Watch the Grand Kleagle Squirm

Read this account of Senator Bob Byrd's interview on Hannity & Combs last night and ask yourself what the reaction of people like him would have been had he been a Republican:

Former Ku Klux Klansman Senator Robert Byrd said Thursday that he decided to leave the anti-black terrorist group in 1946 after becoming a born-again Christian, adding that the only reason he used the "N"-word in a 2001 television interview is because he'd heard black leaders say it.

Asked why he left the Klan, Byrd told Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes: "My wife and I, we're born-again Christians. ... We were baptized in the Old Church Yard at Crab Orchard Baptist Church in 1946. ... That changed my thinking in many ways."

Apparently not, Senator. Such as, "Let he who is not a racial supremacist cast the first neoNazi aspersion."

Sorry, but such contrived piety can't go unanswered, even within the same post.

"Time, reflection and the teachings of the Bible" helped him cut his ties with the Klan, said Byrd - where he served as Grand Kleagle and was paid $10 a head to recruit like-minded racists willing to lynch blacks.

In what book does the Bible teach political ambition?

Asked why - 55 years after he abandoned the hate group - he used the "N"-word twice during an interview on Fox News Sunday, the ex-Klansman explained:

"Well, I have heard many people use it. I have heard black leaders use it. I've heard white leaders use it."

Wouldn't those "white leaders" be in the Klan? "White leaders" such as himself? After all, lifetime habits are hard to break.

Byrd told Colmes that the racist slur "meant nothing" to him, except to describe someone who was ignorant.

Only if Byrd himself is ignorant. Which gives an indication of the level of ignorance he attributed to the viewing audience.

The West Virginia Democrat insisted that he'd always tried "to do the right thing." But he didn't explain why he decided to lead the filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or championed the renaming of the Senate's main office after Georgia Senator Richard B. Russell, whose chief accomplishment was blocking the passage of anti-lynching legislation in the 1930s and '40s.

That's an easy one - because filibustering the 1964 Civil Rights Act was, in his mind, "the right thing to do," and he doubtless still believes that to this day.

Makes you wonder whether he and his new colleague from Illinois have exchanged three words to each other.

Instead Byrd insisted it was time to close the book on the earlier chapters of his life, saying: "I was wrong, as many young men are wrong today, even when they join groups. That's all in the past."

That's where he'd like it to be. Too bad for him that at least some of us in the majority give him as little quarter as he gives us. Which should tell you where I think he can shove his lame excuses.

Pity Republicans inside the Beltway aren't similarly as hardnosed. If they were, some Donks might have learned a thing or two from having theirs bloodied.