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May 21, 2007

Democrats and Apologies

By Jerome J. Schmitt
Somewhere in the course of the evolution of the American Left and its party, the Democrats, the offering of formal apologies became an important political ritual. Most likely this grew out of the transition from an attitude of pride in America to an attitude of shame, a feeling that this country is the world's primary villain.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the trend toward a sense of America the evil, a polity requiring apologies, accelerated when the Soviet Union was vanquished in the Cold War, collapsing of its own internal contradictions (as the Marxists would say), leaving American the world's sole superpower. Conceding the point that President Reagan led America, the good to victory over the true Evil Empire just raises too many awkward questions about the activities of those who opposed  his policies at every step.

Like American Thinker's Poet Laureate Russ Vaughn, I am astonished at the effrontery of liberals in the Democratic Party who now frequently call for apologies and reparations for historical crimes occurring before anyone alive today was born, notably the institution of slavery. In this they betray a total ignorance of American History. 

If Democrats are going to demand apologies for historic crimes, they need to inform themselves better about their own party's history. The following racial crimes were perpetrated throughout American history by The Democratic Party, its leaders and supporters:

  1. Preserving and enhancing the legal-standing of the institution of slavery in the ante-bellum South against all humanitarian calls for reform;
  2. Extending the peculiar institution of slavery into Texas and Missouri;
  3. Attempting to extend the institution of slavery into California, Kansas and other US territories and states;
  4. Extending into free-states the slave-masters' legal right to retrieve their "property", escaped slaves. (Dred Scott);
  5. Initiating the secession of the Southern states to preserve slavery upon the election of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican with abolitionist views;
  6. Undermining the North's resolve to preserve the Union and emancipate the slaves (Democrat Copperheads);
  7. Terrorizing freed black Republican politicians and voters during Reconstruction in order to ensure election of white Democrats;
  8. Disenfranchising black voters to make the entire South a one-party state (Democrat), a political monopoly not broken until quite recently;
  9. Via their control of Southern state governments, instituting Jim Crow laws in the 1880s and preserving them until 1965 (America's apartheid);
  10. Governing the South in a manner that tolerated, concealed and surreptitiously-supported racial terrorists such as the Ku Klux Klan, who murdered southern civil rights activists;
  11. Resisting Federal enforcement to end racial segregation as initiated by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. 
In particular:

  1. Sen. Robert Byrd has admitted having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and he filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights act supported by Republicans in greater proportions than by Democrats;
  2. Al Gore's father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr. also joined Sen. Byrd in the filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act;
  3. Sen. Ted Kennedy's father, Democrat Joseph Kennedy, the US Ambassador to Britain, was rabidly anti-Semitic and considered by the Nazi Ambassador to be "Germany's best friend" in London."
  4. President Clinton's mentor, Sen. J. William Fulbright, opposed Civil Rights legislation proposed by the Republicans, as reported by PBS Frontline: "the early civil rights legislation, Fulbright opposed that and went along with the majority Southern (Democrat) view"
While it may be unfair to visit the fathers' sins on the sons (or the mentor's on the protégé in the case of Clinton), and while we may take Sen. Byrd at his word with respect to his reversal of his views about civil rights for black Americans, this does not exonerate the Democratic Party as an institution for its historical support of slavery, racial violence and oppression. 

If there really is a  bill due for slave-reparations in America it should be addressed to DNC Headquarters, Washington DC. 

Jerome J. Schmitt is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.
on "Democrats and Apologies"