The longest serving bloviator in the history of the world’s greatest bloviating body departs the scene

A belated note that the senior senator from the state of Robert C. Byrd has passed away. (Hey, he got every public work in his state named after him, why not the state itself?).

However, there is one important thing to say in praise of Byrd: he was not on board with the open-borders orthodoxy of his party. He voted against the Comprehensive National Suicide amnesty bill in 2007, and, as I remember, occasionally made statements on the subject of immigration that fell outside the liberal purview.

Meanwhile, the conservatives are all upset because the liberal media are giving Byrd a pass on what Powerline calls his “horrific … unbelievably racist” views when he was a young man in the 1930s. Count on the “conservatives” to be more liberal than the liberals, count on the conservatives to require that we judge people in the past by today’s hyper-liberal standards, thus making it impossible for us to have any sympathetic identification with our historic civilization, all of which was “racist” and thus evil according to those standards.

In this connection, I’m reminded of an article years ago in The Weekly Standard in which the author quoted these lines from W.B. Yeats’s last poem, “Under Ben Bulben” (1939):

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all….

and thereby censoriously pronounced Yeats to have been a “racist”!

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Eric G. writes:

Castigating Robert Byrd because of his distant past is another reason why I avoid so many politcal shows. For Republican mouthpieces it’s just about playing gotcha with Democrats. That’s all they’re about. Byrd was a man of the South and a man of his time.

I am so sick of hearing mindless drones spew about historical figures being “racist,” as if such a concept even existed hundreds of years ago.

I believe that the leftists use this tactic to equate white Western civilization with racism, the evilest of all evils according to them. If the West was a white man’s construct, and “racism” and “sexism” are intertwined with it, why should anyone care if it dissapears? That’s the kind of insane thinking that emanates from leftists.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 30, 2010 03:08 PM | Send