Robert Byrd: Ignore the past. He's a Democrat

  Powerline has the best obit, and accurate. RIP is a nice way to say goodbye but the whitewashing of Byrd is really incredible, considering George Allen's mysterious "macaca" that got him booted out of a race for governor when no one even knew what the word meant until some dimwit dug up/created a vaguely racist definition in Swahili or something. Then it was all over. But racist pasts for Democrats is nothing new:

Robert Byrd was indeed a valuable link not only to the Senate's past, but also to the Democratic Party's history as the party of slavery, segregation, and opposition to equal treatment of blacks. Stolberg obviously loved Byrd's cornpone constitutional shtick in favor of filibustering a Republican president's judicial appointees. It's a shame that Stolberg exerted no effort to put Byrd's shtick in the context it merited.

Byrd was old enough, for example, to have vowed memorably regarding the integration of the Armed Forces by President Truman that he would never fight "with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."

  Also interesting is that the governor of West Virginia has the right to appoint his successor until a special election in November; if Byrd had passed after Saturday, the appointment would have been good for 2 1/2 years. (Caveat: a socially conservative Democrat? I'll believe it when I see it. Somehow when it comes to politics, democrats shed their so-called conservatism the minute it costs them anything.) 
  Commentary from John Miller on NRO:

It will be interesting to see who West Virginia governor Joe Manchin selects as Byrd's successor. Manchin is a socially conservative Democrat. Shortly after his first election in 2004, I interviewed him for an article in NR:

“In West Virginia, people look to see where you stand on life, marriage, and guns,” says Joe Manchin, the newly elected governor of that state, a Democrat with conservative views on social issues. “If you’re on the wrong side of just one or two of those issues, you’ve got a problem. If you’re on the wrong side of all three, you’re mortally wounded.”