Daniel Webster and Robert Byrd

My readers will know that no admirer of our US constitutional system am I.  For its antique and anti-democratic, even racist features are an important element of the elitism that I believe has led us to our present sorry state.

  But even I must give credit where credit is due.  And Senator Robert Byrd of our rural state of West Virginia has outdone himself.  

Originally elected when Lyndon Johnson was our President, this forty year veteran was sent to the Senate by his people with the specific mission to oppose the granting of civil liberties to African-Americans.  To do whatever was possible to keep this group in the place to which so many of their fellow-citizens felt that God had assigned them.  Did not the Book say that the sons of Ham should ever be "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for others?

But time has a way of teaching us all that what we knew was certainty at the age of forty does not seem so certain at the age of eighty.  And uniquely for a US politician Bryd says of his work in those days "I was wrong."  And how often does any politician in any country ever say something like that?

The Senator is as famous for his carrying about with him, wherever he goes, a copy of the US constitution, as he is for his unflinching personal candour.  

And because the criminal Bush regime was as disrespectful of both truth and our own constitution as it was of the United Nations and the international law, in its mad and greedy rush to war, Senator Byrd has been among its most intransigent critics.

I suppose that if one is eighty years and some of age that one has an healthy sense of living on borrowed time.  That there is nothing some idiot Fascist can do to one that is worse than what nature will shortly manage anyway.  Perhaps this is what makes the Senator so bold.  I do not know.

But alone in our government he calls the Iraq War illegal, in terms of both our own constitution as well as of the international law.  And alone in our government he names both the President and his former National Security Advisor for what they are, common liars.

And today, on the floor of the United States Senate, in words that flowed in full and abundant power, words that were worthy of the greatest senatorial figures in our history, and words that poured forth as from the mouth of a much younger man, he made the debate on Dr Rice's nomination to be Secretary of State the ocaission for an indictment of the war and of the lies that led up to it.  Through Dr Rice he eloquently attacked the causus belli of this war, and the integrity of the men and women who prostituted whatever shreds and tatters of their honour they still had to launch it.  And he showed us all what lies next to his heart, the honour and the Constitution of the Great Republic.

I cannot believe that the yellow American press and media, as much culpable of these ongoing war crimes as anyone, will let much be known to our own people of the Senator's words, but in years to come this speech, and even its ninteenth century curlicues, will appear in history as fully equal with those of Daniel Webster or Charles Sumner as they assaulted the cruelty of slavery.  Even though Senator Byrd will not succeed in preventing Dr Rice from becoming Secretary of State, his words will stand with those of these, the most notable and eloquent of his predeccessors.

Those men and women of other nations who would understand us better could profit by reading those words and learning that at its best our Republic has lifted ordinary, even very limited, imperfect men, to the height of honour when only they speak honestly and truthfully to their fellows.  But, alas, this will always be rare, even remarkable, for most of our officials must ever remember who owns them.  And this is the worst of our system.

For the text of Senator Byrd's remarks I refer you to:  Commondreams.org/views05/0125-34.htm

From the Imperial Capital
Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com