Republican House Majority Whip Steve Scalise is being attacked because of some of his past political relationships. Conservatives and liberals alike are calling for his resignation. As expected, USA Today and the Chicago Tribune, have called on Scalise to resign his House GOP leadership post:

“USA Today argued that Scalise’s longtime relationship with Kenneth Knight, the top political hand to former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, damages GOP efforts to reach out to minority voters heading into the crucial 2016 presidential election cycle.”

Mark Levin and Sean Hannity are also calling for Scalise’s resignation because he’s an ally of John Boehner and is against the Tea Party.

With this type of pressure, Scalise is done.

I don’t know the whole story, but I do know there is a double standard when it comes to the way Democrats and Republicans are treated in cases like this and far worse.

Let’s being with President Obama and his family who attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for several years. We know from recorded sermons that Wright is an anti-white racist. All President Obama had to say about this issue was that he was not aware of Wright’s views.

Scalise said the same thing about the group to whom he spoke 12 years ago. It’s my understanding that he spoke to the group once. Again, I am not privy to all the information, but when compared to some prominent liberal Democrats, it’s a blip on the political dial.

Then there’s Al Sharpton who was involved with Tawana Brawley, a teenage black girl who claimed she had been beaten and raped by a white police officer and a local prosecutor:

“Brawley was 15 years old in 1987, when she was found in her hometown of Wappingers Falls, New York, with ‘Bitch,’ ‘KKK,’ and ‘Nigger’ written on her stomach, her jeans burnt in the crotch, feces in her hair, and her tennis shoes sliced open. She said that she had been abducted and raped by a group of white men.”

With no evidence, Sharpton ran with the story. “After a six-month investigation a grand jury found that the entire episode had been a hoax, with Brawley having defaced herself to avoid the wrath of her stepfather after staying out late to visit a boyfriend.”

There were other incidents to follow, for example, the 1991 Crown Heights riots and the Freddie Fashion’s Mart incident.

Today, Al Sharpton has his own radio show and is an advisor to President Obama. In addition, his racial rhetoric may have played a part in violent demonstrations against New York City police officers.

Let’s not forget Jesse Jackson who in January 1984 during a conversation with black Washington Post reporter, Milton Coleman, “referred to Jews as ‘Hymies’ and to New York City,” a slur on Jewish people.

Do you remember when Ex-KKK member Robert Byrd, the late senior Democrat senator from West Virginia, casually used the phrase “white nigger” twice on a FOX news show hosted by Tony Snow in March of 2002? Byrd was only mildly rebuked for his indiscretion. Even most prominent black leaders remained silent. No sensitivity training or call for his resignation ever appeared. Byrd was not just a member of the KKK, he was a “Kleagle” — an official recruiter who signed up members for $10. None of these “youthful indiscretions” kept Byrd from positions of authority in the Senate and judging the actions of others.

Byrd claimed that he left the Klan in 1943, but a letter he had written to the local Imperial Wizard three years later surfaced and offered evidence that he remained loyal to Klan ideals: “The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia” and “in every state in the Union.”

If a Republican had said anything nearly as offensive, he would have been put out to pasture with Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder before the sun set that day.1

For those who have a short memory, Joe Biden was accused of plagiarism in 1987 during his bid for the presidency. It seems that he borrowed passages from British politician Neil Kinnock and claimed them as his own. But since these were speeches rather than published material, few people were openly critical. (Remember, Biden is a liberal Democrat.) It wasn’t too long before a number of journalists did some digging and found that Biden had also lifted passages from speeches given by Robert Kennedy. To add further damage to his already shaken credibility, reports began to surface that Biden had padded his academic record.

Twenty years earlier, Biden, a judge of judges who sat in judgment of Clarence Thomas, had received a failing grade in a law school course for plagiarizing a legal article. He had copied five pages from another work while only supplying one footnote. Biden claimed that he had been unaware of the appropriate standards for legal briefs. Right.

Joe Biden presently holds the second most powerful political position in the United States – Vice President.

Then there’s Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Chappaquiddick infamy. The Chappaquiddick story is so well known that the words “Ted Kennedy” and “Chappaquiddick” are inseparably linked for all time. It is beyond me to understand how the majority of voters in Massachusetts continually elected this man to the Senate every six years.

Kennedy was drunk the evening of July 18, 1969, when he drove his car off Dike Bridge and into Poucha Pond, leaving Mary Jo Kopechne, a young campaign worker, to drown. To add to the tragedy, Kennedy left the scene of the accident and did not report it to the police until 9:45 the next morning. Kennedy hoped to contrive a story that would put Kopechne in the driver’s seat and absolve him of criminal neglect for driving too fast for conditions and under the influence.

Fortunately, no one would go along with this particular lie, although there was still a massive cover-up by the Kennedy political machine to protect the powerful Senator.

The Kennedy operatives whisked the other “Boiler Room girls” — who had been with Kennedy and Kopechne at the Lawrence Cottage, where the party was held — off the island and removed any evidence that the senator had been drinking. In addition, the fact of Kennedy’s expired driver’s license disappeared from the Massachusetts motor vehicle office.

Chuck Moss, a journalist for the Detroit News, got it right in his review of Leo Damore’s Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up. Damore’s book “reveals the arrogance, the power and the corruption that permitted him to simply walk away into the future, where he can address a nationally televised Democratic convention [in 1988] — on the subject of public morals.”2Two months before his death in 1979, former State Police Detective George Killen said Senator Kennedy “killed that girl the same as if he had put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”3

1. In 1988, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was fired after 12 years as a CBS football analyst for remarks he made to a Washington, D.C, television reporter on Martin Luther King Day about the physical abilities of black and white athletes. Snyder said that a black is “bred to be the better athlete because, this goes all the way to the Civil War when … the slave owner would breed his big woman so that he would have a big black kid.” Snyder later apologized for the comments but his career as a broadcaster quickly ended. [↩]
2. Chuck Moss, “Author Offers Damning, Disturbing Look at Kennedy and Chappaquiddick Tragedy,” The Atlanta Journal and Constitution (August 28, 1988), 13M. [↩]
3. Leo Damore, Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988), xiii. [↩]