Where's the outrage? Oh, there it is.

I usually don't have much patience for Robert Byrd. He rivals only Alaska's Ted Stevens as the Senate's King of Pork. And I've always been pretty quick to point out Byrd's dubious past. But I was taken aback to hear the usually smooth-tongued orator had been so incautious as to compare Bill Frist to Adolph Hitler.

From our friends at NewsMax, who note that Republicans are "careful" to not mention Byrd's KKK past in their comments. So NewsMax does it for them.

GOP Careful in Byrd Blast

Republicans blasted Sen. Robert Byrd on Wednesday for comparing GOP plans to use the so-called "nuclear option" in battles over judicial nominees to tactics employed by Adolf Hitler.

Most critics, however, avoided mentioning Byrd's Ku Klux Klan past.

"Senator Byrd's inappropriate remarks comparing his Republican colleagues with Nazis are inexcusable," said Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, without noting Byrd's days as a Klan Kleagle.
Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman also blasted Byrd, but avoided the obvious connection between his Hitler remark and his past membership in the anti-black terror group.

"It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party," Foxman said, in quotes covered by Reuters.

Likewise, Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman avoided mentioning Byrd's days as a nightrider, saying only that his "invocation of Hitler's Germany ... is reprehensible and beyond the pale."

However, Kevin Martin, a Washington-based independent consultant on African American issues, slammed the West Virginia Democrat without pulling any punches.

"Robert Byrd sought to use imagery of the holocaust, but was a member of a racist homegrown terrorist group in West Virginia," Martin told NewsMax.

"During WWII he supported what the Nazi’s had been doing to the Jews and used terror such as lynching to suppress the rights of all minorities here in America.”

Ahem. Gosh. Let's take a gander at what the Senator actually said.

Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.

But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that "Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact." And he succeeded.

Hitler's originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.

It seeks to alter the rules by sidestepping the rules, thus making the impermissible the rule. Employing the "nuclear option", engaging a pernicious, procedural maneuver to serve immediate partisan goals, risks violating our nation's core democratic values and poisoning the Senate's deliberative process.

Republicans buy their outrage by the case at Costco.

Speaking of interesting comparisons; Kevin Martin, "the Washington-based independent consultant on African American issues," once compared the NAACP to a skinhead convention -- a curious choice for NewsMax to grab a reaction from. Well, not so curious, I guess.