Rice vs. KKK

As if it weren't bad enough that Condi Rice had to grow up in fear of the Klan when she was a child in Birmingham, AL, she now has to face the Klan again as an adult. Enter former Klansman and current U.S. Senator, Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

"Senator Robert Byrd, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, announced late [Wednesday] that he would not allow the Senate to approve Ms. Rice without a few days of consideration of her lengthy testimony, and at least a token debate on the floor," reports the New York Times.

Sen. Byrd's maneuver came just hours after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved her nomination by a vote of 16 to 2. The two naysayers were, not surprisingly, election loser John Kerry and new pointwoman for the loony left, Babs Boxer.

Though Robert "Sheets" Byrd "officially" left the Klan in 1943, he filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act for 14 straight hours. And three years after he said he'd left his white-sheeted brethren behind, he wrote to Georgia's Grand Imperial Wizard, urging, "The Klan is needed today as never before."

Sen. Byrd was also a fierce opponent of desegregating the military, complaining in one letter: "I should rather die a thousand times and see old glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen of the wilds."

Interesting that while Republicans are supposed to be racist merely for opposing affirmative actions and racial quotas (never mind the fact that real racist Republicans like David Duke are loudly rejected by the GOP), to the best of my knowledge, there aren't any current GOP Senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act or were in the KKK. So while the nation is about to have its first black female Secretary of State, the Dems are embracing their bigots.