Joe Wilson's Strange Friends - the new Ku Klux Klan

The controversial congressman has been a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Max Blumenthal, author of the just-published Republican Gomorrah, asks:
Did he remain so even after it became a hate group?

Since Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina bellowed at President Barack Obama, “You lie!” during the president’s nationally televised speech on health care, the fourth-term backbencher has emerged as a hero for the conservative grassroots. One of the most enthusiastic endorsements of Wilson’s histrionics came from the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a group that Wilson has belonged to according to his own biographical materials.

“Mr. Wilson, never apologize for allowing your love of truth to overrun your desire to be polite,” the SCV Tea Party declared on its website. “It is the liar who must apologize, not the one who identifies the liar!”

SCV leader Kirk Lyons harbored dream of creating a seemingly benign front group for a more sophisticated version of the Ku Klux Klan.
Who are the SCV? A once-proud organization of Confederate history buffs and Civil War re-enactors that traditionally spent its money to restore battlefields and Confederate cemeteries. By 2006, however, the SCV had been substantially taken over by an organized cadre of white supremacists (read here for more background) who sought to turn the nation’s oldest Southern historical society into what the veteran white supremacy activist Kirk Lyons called “a modern, 21st century Christian war machine capable of uniting the Confederate community and leading it to ultimate victory,” had seized much of the SCV’s leadership positions, the Southern Poverty Law Center released an extensive list of SCV officials who belonged to “hate groups.”

Lyons, a key member of this new leadership, had harbored dreams of creating a seemingly benign front group for a more sophisticated version of the Ku Klux Klan. “I have great respect for the Klan historically, but, sadly the Klan today is ineffective and sometimes even destructive,” Lyons told a German neo-Nazi magazine in 1992. “It would be good if the Klan followed the advice of former Klansman Robert Miles: 'Become invisible. Hang the robes and hoods in the cupboard and become an underground organization.'” With the SCV, Lyons discovered he didn’t have to go underground after all.

more http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-11/joe-wilsons-rebel-yell/

Nothing shocks me these days regarding wingnuts.

:hi:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=209

For close to three decades, Boyd Cathey has been a superficially presentable but radical political activist — a man with tight connections to Holocaust denial, far-right Catholicism and racially tinged neo-Confederate causes who nevertheless has helped lead major political campaigns. In the 1970s, while still in his 20s, Cathey studied in Spain, Switzerland and Argentina at institutions run by the Society of Pius X, a far-right "traditionalist" Catholic sect that rejects modern theological reforms, and Opus Dei, a Catholic organization that long supported Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. . . .

By 1984, Cathey had taken a public plunge into far-right, neo-Confederate politics, joining Southern Partisan magazine as a contributor, editor and senior adviser until 1999. In 1988, Cathey was named North Carolina co-chair for gay-bashing televangelist Pat Robertson's presidential run.

Four years later, he became state campaign manager for far-right commentator Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign — and was exposed during that campaign as an editorial adviser, since 1989, to the journal of the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review (IHR). (The IHR puts on conferences featuring people like neo-Nazi David Duke and the son of Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.) Cathey claimed in 1996 that he had quit his IHR position, but its leader, Mark Weber, said last year that Cathey was still in the post. Cathey is still listed on the group's Web page today.

Cathey recently also has become a key player in the attempted extremist takeover of the Sons of Confederate Veterans led by Ron Wilson (see Hijacking Heritage) the heritage group's commander in chief since August 2002.

Sanford, DeMint, and Graham are all associated with them, and I'd be willing to bet Wilson is too, but haven't been able to find any documentation.

Shocked that he associates with bigots.

And this gambling, I'm also shocked that there is gambling in this establishment.