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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: longnshort who wrote (267817)1/10/2006 2:18:06 PM
From: paret  Respond to of 1574784
 
Ironically, the party that defended slavery in the 19th century and segregation for much of the 20th century is the Democrat party. The governors who stood in schoolhouse doorways were all Democrats. The segregationist senators who filibustered the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts were all Democrats. The party that elected former Klansman Bob Byrd as its leader in the Senate for a decade was the Democrat party.

These are just some of the highlights of the Democrat party’s embrace of racism. That’s certainly not to say that every Democrat is a racist, or every Democrat during these periods was a racist. Indeed, many fought their own party. Many were involved in championing abolition and civil rights. But that’s not the point. The argument proffered by Patrick Leahy and Ted Kennedy, among others, makes no such distinction

During today’s Alito hearings, Leahy’s smear went something like this: Alito’s membership in a college group, in which an individual member wrote an absurd article about blacks, taints Alito as a racist. This is contemptible demagoguery, no matter how many times the Democrats use it against Republican judicial nominees.

For example, Ted Kennedy’s father was sympathetic to Adolf Hitler while he served as Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to Britain. Joseph Kennedy opened back-channels to the Third Reich. He was openly anti-Semitic. FDR had to recall him from his post. Now, what does that say about Ted Kennedy? Nothing — unless, of course, we adopt the smear by association tactics used against Alito. Indeed, Kennedy, Leahy, and every Senate Democrat who voted repeatedly for Bob Byrd to serve as their leader — a post he held for 12 years — is what, a pro-KKK racist? That’s absurd and offensive.

It’s hard to believe that the party that so abused race in the past is doing so again today. It’s also sad that the major media carry this message as if it has some legitimacy