Senator Robert Byrd said the "N" word [Nazi] during a senate debate yesterday, and the usual gang of simple minded idiots got up on their hind legs and fought to make their braying heard:
** Sen. Rick Santorum(!) of Pennsylvania, the Senate's No. 3 Republican, and an utter embaressment besides, called for Byrd to retract his comments, saying they "lessen the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate
** Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the remarks "poisonous rhetoric" that are "reprehensible and beyond the pale."
Strong words. So what exactly did Senator Byrd say to cause those nice, straight, gentile noses to get bent all out of shape?
"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 GOP's plan to end fillibusters] seeks to do."
Now, try not to get me wrong: I'm in agreement with the fellow, who said that, in an argument, the first person to mention Hitler loses. I see what Byrd was trying to say, but he said it badly.
Still I find myself asking: Does the GOP have the moral credibility to dispute with Byrd on this point?
The answer is no.
As sideshow put it: The GOP is a party that is so racist it thinks Condoleezza Rice's incompetence can be defended solely on the grounds that "she's black." It's the party that is so morally empty that it thinks opposing a torture apologist for the post of Attroney General is evidence of racism. It's the party the regularly demonizes gays for political gain.
And as you well remember, they sat with stonelike silence back when Dick Cheney and his potty mouth lessened the "decorum of the Senate."
Meanwhile Byrd is a southern Senator who stayed with the Democrats back in the sixties when all the real southern rasicists bolted to the GOP, in protest of the Civil Rights Act. The GOP is home to David Duke and Pat Buchanan for a reason after all.
So, though I'm not happy with Byrd's remarks, I wish someone from my side of the aisle had taken him aside and told him to tone it down. And I wish someone from the other side of the aisle would call Chutzpah! on the posturing GOP phonies who are making all the hypocritical noises right now.
PS: I think it's great the the GOP is deploying arguments based on identity politics, especially now that the liberals, having realized that they don't work, have largely given up the strategy. (With the help of God, this constant playing of the race card will hurt the GOP just as it hurt the Dems.)
I also think the desparate tone and the ad hominen reasoning used by the
Related: NTodd