1992! How does he think he got that? His “role model”
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was the segregationist Democrat J. William Fulbright, whom he worked for and called “my mentor.”
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Fulbright voted against every important civil rights bill in the fifties and sixties. He signed the Southern Manifesto opposing desegregation in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education.
(Ninety-seven of the ninety-nine signatories to that document were Democrats.) Just three years after Fulbright opposed the Civil Rights Acts of 1965, Clinton was working on his reelection campaign. As president, Clinton invited Fulbright to the White House for a special ceremony to give the old segregationist the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Another segregationist, Albert Gore Sr. was in attendance. In his tribute, Clinton praised Fulbright for being “among the first Americans to try to get us to think about the people in Russia as people.”
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The people in Russia! Alas, Fulbright was incapable of thinking about black Americans as people.

While exploding in a joyful frenzy about Lott—who was seven years old when Strom Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat—the media were undisturbed by a former Ku Klux Klansman sitting in the U.S. Senate for more than half a century. He was a Democrat.

Democrat Bob Byrd had been a “kleagle” (recruiter) and “exalted
cyclops” (head of the local chapter) of the Ku Klux Klan. But he got liberal insta-forgiveness. During his fifty-one years in the U.S. Senate, Democrats made Byrd secretary of the Senate Democratic Caucus (1967–1971), Senate majority whip (1971–1977), Senate majority leader (1977–1981 and 1987–1989) and Senate minority leader (1981–1987).

After World War II, which Byrd somehow managed to avoid despite being in his late twenties, he wrote to the Grand Wizard of the KKK saying the Klan was needed “now more than ever” and that he was “anxious to see its rebirth in West Virginia.”

He wrote another letter to a racist senator proclaiming that he—war avoider Byrd—would never fight under the American flag “with a Negro by my side. 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, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
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The uncomfortable fact of Byrd’s official positions with the Klan was always gently brushed over, when not completely ignored. The April 2003
Vanity Fair
magazine paid homage to Byrd in a “Profiles in Courage” tribute written by former Clinton spokesman Dee Dee Myers, who quickly disposed of his Klan days, saying: “despite briefly aligning himself with racists a half-century ago…” On his death in 2010, Bill Clinton complained that newspapers had even mentioned Byrd’s “fleeting” membership with the Klan, which Clinton excused by saying, “He was trying to get elected.”
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Less than two years after the hysteria over Lott’s toast to Strom Thurmond, one of Lott’s fiercest critics, Democratic senator Chris Dodd, made his own hail-fellow-well-met toast—to the former KKK kleagle Bob Byrd. On the occasion of Byrd’s seventeen thousandth vote in the Senate, Dodd said Byrd “would have been a great senator at any moment.…He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of Civil War in this nation.”

During the Civil War?

The
Hartford Courant
defended Senator Dodd’s offensive gasbaggery about Byrd being “right” during the Civil War, saying Dodd’s civil rights record is “impeccable.” He “erred,” the
Courant
said. “He didn’t commit a capital offense”
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—unlike Trent Lott for his less egregious remark about a less egregious man.

At least Strom Thurmond did a complete about-face on his racial views when he became a Republican. Thurmond voted to make Martin Luther
King’s birthday a national holiday and voted to confirm Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Byrd is the only senator to have voted against both blacks ever nominated to the Supreme Court: Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. He also voted against the appointments of federal judge Janice Rogers Brown and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Both are black women.

Apparently Nixon’s “southern strategy” didn’t work on Robert Byrd.

In addition to Senator Dodd’s fulsome praise, Byrd has been extolled by Senator Teddy Kennedy as having “the kind of qualities that the Founding Fathers believed were so important for service to the nation.”

Byrd’s extraordinary transformation from Ku Klux Klan kleagle to liberal profile-in-courage winner was mostly accomplished by the simple expedient of his switching from opposing the rights of blacks to opposing the rights of unborn babies. In 2007, NARAL Pro-Choice America gave Byrd a grade of 100 for his stellar service in the war against unborn babies. At least he’s consistent: Abortion is disproportionately performed on black babies.
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Liberals have always been very picky about whose racist pasts could be mentioned. The most beloved Democratic president in the liberal firmament is Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he nominated a former Klan member to the Supreme Court. But the left’s secular religion holds that FDR was the greatest president who ever breathed, so that nasty business with the Klan was swept under the rug.

This is why liberals love the public schools: The populace has been so dumbed down that Democrats can spout any counterfactual nonsense and people will believe it. With their infernal repetition, liberals spread amazingly self-flattering myths and no one ever bothers to look up facts. The left’s victory will be complete when all high school seniors believe the Confederates were Republicans, like Adam Nossiter of the
New York Times.

Any fact that makes Americans less likely to vote for a Democrat is now called a racist smear.

The mythos of Republican dirty campaigning is entirely liberal projection. The real secret of modern political campaigns isn’t Republicans’ sneaky appeals to racial resentment, it’s liberals’ Miss Grundy lecturing about racism intended to rile up black voters and intimidate white suburbanites who are terrified of appearing racist.

Liberals love telling blacks they are woebegone wretches horribly oppressed by whites. They
love
that. But since even the Democrats aren’t subjugating blacks anymore, no one is. So the Democrats make up stories of racist incidents committed by Republicans.

The caption accompanying a
Newsweek
story about racism is a good example of the miasma of lies, myths and irrelevant associations that sustain the Republicans-are-racist thesis:

“After Nixon’s narrow loss to JFK, Goldwater stormed the GOP; by ’68, Nixon was back with his ‘Southern Strategy’—one that helped elect Lott to the House in 1972;…As the party became more apparently mainstream under Reagan and Bush, Lott rose through Congress, singing different songs to different audiences; PHOTO: Hardball: Bush at the controversial Bob Jones University in 2000; the McCain family, which was smeared in the GOP South Carolina primary that year; Lott at the Thurmond birthday party.”
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