"Exalted Cyclops" Senator Byrd: From Klan Leader to Senate Gasbag

Senator Byrd, who recently embraced the whacko leftists in MoveOn.org is up for a tough re-election fight in 2006. So perhaps it's a good time to reflect on his past and how it illuminates his present. This is about the best documented expose on Senator "Sheets" and it comes courtesy of the vast right wing conspriacy... OOOPPPSS!! Strike that... I meant: Washington Post.

"A Senator's Shame":By Eric Pianin Washington Post Staff Writer
June 19, 2005; Page A01

In the early 1940s, a politically ambitious butcher from West Virginia named Bob Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. After Byrd had collected the $10 joining fee and $3 charge for a robe and hood from every applicant, the 'Grand Dragon' for the mid-Atlantic states came down to tiny Crab Orchard, W.Va., to officially organize the chapter. As Byrd recalls now, the Klan official, Joel L. Baskin of Arlington, Va., was so impressed with the young Byrd's organizational skills that he urged him to go into politics. 'The country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation,' Baskin said.
...
Byrd's indelible links to the Klan -- the "albatross around my neck," as he once described it -- shows the remarkable staying power of racial issues more than 40 years after the height of the civil rights movement. Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) learned that lesson the hard way at a birthday party in December 2002, when his nostalgic words about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), who ran for president as a
segregationist in 1948, caused a public uproar and cost Lott the majority leader's post.

Ah well, if you're a Republican and make a mildly insenstive remark, you'll have to RESIGN from your leadership post. If you're a Democrat who is a former Klan organizer or a Democrat who compares our troops to Nazis, you skate free...

Born Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. in North Wilkesboro, N.C., on Nov. 20, 1917....According to his book, Byrd wrote to Samuel Green, an Atlanta doctor and "Imperial Wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, in late 1941 or early 1942, expressing interest in joining. Some time later, he received the letter from Baskin, the "Grand Dragon" of mid-Atlantic states, saying he would come to Byrd's home in Crab Orchard whenever Byrd had rounded up 150 recruits for the Klan.

When Baskin finally arrived, the group gathered at the home of C.M. "Clyde" Goodwin, a former local law enforcement official. When it came time to choose the "Exalted Cyclops," the top officer in the local Klan unit, Byrd won unanimously.
...
Byrd wrote that he continued as a "Kleagle" recruiting for the Klan until early 1943, when he and his family left Crab Orchard for a welding job in a Baltimore shipyard. Returning to West Virginia after World War II ended in 1945, he launched his political career, but not before writing another letter, to one of the Senate's most notorious segregationists, Theodore Bilbo (D-Miss.), complaining about the Truman administration's efforts to integrate the military.

Byrd said in the Dec. 11, 1945, letter -- which would not become public for 42 more years with the publication of a book on blacks in the military during World War II by author Graham Smith -- that he would never fight in the armed forces "with a Negro by my side." Byrd added that, "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."

This is consistent with today's Democrat party that would rather see this nation defeated in the war on terror rather than see it succeed with the leadership of President Bush and Secretary of State Rice.

Byrd's Klan past became an issue again when he joined with other southern Democrats to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Byrd filibustered the bill for more than 14 hours as he argued that it abrogated principles of federalism. He criticized most anti-poverty programs except for food stamps. And in 1967, he voted against the nomination of Thurgood Marshall, the first black appointed to the Supreme Court.