David Horowitz
Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2003

The Democrats have started the new congressional session by launching a lynching party. (How embarrassing is it these days to be a Democrat?) In fact, this is the second lynch party organized by the Democrats for the same victim, Judge Charles Pickering, whom the president has nominated to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Last session, after smearing Pickering in a manner that would make Joe McCarthy blush, the Democrats voted in lock step to keep his nomination from coming to the Senate floor.

Leading the lynch party was New York Senator Charles Schumer, who has promised to filibuster the Pickering nomination and who said, "To renominate Charles Pickering Sr. who ... is probably best known for intervening on behalf of a convicted cross-burner, shows unfortunately that Richard Nixon's Southern strategy is still alive and well in the White House."

This is racial gutter talk and rank character assassination. Pickering's court intervention was to prevent a man with no prior record from serving five years in jail for a crime in which there were two other participants who – thanks to the Clinton Justice Department – served no prison time at all. It was a matter of equity in sentencing, not sympathy for cross burners, that prompted Pickering's intervention.

In the 1960s Mississippi was a racial battleground which could mean death for those who challenged its segregationist ways. Here is the Wall Street Journal's summary of the role that Judge Pickering played in that era:

"In the 1960s, he sent his children to the newly integrated Mississippi public schools. As county attorney from 1964-68 he aided the FBI in prosecutions of Ku Klux Klansmen, including testifying against the Imperial Wizard, and was defeated for re-election because of it. In 1971, he was elected to the state Senate with the support of two-thirds of the African-American voters in his district.

"He also has a long record of helping advance civil rights causes in Mississippi, getting white banks to lend money to black businesses and helping get federal funds directed to programs that helped African-Americans. Former Democratic Governor William Winter says Judge Pickering has been 'one of this state's most dedicated and effective voices for breaking down racial barriers.' African-American leaders in his hometown of Laurel, Mississippi, overwhelmingly support him."

This is the man – someone who has put himself on the line for African Americans – that so-called liberal Democrats have set out to tar and feather as a closet racist. The Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are shameless witch-hunters and liars; they are being egged on by the lynch lobby that preposterously (but effectively) calls itself the "civil rights" movement.

These are disgusting times.

Editor's note:
Now we know: "Why the Left Hates America"