
Paul R. Hollrah
Obama’s "Flexible” Value System
July 14, 2008
In his book,
Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men
of Jewish Descent in the German Military (University Press of
Kansas, 2002) , author Bryan Mark Rigg, tells us that as many as 150,000
Jews and "partial-Jews” served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
Rigg tells us that
"exemptions” were made in order to allow a soldier to stay in the
military or to spare a soldier’s parent, spouse, or other relative from
incarceration and the gas chambers. But as the war dragged on, politics
soon trumped military necessity and it became all but impossible for a
soldier to escape the fate of millions of other Jews.
From the perspective of
the 21st century, and knowing what we do about what went on behind the
walls of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belzen, it is no less difficult
to understand the fidelity of the Jewish soldier to the Wehrmacht
than it is to understand the half century-long fidelity of African
Americans to the Democratic Party.
Much is known about the
century of brutality that American blacks suffered at the hands of the
night riders of the Ku Klux Klan, the paramilitary arm of the Democratic
Party. The best known archives are maintained by the NAACP and the
Tuskegee Institute, but the most extensive record of lynching, in terms
of sheer numbers, is contained in a document titled The Lynching
Calendar, which covers the years 1865-1965 and contains many names
of those murdered and brutalized, along with the dates and places of
their misfortune.
Summarizing the
Calendar statistics, we learn that some 6,650 people were the
victims of racial and political violence during that era. Of these, some
4,180 are listed as "unidentified” blacks...men, women, and
children...while 2,487 victims are listed by name. Tuskegee Institute
records tell us that, between the years 1882 and 1951, some 3,437 blacks
and 1,293 whites, many of them white Republicans, were lynched.
Political assassination
at the hands of Democrats and their Klan "enforcers” was commonplace.
For example, in a single day of brutality, Easter Sunday, April 13,
1873, 150 black Republicans were rounded up and murdered by Democrats at
Colfax, Louisiana. 50 of those men were killed under a white flag of
truce.
So it is with a great
sense of bewilderment that we contemplate Barack Hussein Obama, the 2008
presidential nominee of the Democrat Party, a man for whom the color of
his skin has served as the primary focus of his life...the ever-present
"chip” on his shoulder. Not only is he the most liberal member of the
United States Senate, he is among the most partisan and the least likely
to work cooperatively with members of the opposition party. The things
he tells us about himself in his memoir, Dreams from My Father,
clearly demonstrate that his hatred for Republicans is exceeded only by
his mistrust and resentment of white people, in general.
Understanding all this,
we are forced to wonder about his motivation in coming to the aid of the
Senate’s only former Klan member, a former Grand Kleagle of the West
Virginia KKK, Senator Robert Byrd, just days after being sworn in as the
junior senator from Illinois.
In a March 2005
fundraising appeal to the radical group MoveOn.org, Obama said, "Senator
Robert Byrd was one of the first senators I met with when I came to the
Senate three months ago. Senator Byrd understands the history, the
importance, and the role the Senate plays in our government...”
Reeling off a long list
of charges against the Bush Administration and Senate Republicans, all
of which were either untrue or totally misleading, Obama concluded by
saying, "Above all, Robert Byrd understands just how sacred the
Constitution of our country truly is and fights every day to protect
it.”
This is the same Robert
Byrd who wrote in a 1944 letter to a Mississippi senator, "I
shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side.” This is
the same Robert Byrd who wrote in a 1945 letter to that
same Mississippi senator, "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, a
throwback to the blackest
specimen from the wilds.”
This is the same Robert Byrd who wrote in a 1948 letter to the Grand
Wizard of the West Virginia Klan, at a time when Klan membership was in
steep decline, "The Klan is needed today as never before
and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every
state in the Union.” This is the same Robert Byrd who holds the
distinction of being the only man to use the "n-word” on the floor of
the U.S. Senate during the last half century, or more.
Obama’s fundraising
appeal for his KKK colleague was a successful one. Within 48 hours,
nearly $823,000 poured into the Byrd campaign coffers. And when Obama
traveled to West Virginia to campaign for Byrd, the Charleston Daily
Mail opined, "If the African-American trailblazer has any qualms
about endorsing the man who filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act and
who disdainfully referred to blacks as ‘the darkest specimens of the
wilds,’ he’s keeping them to himself.”
Yes, Obama’s greatest
asset...second only to his ability to read words from a
teleprompter...is his, shall we say, "flexible” value system. If the
American people have ever needed proof that, for Democrats, nothing is
more important than winning an election...no matter what they must do to
win...Obama’s warm embrace of the old KKK recruiter from West Virginia
is it.
Would "Chuckie” Schumer
ever kiss Adolph Hitler on the lips? Would Obama ever kiss a Klansman on
the lips? You bet! But only if it would help their party win an
election.