Because Zell Miller gave an effective speech whilst being from the South this was seen by the Solons in the one party media as an excuse to trot out the hackneyed bogeyman of the Ku Klux Klan. Just this morning on Don Imus's radio show, Dick Cavett stepped over the line to declare, 'Zell Miller looks like a Klansman.'

Never mind that Senator Miller has a well documented record of fighting the KKK. Never mind that the only actual ex—Klansmen in the US Congress are Democrats, including most notoriously the Democrats'  pork barrel king, Robert Byrd.
 
Never mind that this self—same media had nothing but praise for Senator Miller when he gave a not too dissimilar keynote speech for Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992. What was new and different and unacceptable in this week's keynote speech was that he attacked the Democrat Party and defended the Republican Party. So he must be attacked, and what is more handy than to call a white man with a Southern accent a Klansman?

But to smear Zell Miller as a Klansman because he is supporting Republicans over his own Democrat Party is simply to turn history upside down. It is pig ignorant revisionism even for the Democrats and their spokesmen in the media like the faux intellectual Dick Cavett.

For, lest we forget, the Ku Klux Klan was formed for one reason alone—to wage violent war upon the Republican Party. The Klan sought to use terror to weaken the encroachment of Republicans on their Democrat political power base in the southern states after the South's defeat in the Civil War. In effect, the KKK was the Al Qaeda wing of the Democrat Party. And they weren't at all shy about it. The KKK attacked and killed Republicans with a zeal that would have made Bin Laden proud.

In 1870, at the height of the Klan's terrorism, President Grant instigated an investigation into the Ku Klux Klan. The following year a Grand Jury reported that:

"There has existed since 1868, in many counties of the state, an organization known as the Ku Klux Klan, or Invisible Empire of the South, which embraces in its membership a large proportion of the white population of every profession and class. The Klan has a constitution and bylaws, which provides, among other things, that each member shall furnish himself with a pistol, a Ku Klux gown and a signal instrument. The operations of the Klan are executed in the night and are invariably directed against members of the Republican Party.' 
 
Many whites were attacked and many killed by the KKK for the crime of being Republican. Of course many more blacks were also attacked and lynched. But by and large they were targeted not so much for being black but for being black Republicans. The Klan did everything it could to stop the Republican Party in the South. This entailed preventing blacks from exercising their new freedoms, especially their right to vote—because they were worried they would vote for the Republican Party. Defeating the GOP and its agenda of equal rights for blacks was always job one with the KKK.

No, the term Mr. Cavett and the Democrats were looking for to apply to Zell Miller, the historically accurate term, is 'scalawag.' Scalawags is what the Klansmen called those Southerners who dared to side with the Republican Party in freeing the slaves and trying to secure them their newly won equal rights. In this usage scalawag is surely now a term of honor.
 
And yes, Zell Miller is a modern day scalawag. He seems to be damn proud to be one. He should be.

Posted by Steve Gilbert  9 3 04