Tag Archives: House majority whip

national news, political news

David Duke's name is pure poison

Steve Scalise must not have gotten out much before he was elected to Congress in 2008.

There can be no explanation for his not understanding that any organization associated with someone named David Duke would be pure poison, toxic and a group to avoid at all costs.

He didn’t hear the news about Duke, apparently. He must not have known that Duke is a (former) Ku Klux Klansman, a hater of blacks and Jews and someone whose ideas about anything under the sun are anathema to the principles of inclusion.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/steve-scalise-white-supremacy-group-reaction-113872.html?hp=b1_l2

Scalese spoke to a EURO Organization ostensibly about taxes when he served in the Louisiana state legislature in 2002. He now says he “regrets” speaking to the group. He says is now that the country has learned of the House majority whip’s speaking to the group.

Did he disavow the white supremacist group’s world view the moment he learned of David Duke’s association with it? Gosh, I haven’t heard that he has done that. Has anyone else heard such a thing?

Scalise is now in damage-control mode, trying to fend off the critics who condemn his speech.

The single question I have is this: Did he know that David Duke was the group’s founder when he agreed to speak to its membership?

 

national news, Uncategorized

Racial issue gets in GOP's way once more

That darn issue of race relations has just bitten the Republican congressional leadership right in the backside.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

GOP closes ranks around Scalise

GOP House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., spoke to a white supremacist group in 2002. The group was founded by a fellow Louisianan, one-time Ku Klux Klan grand dragon/wizard/potentate/medicine man David Duke.

Scalise says now he “regrets” his “error in judgment.” He condemns the views of “groups like that.”

Hey, it was a dozen years ago. No harm done now, right? He spoke six years before entering Congress.

Should he quit his leadership post? Should the congressman quit his House seat? I’m not going there until we know more about what he said and the nature of the invitation.

It does kind of remind me of what happened when former U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., had the poor judgment to say something kind about the late Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign. That was when ol’ Strom broke away from the Democratic Party — of which he was a member back then — to run for the White House as a Dixiecrat. He was a segregationist back then — and proud of it, too! He just didn’t like mixing with black people — even though, as we would learn later, he mixed it big time with an African-American woman, with whom he produced a daughter.

Lott said this about Strom: “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

Oh, brother. That got Lott into some serious trouble. Lott stepped down as majority leader.

Two questions: Did the invitation to Scalise come from a group — the EURO Conference — identified easily as a white supremacist organization? And did he know of Klansman David Duke’s association with it?

The deal-breaker well might be the Duke involvement. Let’s come clean, shall we?