By Rick Manning
The House of Representatives continues to be stalled under the weighty decision of whether or not Confederate flags on Confederate soldier gravesites at federal cemeteries should be allowed.
It is beyond absurd that at the very time the House is supposed to be passing appropriations bills that direct not only how much money the Obama Administration can spend in the last full fiscal year of his presidency, but also what he can spend the money on, Democrats have stymied the process in a desperate attempt to whitewash their own cruel history of racism, slavery, and segregation.
Remember it was Democrats who seceded from the Union and made the Confederate flag in the first place. And it was under Democrat Governor Earnest Hollings that the Confederate battle flag was put on the statehouse in Columbia in 1961.
It took a Republican Governor, Nikki Haley, and a Republican state legislature to remove it. Given this history, it is certainly understandable why Democrats would want to fight to expunge the last remnants of a symbol that they equate with their record of racism.
So long as the Democrats are so intent upon erasing their political party’s history, the House of Representatives should expand the legislation to delete other 20th-century Democrat racists and supporters of mass murder from federal memorials and buildings.
First on the list should be the renaming of the Richard Russell Senate Office Building. Named after Democratic Senator Richard Russell, a segregationist who led the fight against civil rights legislation for decades, Russell may have single-handedly delayed the healing of our nation’s racial divide for a generation. For Democrats, so stained with racist guilt, and so caring about how the dead are honored, it must be devastating to have one of three Senate office buildings named after a leading segregationist.
Next would be removing Democrat President Woodrow Wilson’s name from the bridge that crosses the Potomac east of Washington, D.C. Wilson is the President who re-segregated the entire government including the armed forces, held a showing of the movie “Birth of a Nation” at the White House, and went so far as to praise it in spite of calls by the NAACP to ban it. “Birth of a Nation” was subsequently used as a recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan. It must be incredibly upsetting to the perpetually-outraged left to know that the President who endorsed this movie is honored by having his name on one of three major bridges across the Potomac in the D.C. area, and Republicans should address this insult by tearing Wilson’s offensive name off of this and any other federal buildings and property which bear it.
Former Democrat head of the Senate Robert Byrd, who served in that body with President Barack Obama, was a former Ku Klux Klan leader in West Virginia, and Congress should include the removal of his name from every federal building and penitentiary in West Virginia in any Confederate flag removal legislation. Imagine the distress that federal prisoners of African American descent must feel when they are locked up in a facility named for a man who wore a white hood.
In Chicago, gravestones marked with the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union are prominent in the federal Haymarket National Cemetery. The Soviet Union, which is exalted in the symbol on these gravestones, was responsible for the murder of between 15 and 60 million of its citizens in a string of state-sponsored violence only surpassed by its communist neighbor China. It is an affront to the memories of the millions upon millions of dead killed by Vladimir Lenin and his successor Josef Stalin that the symbol of their oppression be allowed to exist on federally-protected property. The souls of these millions cry out that the hammer and sickle must be removed, and any legislation dealing with putting flags on Confederate grave sites must certainly remove this symbol of oppression, even as it is remembered that those recognized in this communist-loving graveyard were some of the foremost leaders of the organized labor movement.
Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt has a memorial dedicated to him in D.C., in spite of his unconstitutional internment of Japanese Americans. Certainly this action from 1942 is far more offensive than a 150-year-old battle flag, and those pushing the elimination of the flag at gravesites surely must break into hives when thinking about FDR’s offenses, and their sensitivities should be respected by the removal of this memorial from federal property.
To Democrats’ everlasting shame, even their everyman icon President Harry Truman must be expunged from the federal record due in no small part to his writing to his soon-to-be wife the following words, “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s not a n**er or a Chinaman.” Note, Truman did not use asterisks. His Presidential aides knew his sentiments as they recommended that he join the Ku Klux Klan when he was President. While Truman did not join, he also did not fire anyone over what would seem an outrageous suggestion unless, in fact, Truman shared common beliefs with the lynch mobs of the KKK.
And finally, Hillary Clinton’s icon Margaret Sanger’s legacy of advocating for racial purity and the killing of the disabled before birth should be an automatic disqualifier for the organization she founded and which exalts her memory, Planned Parenthood, to continue to receive federal funding.
Here is just one of Sanger’s abhorrent statements reported in the Washington Times, quoting page 366 of her autobiography where she recalled her speech to a KKK meeting in Silver Lake, New York writing, “I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan … I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses … I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak … In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.”
Obviously, she wasn’t being invited back dozens of times because she was chastising the hooded lynch mobs.
It is clear that Republicans should accept the Democrat Confederate battle flag challenge and include in the legislation a full-blown elimination of the Democrats 20th-century racist leadership and other liberal radicals through a stripping of Richard Russell, Woodrow Wilson, Robert Byrd, the communists of Haymarket, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Margaret Sanger from all federal properties.
And to think, I didn’t even mention President John F. Kennedy and his Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr., or JFK’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s constant use of the N word and belittlement of African American White House staff.
The House of Representatives needs to get back to work, and if the only way to proceed is to allow Nancy Pelosi to rid the nation of the stain of more than 150 years of racism and genocide that has driven the Democrat Party, they should not get in the way.
After all, maybe they can rename the Woodrow Wilson Bridge to something more suitable to the Democratic Party elites — maybe the Hillary Clinton Bridge, sponsored by the people of Qatar?
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
