According to Deroy Murdock in National Review, “Dems Need to Houseclean” (January 6, 2003), “Before lecturing Republicans, Democrats should mop up their side of the political spectrum.” Writes Murdock,
Just this fall, Clinton praised Arkansas’ late Democratic senator J. William Fulbright, a notorious segregationist who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He also signed the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation decision in 1954. Clinton called Fulbright “My mentor, a visionary, a humanitarian.”
During his 12-year tenure, Governor Clinton never approved a state civil-rights law. However, he did issue birthday proclamations honoring Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. He also signed Act 116 in 1987. That statute reconfirmed that the star directly above the word “Arkansas” in the state flag “is to commemorate the Confederate States of America.” Arkansas also observed Confederate Flag Day every year Clinton served. The governor’s silence was consent.
Arkansas’ former governor, the late Orval Eugene Faubus, attended Bill Clinton’s 1979 gubernatorial inauguration, where the two pols hugged, as Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg recalls. Faubus, of course, resisted the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. He actually deployed National Guard soldiers to bar nine black students from entering. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to break that logjam and give the black teens a fighting chance to learn. Clinton once lauded that same Faubus as a “man of significant ability.”
What was Lott thinking when he aped Clinton–of the Presidency perhaps? Alas for Lott, he forgot only Democrats can get away with being racist. Just ask former Klansman Robert Byrd who “remains the Senate’s president pro tempore, the third in the line of presidential succession behind Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R, Illinois).” He’s a Democrat.