Friday, March 04, 2005

Don't like being called Nazis?

Then stop acting like them:

My Way News: "WASHINGTON (AP) - A pair of Jewish groups accused Sen. Robert Byrd on Wednesday of making an outrageous and reprehensible comparison between Adolf Hitler's Nazis and a Senate GOP plan to block Democrats from filibustering. A GOP senator called for Byrd to retract his remarks.
Byrd spokesman Tom Gavin denied that Byrd, D-W.Va., had compared Republicans to Hitler. He said that instead, the reference to Nazis in a Senate speech on Tuesday was meant to underscore that the past should not be ignored.
'Terrible chapters of history ought never be repeated,' Gavin said. 'All one needs to do is to look at history to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the minority.'
Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the Senate's No. 3 Republican, called for Byrd to retract his comments, saying they 'lessen the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate.'
Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the remarks 'poisonous rhetoric' that are 'reprehensible and beyond the pale.'
Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Byrd's remarks showed 'a profound lack of understanding as to who Hitler was' and that the senator should apologize to the American people.
'It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party,' Foxman said.
In his comments Tuesday, Byrd defended the right senators have to use filibusters - procedural delays that can kill an item unless 60 of the 100 senators vote to move ahead.
Byrd cited Hitler's 1930s rise to power by, in part, pushing legislation through the German parliament that seemed to legitimize his ascension.
'We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men," Byrd said. "But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends."

Byrd then quoted historian Alan Bullock, saying Hitler "turned the law inside out and made illegality legal."

Byrd added, "That is what the nuclear option seeks to do." "

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