Clinton: Come On, Byrd Being in KKK Isn’t a Big Deal, He Only Did It to Get Elected

While in Charleston, West Virginia, Bill Clinton tried to explain away why we should just ignore that the late Senator Byrd was a member of the KKK:



Um, Bill, It is hard to believe that Bobby didn’t join the Ku Klux Klan back in 1942, a full four years before that he ever ran for anything, only to help himself get elected to office in a southern state. Furthermore, he recruited others to join them. One don’t actively urge other people to join an organization that one doesn’t believe in at all, and he raised in the ranks up to an Exalted Cyclops of that terrorist organization, as well. It doesn’t seem like he just had a “fleeting relationship” with the KKK.

Are we, also, supposed to forget that he, along with many other Southern Democrats, filibustered and arguing AGAINST the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for 14 hours? Is that how he “spent his life making it up”, Mr. President? Now, it is true that there are no perfect politician, but come on, this is more than just a slight oversight. It was a pattern of conduct that lasted decades.

He seemed pretty adamant about his disdain for blacks. He even went so far as to send a letter to the then-Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi expressing his contempt for blacks:

I shall never fight in the armed forces 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.
— Robert C. Byrd, in a letter to Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D-MS), 1944

Come on stopped trying to put sugar on this and calling it candy.