Demagogue

... at the opening session of the NAACP convention here in Milwaukee were when he referred to the recent U.S. Senate resolution apologizing for not acting effectively to stop lynchings. In his speech, Bond told the convention:

" ... the NAACP's major campaign during its first four decades was against the barbaric practice of ritual human sacrifice. In May 1911, the NAACP Board passed a resolution [condemning] a Kentucky lynching in which a black man was taken from jail and placed on the stage of the town's opera house.

"The crowd paid admission to fire (bullets) at the victim -- those in the orchestra got six shots, those in the gallery: one.

"Walter White wrote of the 1918 lynching of pregnant Mary Turner in Valdosta, Georgia. After she had been tied to a tree and burned 'a man stepped forward with a pocketknife and ripped open her abdomen in a crude Ceasarean operation. 'Out tumbled the prematurely born child,' White wrote. 'Two feeble cries it gave -- and (it) received for the answer the heel of a stalwart man, as life was ground out of the tiny form.'

"If a United States Senator, in the year 2005, can't apologize for that, what outrage is deserving of an apology? .... (The Senate did not hold) a roll call vote that would have put senators on record ..."

This fact was not widely reported in the articles I read about the resolution.

"... Instead, the Senate Majority Leader allowed the resolution to be adopted under a voice vote procedure that did not require any senator's presence.

Since you don't have to be present for Dr. (Bill) Frist to diagnose your medical condition, why should he require your presence to vote?"