Harry Reid, the Democratic Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, said on Monday that those who oppose government-run healthcare are the same sort of people who opposed granting civil rights and voting rights protections to black Americans.
Monday on the Senate floor, Reid said:
“Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, ‘slow down, stop everything, let’s start over.’ If you think you’ve heard these same excuses before, you’re right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said ‘slow down, it’s too early, things aren’t bad enough’ … When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today.”
What Harry forgot to mention was that it was Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond who led the unsuccessful filibuster against Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Harry also forgot to mention the many other prominent Democrats who fought tooth and nail to stop passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including party luminaries Robert Byrd, Al Gore Sr., and J. William Fulbright.
Crying RACISM! is the No. 1 go-to play for Democrats in trouble, even when the charge is a flat-out lie.
In September, Democrats jumped all over Republican Congressman Joe Wilson, whose emotional shout of “You lie” to President Obama during his address to a joint session of Congress gave the legacy media’s race-mongering lapdogs plenty to wag their tongues about.
Maureen Dowd, a partisan hack masquerading as a journalist, claimed that Joe Wilson’s outburst was a racist attack on the president.
Dowd wrote: “What I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!” She added that Representative Wilson “clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president.”
Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia took his rhetoric a step further, saying Wilson’s comment had to be formerly rebuked or the Klan would ride again. “I guess we’ll probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again and riding through the countryside, intimidating people,” Johnson said.
The only current member of the United States Congress I know of who ever wore the white sheet and pointy hat of the KKK is West Virginia’s senior senator, and former Democratic leader, Robert Byrd, who held the Klan titles of kleagle (recruiter) and grand cyclops.
In 1942, at the start of the U.S. involvement in World War II, when millions of young men his age were signing up to join the military, Robert Byrd joined the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1944, the bloodiest year of the war, Byrd wrote, “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side.”
Perhaps Congressman Johnson was worried that Joe Wilson’s outburst might drive Robert Byrd to dust off his white sheet and hood.
History is clear. The Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan. Almost without exception, Klansmen were Democrats, and the Klan itself served as the armed wing of the Democratic Party.
In 1875, in East Feliciana Parish, an armed mob of white Democrats, led by Dr. J.W. Saunders, stormed the town square in Clinton and drove all of the black elected officials out of town. The mob threatened the officials with death if they ever returned. One black official who initially refused to leave was Sheriff Henry Smith. He was shot and forced to resign.
A nearby newspaper, The Amite City Democrat, declared its support for the coup against the black elected officials, proclaiming, “The insolent, ignorant, negro Sheriff Smith of East Feliciana has at last resigned.” The newspaper made no mention of the details surrounding the sheriff’s “resignation.”
In the Florida Parishes, the Whitecaps were another armed band of miscreants that terrorized black people on behalf of the Democratic Party. In his book Pistols and Politics, historian Samuel C. Hyde Jr. wrote: “Whitecaps … typically functioned as racial regulators, keeping the blacks down and assaulting the interests of economic competition.”
The left is losing the argument on healthcare and voter confidence in President Obama is tanking. Every serious poll shows that the vast majority of Americans are satisfied with their medical insurance. So the Democrats are doing what they always do, attempting to portray as racist anyone who opposes massive healthcare reform and huge spending increases on a host of other needless government programs.
Harry Reid is a liar and a fraud. If he wants to get on the “right side of history,” he should try telling the truth.
Chuck Hustmyre is an award-winning journalist and a retired federal agent. He is the author of three books and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles. For more information visit www.chuckhustmyre.com.
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