Al Franken's remarks today:

From his facebook page (I don't think it's a problem to repost the whole thing if it is tell me and I will edit it.)


In March of 1861, the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens delivered a speech outlining the reasons Confederates were going to war, and explained the vision of the government they were seeking to create.

He said, "The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution."

And he continued: "... the great truth [is] that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

The Civil War and the Confederacy were about slavery. Period. I was reminded of this speech when Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, used it earlier this summer in powerful remarks he used to make the case for removing those monuments in his own city.

Statues erected to memorialize Confederate leaders in the Civil War—men like Robert E. Lee—suggest that this part of our history is something worth celebrating. It is not.

The people who descended on Charlottesville were there to protest the moving of a Robert E. Lee statue and assert their belief in white supremacy. The hatred and bigotry on display from these white supremacists and neo-Nazis are so universally repugnant that Republicans and Democrats on every part of the political spectrum swiftly and sharply condemned it.

But Donald Trump didn't.

The fact that white supremacists and leaders in the KKK have roundly praised what the president said in his press conference today says something pretty horrifying. Donald Trump is unwilling to condemn people who are wistful for the days of slavery—America's original sin—and who came to Virginia armed with makeshift shields and clubs.
I sincerely hope that in the wake of the failure of this president to assert any moral leadership, Americans from every corner of this country will come together to say that these people and this mindset are morally repugnant. And that hatred and violence have no place in our country

https://www.facebook.com/senatoralfranken/