Sarah Palin: Steve Scalise Defenders Just As Bad As Jeremiah Wright Defenders

Sarah Palin took to her Facebook page to lash out at defenders of U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, the House Majority Whip accused of speaking to a group of white supremacists 12 years ago.

Palin also specifically referenced the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the radical “God Damn America” preacher whose Chicago church Barack Obama attended for 20 years.

The hashtags Scalise or Steve Scalise were trending on Twitter over the holidays, as the mainstream media ran with significant coverage of the scandal engulfing the number three Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, a lawmaker who most people never heard of and will probably quickly forget if or when this uproar blows over.

Palin’s posting also referenced similar commentary from fiery conservative talk show host Mark Levin, who claimed among other things that House Speaker John Boehner would never have gone to bat for Scalise if he was a member of the GOP’s Tea Party faction rather than the so-called establishment wing.

Unless more damaging info emerges, it is likely that Steve Scalise will be able to hold on to his leadership post, although time will tell.

The former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee didn’t mince words about her disapproval of Steve Scalise and several others on the opposite end of the ideological divide.

“Defense of this (last decade) racist action is disgusting and wrong, as is defense of the even more recent immoral actions of our President’s with any association he embraced with the racist Jeremiah Wright and the anti-American domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. I’ll add to Levin’s list: Do political ‘leaders’ think Americans are so stupid we don’t recognize the despicable double standard here, and that we’re so weakly complacent that we’ll put up with this?”

Even if done accidentally by Scalise, speaking to the racist and anti-Semitic European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), former KKK leader David Duke’s group, was a fundamentally stupid thing to do. However, there could be both more and less to this scandal.

An investigation by the liberal website Slate, no friend to Republicans in general, may have exonerated the apparently inept Scalise, a Louisiana Republican who represents the state’s First Congressional District. According to the Slate report, Scalise may have actually spoken to a separate New Orleans neighborhood association in a hotel hospitality room before the EURO event started.

Duke associate Kenny Knight claims that Scalise, a representative of the local sheriff, and a Red Cross official got invites to speak to the civic association at the hotel.

“Knight estimates that about two-thirds to three-quarters of the people in the hospitality room at the civic association meeting were local residents who weren’t there to attend the EURO event, and about one-third to one-quarter were EURO convention attendees who arrived early and filtered into the hospitality room to drink coffee and kill time.”

In the meantime, David Duke has threatened to reveal the names of both Democrats and Republicans whom he has hosted in the past.

Along those lines, with all the coverage devoted to the Steve Scalise scandal, the mainstream media largely ignored the background of the late U.S. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

Byrd, a Democrat, served in the U.S. Senate for 51 years, and was Senate Majority Leader from 1977 to 1981 and 1987 to 1989. Byrd was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Another Democrat, Alabama Senator Hugo Black, later elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court by FDR, was also a member of the Klan.

At the time of his passing, U.S. News & World Report observed, “It is therefore curious, in a town where Republican indiscretions have no practical shelf life, that Byrd’s partisan allies and the Washington press corps repeatedly refused to delve into his activities as a long ago member of the Ku Klux Klan other than to acknowledge it as a ‘youthful indiscretion’ and move on.”

Added National Review Online columnist Jonah Goldberg about the apparent double standard, “Meanwhile, the Democratic party venerated the late senator Robert Byrd, a former Klansman himself. He was one of 19 senators (all Democrats) to sign the Southern Manifesto opposing integration. One of his co-signers was William Fulbright, Bill Clinton’s mentor.”

Regardless of your feelings, if any, about Sarah Palin, do you agree or disagree that a double (or triple) standard is in play in the Steve Scalise controversy?

[image via R. Gino Santa Maria / Shutterstock.com]