In his book, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (University Press of Kansas, 2002) , author Bryan Mark Rigg, tells us that as many as 150,000 Jews and “partial-Jews” served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

Rigg tells us that “exemptions” were made in order to allow a soldier to stay in the military or to spare a soldier’s parent, spouse, or other relative from incarceration and the gas chambers. But as the war dragged on, politics soon trumped military necessity and it became all but impossible for a soldier to escape the fate of millions of other Jews.

From the perspective of the 21^st century, and knowing what we do about what went on behind the walls of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belzen, it is no less difficult to understand the fidelity of the Jewish soldier to the Wehrmacht than it is to understand the half century-long fidelity of African Americans to the Democratic Party.

Much is known about the century of brutality that American blacks suffered at the hands of the night riders of the Ku Klux Klan, the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party. The best known archives are maintained by the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute, but the most extensive record of lynching, in terms of sheer numbers, is contained in a document titled The Lynching Calendar, which covers the years 1865-1965 and contains many names of those murdered and brutalized, along with the dates and places of their misfortune.

Summarizing the Calendar statistics, we learn that some 6,650 people were the victims of racial and political violence during that era. Of these, some 4,180 are listed as “unidentified” blacks… men, women, and children… while 2,487 victims are listed by name. Tuskegee Institute records tell us that, between the years 1882 and 1951, some 3,437 blacks and 1,293 whites, many of them white Republicans, were lynched.

Political assassination at the hands of Democrats and their Klan “enforcers” was commonplace. For example, in a single day of brutality, Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, 150 black Republicans were rounded up and murdered by Democrats at Colfax, Louisiana. 50 of those men were killed under a white flag of truce.

So it is with a great sense of bewilderment that we contemplate Barack Hussein Obama, the 2008 presidential nominee of the Democrat Party, a man for whom the color of his skin has served as the primary focus of his life… the ever-present “chip” on his shoulder. Not only is he the most liberal member of the United States Senate, he is among the most partisan and the least likely to work cooperatively with members of the opposition party. The things he tells us about himself in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, clearly demonstrate that his hatred for Republicans is exceeded only by his mistrust and resentment of white people, in general.

Understanding all this, we are forced to wonder about his motivation in coming to the aid of the Senate’s only former Klan member, a former Grand Kleagle of the West Virginia KKK, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), just days after being sworn in as the junior senator from Illinois.

In a March 2005 fundraising appeal to the radical group MoveOn.org, Obama said, “Senator Robert Byrd was one of the first senators I met with when I came to the Senate three months ago. Senator Byrd understands the history, the importance, and the role the Senate plays in our government…”

Reeling off a long list of charges against the Bush Administration and Senate Republicans, all of which were either untrue or totally misleading, Obama concluded by saying, “Above all, Robert Byrd understands just how sacred the Constitution of our country truly is and fights every day to protect it.”

This is the same Robert Byrd who wrote in a 1944 letter to a Mississippi senator, “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side.” This is the same Robert Byrd who wrote in a 1945 letter to that same Mississippi senator, “Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt, never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

This is the same Robert Byrd who wrote in a 1948 letter to the Grand Wizard of the West Virginia Klan, at a time when Klan membership was in steep decline, “The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the Union.” This is the same Robert Byrd who holds the distinction of being the only man to use the “n-word” on the floor of the U.S. Senate during the last half century, or more.

Obama’s fundraising appeal for his KKK colleague was a successful one. Within 48 hours, nearly $823,000 poured into the Byrd campaign coffers. And when Obama traveled to West Virginia to campaign for Byrd, the Charleston Daily Mail opined, “If the African-American trailblazer has any qualms about endorsing the man who filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act and who disdainfully referred to blacks as ‘the darkest specimens of the wilds,’ he’s keeping them to himself.”

Yes, Obama’s greatest asset… second only to his ability to read words from a teleprompter… is his, shall we say, “flexible” value system. If the American people have ever needed proof that, for Democrats, nothing is more important than winning an election… no matter what they must do to win… Obama’s warm embrace of the old KKK recruiter from West Virginia is it.

Would “Chuckie” Schumer ever kiss Adolph Hitler on the lips? Would Obama ever kiss a Klansman on the lips? You bet! But only if it would help their party win an election.