Is Byrd Senile Or Just a Racist Idiot?

Michelle Malkin goes into detail about the aged West Virginia Senator and patronage king, Robert Byrd. Like Hugo Black, who later became a "First Amendment absolutist" on the Supreme Court, he had a youthful flirtation with the KKK. Unlike Black, he seems to have retained the ideology, if not his actual membership.

Byrd's latest is an oration comparing the Republican quest for a majority vote on judicial nominees to Hitler's use of German law to assume power and carry out his program. An inept and inexact comparison that recruits Hitler and his murderous régime to yet another cause, in this case an unprecented obstruction of the majority will.

No doubt they'll be wheeling in his wasted body and addled mind for a few more years yet. Hillary must be beside herself. Can she distance herself from the rampant moonbattery of her party enough to triangulate her way into the White House? I don't underestimate Hillary, but I doubt it, as long as she's chained to Byrd, Dean, Schumer, Sharpton and Moore.

The Anti-Defamation League of course piped up. How dare Byrd cop from their Hitler franchise? Everybody does it, so that restricting Nazi analogies to Jewish causes is a hopeless task. When a cranky soup merchant is the "soup Nazi," and 9/11 victims are "little Eichmanns," the ADL might as well dismount their high horse, 'cause it's just a mule that will go nowhere. The Hitler and Holocaust trademarks are diluted to the point where they are common parlance. My advice: it's good for an essay or too. Otherwise, fuggedabait.

In any event, for the record, here's a bit of Michelle's piece on Sen. Byrd. She's hot.

The ex-Klansman later filibustered the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act -- supported by a majority of those "mean-spirited" Republicans -- for more than 14 hours. He also opposed the nominations of the Supreme Court's two black justices, liberal Thurgood Marshall and conservative Clarence Thomas. In fact, the ex-Klansman had the gall to accuse Justice Thomas of "injecting racism" into the Senate hearings. Meanwhile, author Graham Smith recently discovered another letter Sen. Byrd wrote after he quit the KKK, this time attacking desegregation of the armed forces.

The ex-Klansman vowed never to fight "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."

If this ex-Klansman were a conservative Republican, he would never hear the end of his sordid past. "Ex-Klansman who opposed civil rights and black justices" would appear in every reference to Sen. Byrd. And even the "ex-" would be in doubt. Maxine Waters and Ralph Neas and Julianne Malveaux and Al Sharpton and all the other left-wing bloodhounds who sniff racism in every crevice of American life would be barking up a storm over Sen. Byrd's latest fulminations. Instead, the attack dogs are busy decrying latent racial bigotry where it doesn't exist, while the real thing roams wild and free in their own political backyard.

She's right. The Racists Beset Me Riff, like the Adolf Analogy, is used to attack one's enemies, not one's buds.

Hacks, who'd make H.L.Mencken proud.

Update 3/4/2005: corrected typo in "Holocaust."