Only the Good Die Young

"You might have heard I run with a dangerous crowd... We ain't too pretty we ain't too proud..." Senator Robert C. "Clorox" Byrd (D- Burning Cross, West Virginia), at 87 the oldest and whitest member of the U.S. Congress, this week won passage of a bill that would provide $10 million toward a memorial to slain civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King. "So what?" you ask. King was a good enough guy, the feds take our money for stuff like that all the time and everyone knows Byrd produces more pricey pork every year than Jimmy Dean. So, really, $10 million is chump change in the grand scheme of things. The better question to ask is, "Are you kidding me?" Aided by a complicit press, Byrd has spent a public lifetime covering up his private one as a "Kleagle" (paid recruiter) and "Exalted Cyclops" (Keeper of the Silver Zippo and the Gas-Soaked Kross in the Garage) for his Ku Klux Klan chapter back home. He admits to joining the Klan in 1941 "for about a year" because it was a good way to fight communism. Byrd says he left because he lost interest in the organization, he wasn't crazy about the pointed hats and he kept forgetting the secret handshake. But a paper trail and years of bloviating bigotry on the public record (if not in The Washington Post) belie his cover. Over a so-far-47-year self-serving Senate career, Byrd has defended the Klan against blame for its part in generations of racial violence across the South. While many were marching in Selma, Byrd did his part for freedom with a 14-hour filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And he has demonstrated his discrimination is indiscriminate by making bad history as the single senator opposing the nominations of both the liberal Thurgood Marshall AND the conservative Clarence Thomas... the only two black Justices ever to ride the big bench. So why, after all these years, is this hateful old gasbag now wrapping his arms around the memory of Martin? Is Byrd simply an old bigot making amends for a rotten record before he meets his maker? Or is he filling his Depends with worry that the voters of West Virginia are finally ready to swap him out for a senator they can respect? We may never know. We do know that the King family has yet to comment on this week's news. Maybe it's because a Robert Byrd-sponsored MLK monument makes about as much sense as a Yasser Arafat Synagogue.... "They say there's a heaven for those who will wait... Some say it's better but I say it ain't..." Especially if it means an eternity listening to the prattling and preaching of Jimmy Carter. The historically least of our presidents was dispatched overwhelmingly by voters after one ruinous term that ended in 1980. Under his lack-of-leadership, the country experienced double digit inflation, double digit unemployment, double digit interest rates and the disrespect of friends and foes around the world. Jimmy himself invented something called "The Misery Index" so we could all measure the suffering of the country on his watch. We the people always hoped and assumed he would head back to rural Georgia after losing to Ronald Reagan, humbled-but-wiser for his failure, and perhaps quietly fill his remaining days doing something that wouldn't hurt him or us. But as president, Jimmy Carter embraced dictators, made bad decisions and advanced anti-American interests whenever he could. Those are the things he always did best. And even today, this 81-year-old crank gets pain-in-the-ass-pity-press whenever he takes his everything-everywhere-is-holier-than-anything-in-America show on the road. Like the other day in Birmingham, England when the former president did the wrong thing once more in criticizing an ongoing war effort while standing on foreign soil. He whined about the wisdom of the Iraq war and said that it gives terrorists an excuse to attack the United States. Among his uninformed observations was this whopper: "What has happened at Guantanamo Bay... does not represent the will of the American people" and "the camp is an embarrassment." Wrong once again, Jimbo. According to a June 25 Rasmussen Report survey, only 20% of Americans (mostly members of the ACLU, some traitors in Congress and the reporters at Newsweak) believe prisoners at Gitmo have been treated unfairly. Seven-out-of-ten adults believe the prisoners are being treated "better than they deserve" (36%) or "about right" (34%). The Rasmussen Report did not ask respondents if Jimmy Carter embarrassed them. However, 58% of those surveyed think the former president is brain-damaged because he has been "using his forehead to pound nails into wood" (37%) or because he "fell off a ladder onto his head" (21%) while building houses for the needy. 12% of those surveyed said, "Jimmy who?"....