From the Tuesday Morning Jolt:
One Last Scandal for 2014
Who’s having the worse week, Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh or House majority whip Steve Scalise?
House majority whip Steve Scalise (R., La.) spoke to an event hosted by a white-nationalist group when he was a state legislator in 2002, according to multiple reports.
Scalise’s office has confirmed that he took part in the event organized by the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), a group founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana politician David Duke, and says his limited staff at the time had not properly vetted the event. He attended the event while campaigning against a state budget measure.
“Throughout his career in public service, Mr. Scalise has spoken to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of viewpoints,” Scalise spokeswoman Moira Bagley told the Washington Post. She explained that he attended the event while campaigning against a state ballot initiative.
“He has never been affiliated with the abhorrent group in question,” Bagley continued. “The hate-fueled ignorance and intolerance that group projects is in stark contradiction to what Mr. Scalise believes and practices as a father, a husband, and a devoted Catholic.”
Congressman, the group is called the European-American Unity and Rights Organization. What, did you mistake them for NATO? Were they strangely unresponsive to remarks about trade policy and currency exchanges?
Moronic as Scalise’s decision might have been, he did make it twelve years ago. If there was any indication the guy had any white supremacist instincts, one would think they would have surfaced in the following decade. Maybe Scalise really did have no idea of the group’s agenda or hateful perspectives.
The Washington Post quotes a bunch of Democrats making typically opportunistic comments about the revelation. You can’t really blame them; if we learned a high-ranking Democratic official had addressed a hate group, Republicans and voices on the Right would be calling attention to that.
But the Democrats shouldn’t be too loud in their denunciation, in light of other figures they’ve forgiven . . .
In the early 1940s, a politically ambitious butcher from West Virginia named Bob Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. After Byrd had collected the $10 joining fee and $3 charge for a robe and hood from every applicant, the “Grand Dragon” for the mid-Atlantic states came down to tiny Crab Orchard, W.Va., to officially organize the chapter . . .
Byrd wrote that he continued as a “Kleagle” recruiting for the Klan until early 1943, when he and his family left Crab Orchard for a welding job in a Baltimore shipyard. Returning to West Virginia after World War II ended in 1945, he launched his political career, but not before writing another letter, to one of the Senate’s most notorious segregationists, Theodore Bilbo (D-Miss.), complaining about the Truman administration’s efforts to integrate the military.
Byrd said in the Dec. 11, 1945, letter — which would not become public for 42 more years with the publication of a book on blacks in the military during World War II by author Graham Smith — that he would never fight in the armed forces “with a Negro by my side.” Byrd added that, “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”
If you can forgive all that — as just about everyone in Congress did — then you have to give Scalise the benefit of the doubt.