Former Klansman Leader Dies
...Democrats Mourn.


Robert Carlyle Byrd has assumed room temperature. In his storied carreer he ladeled pork projects into bills and proudly served in the Ku Klux Klan. 

Byrd was perhaps best known for the way he funneled dozens of projects and millions of federal dollars to his home state, West Virginia. He earned the sobriquet "the Prince of Pork" from some taxpayer groups -- they meant it as an insult, but Byrd wore it as a badge of honor.


Byrd's political career was also dogged by his early membership in the Ku Klux Klan, which he said he joined mostly because of its anti-communist position and the political connections he could make there. But in a 1945 letter to a segregationist U.S. senator, Byrd wrote that he would never fight in the armed forces alongside blacks, and said he never wanted to "see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels."
In 1964, Byrd filibustered against the landmark Civil Rights Act for more than 14 hours and voted against it. Forty years later, he said that was the one vote of his congressional career that he regretted most.

As late as 2001, Byrd used the phrase "white niggers" in a nationally televised interview. He later apologized and said, "The phrase dates back to my boyhood and has no place in today's society."
Byrd endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008, but waited until after West Virginia's Democratic primary, which Obama lost badly.


Still Democrats mourn his loss. I am not a Democrat.........nuff said