Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Historic apology, same old bias.

I can't really see how anyone can have too much trouble with the latest move by the US Senate to officially apologize for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation almost a century ago. At least in this case, their are still people alive today that were directly affected by the Senates refusal to follow the Presidents and Congresses lead and pass these laws. (This is opposed to the several states/cities that now require companies to apologize for any connection to the slave trade (see Wachovia Bank) ; something which has little connection to any of the modern companies or any person currently living.)

What I do have a problem with is the manner in which the NY Times and other bastions of the MSM are taking this opportunity to try and re-write history and make this look like this was a Republican problem. Despite the fact that it was in fact southern Democrats who filibustered every attempt at passing the legislation in question, the NY Times does everything they can to imply just the opposite. Unless you read this statement some other way (from the article):
"Although the House passed anti-lynching legislation three times in the first half of the 20th century, the Senate, controlled by Southern conservatives, repeatedly refused to do so."
Why mention who controlled the Senate and not the fact that it was the members of the minority party that were actually preventing the passing of the bill. There is no way to read this except as a blatent attempt to make the party of the 'Southern conservatives' look bad. It's pretty bad when the NY Times is directly using Michael Moore type tactics to report the news.
This is the same type of historical revisionism that makes the Democrats the heroes of the Civil rights movement when in fact it was again several Democrats who used the filibuster in an attempt to prevent that legislation from passing; a certain still elected Democratic Senator among them.

Captain's Quarters and Patterico go a bit more into the MSM's obvious attempt to distance the fact these were two cases in which filibusters were used, to paraphrase Senator Byrd (D-WV in case you didn't know), to 'save the Republic'*.


*In all honesty he said that about the deal made a few weeks ago to keep the filibuster alive, but since he himself used it as a way to block civil rights bills, I felt it fitting to use his words.

Update: Added the comment in brackets above about the slave apologies.

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