Ramblings' Journal

Sen. KKK Byrd compares GOP to Nazis

Former Klansman and Democratic Senator Robert "Sheets" Byrd (KKK-WV) somehow thought it was OK to compare Republicans and Republican Senators to Nazis.

A pair of Jewish groups accused Sen. Robert Byrd on Wednesday of making an outrageous and reprehensible comparison between Adolf Hitler's Nazis and a Senate GOP plan to block Democrats from filibustering.

Byrd spokesman Tom Gavin denied that Byrd, D-W.Va., had compared Republicans to Hitler. He said that instead, the reference to Nazis in a Senate speech on Tuesday was meant to underscore that the past should not be ignored.

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Wednesday that Byrd's remarks showed "a profound lack of understanding as to who Hitler was" and that the senator should apologize to the American people.

"It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party," Foxman said.

In his floor speech Tuesday, Byrd defended the Democratic minority's right to use filibusters to block President Bush's judicial nominees from coming to a honest up-or-down vote.

Byrd pointed out Hitler's rise to power in a veiled comparison to the GOP's rise to power in the past ten years.

"We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men," Byrd said. "But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends."

Byrd then quoted historian Alan Bullock, saying Hitler "turned the law inside out and made illegality legal."

Byrd added, "That is what the nuclear option seeks to do."

The nuclear option is the nickname for the proposal to end filibusters of judicial nominations because of the devastating effect the plan, if enacted, would have on relations between Democrats and Republicans.

If that's not a direct comparison between the GOP and Hitler's Nazis, I don't know what is. Mind you, this is coming from a man who used a filibuster to try to defeat the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Oops. I guess it's not politically correct to remind folks of "Sheets" Byrd's anti-black, segregationist past.

Captain Ed points out that the Mainstream Media for the most part ignored this story completely.

Broadcast networks haven't touched it, either. NBC, ABC, and CBS all remain silent. Only Fox News gave any coverage at all, and they had the sense to report it properly

I guess the media has to protect one of their own.

Posted by mhking at March 2, 2005 08:42 PM