Speaking of Robert Byrd
by digby
Just a little reminder for all the Trump defenders out there who are trying to say Clinton is racist for being friendly to Robert Byrd years after he had repudiated his KKK affiliation.
This is from a piece by Rick Perlstein about Trump’s “urban avenging angel” form of conservatism:
No history of modern conservatism I’m aware of finds much significance in the 22,000 Nazi sympathizers who rallied for Hitler at Madison Square Garden in February 1939, presided over by a giant banner of General George Washington that stretched almost all the way to the second deck, capped off by a menacing eagle insignia.
Nor the now-infamous Ku Klux Klan march through the streets of Queens in 1927, when The New York Times reported “1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all,” in which according to one contemporary news report all the individuals arrested were wearing Klan attire, and that one of those arrestees was Donald Trump’s own father.
Has Trump disavowed his father’s KKK affiliation or are his current associations just a continuation of his family’s tradition? It seems fair enough to ask since it doesn’t appear that his father, unlike Robert Byrd, ever apologized for his youthful membership in the Klan or unlike Byrd ever did one thing to make up for it. And neither has his son.
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