Bubba & Wonderboy Sanitize KKK Member Senator Robert Byrd

Glenn Beck has spent a fair amount of time on several of his programs this week excoriating Wonderboy and Bubba Clinton for their whitewashing of Robert Byrd's KKK background.

Byrd, who mercifully died recently, finally ending a disgraceful and overly-long Senate career, was very active in the KKK and in anti-black initiatives throughout his young and middle-aged adult life.

He didn't simply participate in the Klan, he started a chapter! He even had one of those silly titles, like Grand Octopus or something.

As Beck pointed out, contrary to Bubba's claims, Byrd was not some youth committing a youthful indiscretion by joining the KKK. No, he was in his late 20s and already in federal office.

Later, in his late 40s, Byrd voted to filibuster the Civil Rights Act.

Beck reached his zenith on this issue, though, when he compared NY Times headlines, written by the same person, on the occasions of two old Senate codgers' deaths.

For Republican Strom Thurmond, the headline noted that he 'opposed integration,' while Byrd was called a 'pillar of the Senate.'

Stooping even lower, Wonderboy, of at least partial black heritage, simply glossed over Byrd's smarmy background and KKK activism.

By the way, Thurmond, while pro-segregation and anti-integration during the 1950s, never joined the KKK.

Beck also contrasted the rough treatment former GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott received simply for giving Thurmond accolades on his birthday, and positively noting that, if Thurmond's slower approach to integration had been tried, there probably would have been far less strife in America.

For this, Lott was railroaded from his leadership position and, in time, the Senate.

Now, I happen to think Lott is a bona fide idiot and fool. But what's fair, is fair. If Lott never joined the KKK and never obstructed integration personally, why did he suffer punishment at the hands of the liberal media and Democratic Senators, while Bobby Byrd, West Virginia's Senatorial crustacean, had the stench of his KKK activism miraculously eliminated, and his overall record and actions on civil rights totally expunged.

We're in Wonderland now, for sure. And it's not good for the truth.

Blaming America

The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote a wonderful column on April 22nd entitled "Obama Blames America."

Her editorial catalogues the new low to which our current president has sunk in his serial and expansive, named criticism of those who have preceded him in the office, including George W. Bush and Harry Truman.

The president's lengthy confessions of imagined sins of America to audiences abroad speak, once more, to his self-delusional rock star image, which evidently has replaced, if it ever were present, the self-image of representing our country as its senior statesman.

I believe Ms. Rabinowitz is correct when she closes her piece with the passage,

"Since that bridge too far to Europe, ordinary Americans, including some who voted for Mr. Obama, have shown evidence of a quiet but durable resentment over the list of grievances against the United States that the president brought to the world's attention while overseas. There are certain things that can't be taken back. There are images that are hard to forget. Anger of this kind has an enduring power that could, in the end, haunt this presidency."

It's a big mistake for a president to presume a mandate that was never given, nor won. Despite Wonderboy's remonstration to Republican Congressman Eric Cantor that the former can ignore the latter's suggestions because "I won," it doesn't work that way, for long, in our democracy.

He didn't win a mandate to repudiate every, or any, former presidents' actions. As many of my friends, and several pundits have remarked, that is a distinguishing characteristic of a banana republic, i.e., the criminalization of policy disagreements.

Most Americans didn't vote for a president so that he could accuse their country of imagined sins, simply to curry favor with foreigners. Anyone who criticizes Harry Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb merely displays his incredible ignorance of the realities of the time, and of the history of that era.

Can you imagine those overseas speeches in which he blames America for various sins being used in upcoming campaigns?

Such a person is, I think, simply unfit to hold the office of president. As Ms. Rabinowitz suggests, these faux-confessions are very likely to have a seriously negative effect on this president in the next months and several years.

Liberal Inconsistencies: The Islamic Question

The Wall Street Journal published a very important and insightful editorial in Tuesday's edition. The author, Tawfik Hamid, is a former member of an Islamist terrorist group, now a medical doctor living in the West.

He makes many fine and thought-provoking points in his article. However, for my purposes, perhaps the most relevant are these two: Western moral relativism has removed our bases for criticizing Islamic inhumanity and barbarism, and; American feminists are more focused on relatively minor economic issues in their own country, than more profound issues of basic human rights for women in Islamic countries.

He writes, part,

"But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq....

Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals -- who unceasingly claim to support human rights -- have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.

Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please.

The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods."

These are eye-opening and very blunt statements by Hamid. If he had uttered them a few years ago, it would be one thing.

However, we are now in a position to take his statements in a different light. The US Speaker of the House is a woman. Where is Frisco Nan's outrage against the Islamic treatment of women? Where is her solidarity, not to mention that of her party's, with women across the Levant, as they are mistreated, physically abused, and treated as property?

Is it not grossly inconsistent for Nan and her minions to squawk over second-order issues of compensation equality, while their Arabic Islamic sisters are under threats of severe penalties for simply desiring basic human rights?

Further, the Democratic party, which champions the withholding of judgment from anyone's situation, from determining 'right' and 'wrong,' have now hobbled America's ability to appropriately judge the inhumanity of Islamic extremists. Hamid notes that the same liberal Americans who decry our involvement in Iraq, fail to apply similar standards to our enemies among the Islamists of the region.

Liberal Democrats are now reaping the whirlwind of what they have sown with their selective application of criticism, their relativism, and their politically correct views on so many important issues. Having stifled debate on so many critical issues in our own society, and demonized even the ability to express dissent and debate issues, they have lost their own ability to realize when Islamic extremists have gone too far. The Liberals' own capitulation on applying universal, unconditional standards of morality or human behavior have now trapped them into being unable to choose between extreme Islam as a protected 'minority,' and extreme Islam as destructive of basic human rights.

How ironic for the Liberal Democrats to have corrupted the old biblical aphorism about seeing the mote in your neighbor's eye, and not acknowledging the beam in your own, to missing the beam in your neighbor's eye, and mistaking instead the mote in your own for a tumor.

The only thing worse than having such "leadership" in the House, is if similarly-minded Democrats win the White House as well in 2008.