"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 World War II he supported what the Nazis had been doing to the Jews and used terror such as lynching to suppress the rights of all minorities here in America."

Speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday, the former Klansman complained:

"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. ..."

Editor's note: