Daniel J. Flynn has the top story today at Human Events:

Robert Byrd’s death severs the Democratic Party’s most glaring link to its racist past. Rather than let the party’s embarrassing past fade from memory with Robert Byrd, party heavyweights have lamely obfuscated their former senate majority leader’s past as a “Kleagle” and an “Exalted Cyclops” in the Ku Klux Klan.

“He once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean?” eulogized Bill Clinton of America’s longest serving senator. “I’ll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and the hollers of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn’t have and he spent the rest of his life making it up.”

President Barack Obama more subtly addressed Byrd’s membership in the secretive racist organization. “We know there are things he said and things he did that he came to regret,” the President said.

Being a liberal means never having to say you’re sorry. No matter how egregious one’s sins against the stated principles of American liberalism, American liberals will welcome the sinner back as long as he atones through service to American liberalism. So convinced of the goodness of their own cause, liberals self-servingly view liberalism as an indemnity against past transgressions, as proven by this past year’s beatifications of one senator who left a woman to suffocate in her own air pocket at Chappaquiddick and of his longtime colleague who served as a recruiter for the KKK.

And why wouldn’t a former Klansman such as Byrd feel comfortable in the Democratic Party?

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