Good Riddance...

Today, Robert "KKK" Byrd joined Ted Kennedy in the firey pits of hell for eternal damnation. I have a smile on my face today now that this scum of a human is no longer among the living. Am I being harsh because he's a democrat? No, I'm being harsh because he was a fucking KKK member who FILIBUSTERED the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From Ben Smith of Politico

President Obama recalled meeting Sen. Robert Byrd — and thinking about his past in the Klan — in one of the strongest passages of "The Audacity of Hope," but today he remembered him more simply:

He had the courage to stand firm in his principles, but also the courage to change over time.

That's an extremely generous way of looking at it. This may not be the appropriate day to review the details of Byrd's history, and his disavowal of the Klan was, by the accounts of West Virginia civil rights activists, quite thorough, his change also came so late that it's as easy to credit it to expediency as it is to courage. He could hardly have remained in the Senate in 2010 — or even in 1980 — with the views he'd held earlier in his career.

"He did a complete about-face and you couldn't ask for a better man," said the president of one local NAACP chapter, George Rutherford, this morning, dating the change to 1968.

Byrd's involvement in the past is hard to see as a youthful error, as he cast it. He wasn't just a member of the Klan: He founded and led a Klan chapter as a young man, and Klan officials first pushed him into politics. He opposed the integration of the armed forces in World War II, writing, "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." He wrote the Klan's imperial wizard in 1946 that "the Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia."

He filibustered the Civil Rights Act in 1964. He embraced Martin Luther King Jr. only after his assassination. Before a planned 1968 march on Washington, he warned, "If this self-seeking rabble-rouser is allowed to go through with his plans here, Washington may well be treated to the same kind of violence, destruction, looting, and bloodshed."
All this isn't to say that politicians and critics shouldn't have granted him the forgiveness he sought in his later decades. At the same time, they don't really have to.
I won't. Mostly because of these words...

SEN. ROBERT BYRD (D), WEST VIRGINIA: My ol' mom told me, Robert, you can't go to heaven if you hate anybody. We practiced that. There are white niggers, I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time, if you want to use that word, but we've all -- we just need to work together to make our country a better country. And I just a soon quit talking about it so much.

Rot in Hell Byrd.