I do love the headline of the AP article on his death: "Bird to lie in Senate chamber where he served"
Makes sense. Now that he's dead, there's no reason for him to stop lying.
Former TV commentator Alan Colmes, who wrote this stupidity about the late Senator:
Byrd, unlike Thurmond ..., changed his views over time. By the late 1970s, Byrd was speaking in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. Eventually, he regarded his vote in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to the Vietnam War a sin. In fact, Byrd became a liberal lion who stood up to the Bush administration, invoking the rules of the Senate he knew like no one else to point out that it is illegal to fight without a declaration of war.
http://www.aolnews.com/article/opinion-robert-byrd-evolved-unlike-many-of-his-critics/19534279
Fascinating assertion. The way I read it, Colmes has asserted that the fact that Byrd bacame a left-winer should absolve him of his "youthful" racism, while the fact that Thurmond became a right-winger should cause him to remain tainted. Maybe I'm misreading it, but I doubt it.
Perhaps I'm alone in finding that the posthumous revelation of Thurmond's half-black daughter, whom he fathered in 1925, revealed his racism to be more a matter of political opportunism than personal belief. Probably like Colmes, I think Thurmond was an opportunist and a bozo. But I see no reason not to tar Byrd with the same brush.
And the assertion that Byrd somehow uniquely understood the rules of the Senate is nothing more than gibberish. Ever since Korea, Americans have been arguing about fighting wars without a declaration of war (which have been dubbed by both Democratic and Republican administrations as "police actions" to avoid the necessity of a vote for war). In this case, Colmes conveniently forgets (assuming he has enough brainpower to even remember) to point out the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, which both Republicans and Democrats of the time felt gave G.W. Bush sufficient authority to act in Iraq. In fact, Byrd's attempts to limit the grant of authority were voted down by bipartisan margins, with the majority of Democrats voting with the Republicans against his proposed limitations.
But let the Byrd hagiography roll on among the far left. He was, after all, their champion (when he wasn't busy grabbing pork for West Virginia, that is).
