Robert Byrd died Monday, and as he probably expected, his obituaries will all make reference to the fact that he was a member of the reorganized Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s. Most of us who follow politics were aware of this fact, but Byrd was a good Democrat who spoke out against the war and in favor of Barack Obama, so his time in the Klan was more baffling than troublesome. Most obits seem to mention this part of his life out of the fear that passing over it would be bad journalism, but they also imply that his record in recent years exonerates him.

Should we forgive Robert Byrd, then?

Make no mistake, we are all participants in the injustices, historical and ongoing, of our nation. We all benefit from racism and inequality in tangible and intangible ways. But some of us are more directly involved than others, and the KKK is one of those vanguard forces that continually expands the farthest reaches of American iniquity. We may all be guilty, but they are among the most guilty.

But the question of Robert Byrd’s forgiveness can’t be one of degrees. Robert Byrd can be forgiven by degrees, for all the good he did later in life. This is a question of absolutes, which is to say, a question without a compact answer. The question is not what good deeds he did or how many. The question is whether they matter at all.

In more concrete terms, the question is this: did Robert Byrd, by joining the klan at age 24, sign away in some indelible way his right to sit with the rest of us on the side of humanity that doesn’t string people up in trees, cut them in half with barbed wire, burn children alive in churches, and drag them from the backs of speeding trucks until their bodies disintegrate into their unrecognizable constituent parts?

I didn’t say this was going to be a fun one to read.

The fact is that we do not draw such a line in this country. Racism isn’t so much a stain as it is a passing fancy in the ledger of American sin. We like to imagine that we make firm distinctions, we may damn individual acts of racism and violence, but we allow the Klan to persist because we are afraid that the greater evil would be to round them all up, give them shovels, and settle things in a fashion that would seem oddly familiar to them, but that they would never expect.

There has never been a greater evil in this country than the one that the Klan embodies, the idea that white men are in some ineffable way better than everyone else, more deserving, more noble. Robert Byrd wrote in 1944:

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.

Those are most certainly the words of an unrepentant Klansman. I can’t remember, do we forgive Klansmen in this country? Do we take their word for it when they say they’ve moved on? Byrd would later characterize this time in his life as youthful indiscretion, saying:

I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times… and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. I can’t erase what happened.

How gracious.

If there is a God in heaven, then Robert Byrd will have nothing to fear from him, because Byrd’s God was likely a forgiving one. But there is no God, there are only the mistakes we make, and Robert Byrd spent a considerable part of his long life regretting and being embarrassed by his time in the Ku Klux Klan. Whether this punishment was the one he deserved is moot. It’s the only punishment Robert Byrd received, and the one we all finally judged acceptable by our silence.

Obama is detached from the American experience.  He just doesn’t identify with the average American because of his own background.  Indonesia and Hawaii.  His view is from the viewpoint of academics and the halls of the Ivy league schools that he went to and it’s not a love of this country and an understanding of the basic values and wants and desires of it’s people.  And as a result of that, he doesn’t connect with people at that level.

Now, barring the fact that Hawaii is, while quite distant from Pennsylvania, still a US state, I think this quote says more about Rick’s view of a homogenous, nativist America than it does about Obama’s character. Rick is also pretty famous for blaming the world’s ills on people with Ivy League educations, unless they happen to also be Republicans. Rick went to Penn State, a “Public Ivy,” so he technically get a pass on that one.

Ricky is currently mulling a presidential bid, which is why he’s spending so much quality time with the people of Iowa. Whatever. Rick’s biggest enemy is himself, and the only thing we need to do to guarantee his defeat is to keep him talking.

I kind of got something in my eye while I was listening to this nine-minute NPR interview with Tim Hetherington, one of the filmmakers behind the Afghan War documentary, Restrepo. It won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for best documentary, and it will be in theaters starting tomorrow. 

Gulf disaster needs divine intervention as man’s efforts have been futile. Gulf lawmakers designate today Day of Prayer for solution/miracle

This was posted to her Twitter account, so one assumes that accounts for the, ahem, liberties she takes with syntax. As for the liberties she takes with sanity, let’s all just be thankful John McCain was a terrible, terrible presidential candidate, and a piss poor human being.

(painting by Zina Saunders)

In case you missed it, the Vice President’s response to Joe Barton’s apology was somewhere in the vicinty of perfect. I love the way the press pool had to drag it out of him, too:

The reason why I got involved in politics, the reason why the president and I ran, the reason why the president got involved, is: The one primary role for government is to protect people who are being taken advantage of, protect people who are in extreme straits and are not able to take care of situations themselves. I have been down in the Bayou area off and on for the last 36 years. My daughter went down to Tulane, I think I know the area relatively well as an outsider.

There is an entire way of life in jeopardy. This is just not about jobs. This is just not about whether or not the water fowl is polluted, this is an entire way of life that is in jeopardy. And to sit there and say that we’re being in effect — as I understood the statement — that he was ashamed we’re being tough on the oil company that caused the problem…

Look, I just think that it’s pretty important to the people of Louisana all the way to Florida and even his own state of Texas that people disassociate themselves from that. That’s not the role…

What I like about Rahm Emanuel is that he doesn’t just let things go. Remember how Republican congressman Joe Barton retracted his ill-advised apology to BP? Remember how that’s over now and we should just let bygones be bygones? Not so much.

Rahm sees recent statements by Joe Barton, Rand Paul, and Sharron Angle for what they are: explicit articulations of fundamental Republican values stripped of all pretense. “Fuck everybody with dark skin and less than a million dollars, let’s burn the country down,” they say, only with less poetry. Of course, once the GOP realized that the average American would be horrified by the idea of a congressman apologizing to a international oil conglomerate that just destroyed the maritime ecosystems of several southern states, they made Barton explain that his words had simply been “misconstructed.”

Rahm calls bullshit on the idea that Joe Barton misspoke:

That’s not a political gaffe, those were prepared remarks. That is a philosophy. That is an approach to what they see. They see the aggrieved party here is BP, not the fishermen. And remember, this is not just one person. Rand Paul, running for Senate in Kentucky, what did he say? He said the way BP was being treated was un-American.

What most Democrats never seem to understand is that they actually occupy the moral high ground on the most fundamental issue of governance: whether government is worth a damn. Rahm gets it:

But the approach here, expressed and supported by other voices in the Republican Party, sees the aggrieved party as BP, not the American [people] — not the fishermen and the communities down there affected. And that would the governing philosophy. And I think what Joe Barton did is remind the American people, in case they’ve forgotten, this is how the Republicans would govern.

This speaks to the heart of the matter. Whether it was impolite to apologize to BP and not to the people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed by the spill is irrelevant, and a retraction of that apology does nothing to change the fact that the GOP would take the multi-billion dollar industry’s side in any similar disaster. If Hurricane Katrina had been owned by Haliburton, the people of New Orleans would have gotten a bill for all the extra water.

Looks like somebody got a stern talking to:

“I apologize for using the term ‘shakedown’ with regard to yesterday’s actions at the White House this morning, and I retract my apology to BP,” it began, and finished: “I regret the impact that my statement this morning implied that BP should not pay for the consequences of their decisions and actions in this incident.”