Posted on 01/22/2003 9:29:07 AM PST by ewing
Coming Wednesday to Newsmax.com:
Evidence surfaces that Former President Pro Tem of the United States Senate Robert Byrd may have been a member of the Klu Klux Klan 'well past' 1943 , the year he maintained he resigned from the notorious hate group.
[Responsible for 6 lynchings while the Senator was a member, one near his home state in Georgia]
Read more about this subject in related Hot Topics:DNC
I have a question: Is he still 4th in line since the republicans and the 108th congress are now in effect and if not who is?
I hope Kevin tears hima new one.
He was certainly right about Thurgood, though!
Actually he WAS third in the line of succession: VP, Speaker of the House, President Pro Tempore of the Senate.
Ted Stevens of Alaska is now the President Pro Tempore.
As a sop to Byrd, the Republicans named him President Pro Tempore Emeritus - so that he can keep a car and driver. But it doesn't keep him in line for the Presidency.
Back in the bad ol' days, when the Dims were in the majority, Byrd was President Pro-Tem of the Senate.
But NOW, the so-called "Republicans" we sent to Washington have voted to make him "President Pro-Tem Emeritus"!!! and have given him a special suite of offices modeled to look like the Pres. Pro-Tem's office!!!
The spirit (or spinelessness) of Trent Lott lives on in the GOP leadership!
What a shame, but who is the President Pro-tem now, since Emeritus means retired?
Thanks for the info.
Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2003 5:27 p.m. ESTByrd's KKK Alibi Comes Unraveled
Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., has said repeatedly over the years that he joined the notorious anti-black hate group the Ku Klux Klan during World War II - not because he was a racist but because the Klan had taken a strong stance against communism, a system of government that then existed only in the Soviet Union.
But Byrd's KKK alibi doesn't stand up to even the most cursory historical scrutiny, as a World War II veteran pointed out to NewsMax.com Wednesday.
"When Byrd said he joined the Klan, it couldn't have been famous for being anti-Communist, since in 1943 the Soviet Union was our crucial ally in World War II," said our source, who served in the Air Force, then known as the Army Air Corps, in preparation for the Normandy invasion.
"In 1943 Franklin Roosevelt was still calling Stalin 'Uncle Joe'," he added. "And I remember U.S. military maps that showed the Red Army's advances toward Berlin, which was something we were all happy about."
Further puncturing Sen. Byrd's KKK alibi, the World War II vet recalled, "There would have been no reason for any patriotic American to have been anti-Communist in 1943 - because we were doing everything we could to help the Reds beat Hitler on the Eastern Front."
In fact, anti-communism didn't emerge as a genuine force in American politics until 1947, with the outbreak of the Cold War - four years after Byrd says he left the Klan. Two weeks ago the West Virginia Democrat's press secretary Tom Gavin said his boss had belonged to the Klan for only "a number of months."
It was during this period that Byrd - supposedly by then an EX-Klansman - was advising Grand Imperial Wizard Samuel Green on whom to appoint to important posts in the hierarchy of the hate group. In a letter to Green, Byrd urged, "the Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia" and "in every state in the Union."
A year later, in 1948, Byrd opposed President Truman's initiative to integrate the Armed Forces - and he did so using the language of a very much active Klansman.
The powerful Senate Democrat vowed then that he would "never submit to fight beneath that banner [the American flag] 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 Byrd said he thought the Klan's main job was fighting communism, he's either not being honest about why he joined - or he was a Klansman a lot longer than he now wants to admit," said the World War II vet.
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