Conservatives, Steve Scalise, and the Endless Racism Debate

Robert Byrd, the former Democratic senator from West Virginia, has not made news in a few years. That makes sense, once you realize that he died in 2010. What might not make sense, on first glance, is why Byrd's name surged as a Twitter topic on Monday and Tuesday. Topsy.com, which tracks all matter of social media, found that Byrd's name was tweeted less than 50 times per day for the whole month previous. On Monday, his name was tweeted nearly 700 times.

What happened? Media outlets started chasing the story of Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise's 2002 speech at a hotel hosting white supremacists. Conservatives asked why these reporters, and the liberals who'd gotten so compelled, were not as furious that Robert Byrd led his party in the Senate after joining (and later renouncing, but we'll leave that aside) the Ku Klux Klan. A sample of what conservative writers and radio talkers were saying: