Byrd: "Right At Any Time"

Betsy Newmark at Betsy's Page posts about the kerfuffle over the praise my State's Senior Senator, Chris Dodd, gave Senator Byrd.

On the occasion of Senator Byrd's 17,000th vote Dodd said:

I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. Robert C. Byrd, in my view, would have been right at any time. He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation's 220-plus year history where he would
not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true.

[Dodd's comments are contained in the Congressional Record here at page S3541.]

Betsy reminds us that Byrd is a former Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan and voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. So which side would Byrd have been on in the Civil War? Betsy has photographic evidence suggesting Byrd wouldn't have been with the Union. She points us to Armstrong Williams' comments on Dodd's praise for Byrd:

Really? A former Klansman would have been great during the Civil War? Great for whom? I'm not aware of many Klansmen who fought to free the slaves, or to uphold the union or to protect basic rights.

Had a Republican praised a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, the Democrats would have been up in arms. But when one of their own makes racially-insensitive remarks, they avert their eyes. Some things should not be ignored.

In this post, Betsy links us to some things Bryd wrote years ago that would prevent any Republican who wrote them from holding any public office.

Steven Taylor at PoliBlog also posts about the Dodd Comments. Steven wants to know what happened to the media firestorm over Dodd's praise.

The double standard of the biased liberal media is just too much when it is this blatant.

Michelle Malkin [thanks to Steven] said it much better than I can:

The ex-Klansman, you see, is a Democrat. Democrats can join hate groups and utter the ugliest racial slurs and get away with it because they are Democrats. They belong to the party of racial tolerance and understanding. They're paragons of virtue, and the rest of us are bigoted rubes.

UPDATE: Rooftop Report has also posted on this double standard and rounded up other bloggage about it.