The Senate majority leader beclowns himself yet again.

When Democrats are the Senate minority, they are firm believers in the sacred right of the minority party to filibuster legisation. When Democrats are the Senate majority, only evil Hitlers would dare to filibuster their legislation. Here's the latest from Senate majority leader Harry Reid on the subject:

But Reid argued that Republicans are using the same stalling tactics employed in the pre-Civil War era.

"Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, 'slow down, stop everything, let's start over.' If you think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right," Reid said Monday. "When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said 'slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough.'"

He continued: "When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted they simply, slow down, there will be a better day to do that, today isn't quite right.

"When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."

These statements demonstrate that Senator Reid has an utterly amazing level of ignorance about American history. Talk radio has been hammering Senator Reid on this all day: most of these people that the Senator has been complaining about were Democrats!

For example, Republicans never argued for the country to slow down on confronting slavery. The Republican party formed because they thought the country was already to slow and complacent to deal with the evils of slavery. It was the Democrats who fought a tooth-and-nail defense of slavery, not Republicans. Democrats to this day still hold a Jefferson-Jackson dinner to commemorate the two most prominent slaveholding Democrats in American history.

Here's a point that talk radio missed. Senator Reid claims that pre-civil rights era politicians are using the same filibuster threats that Republicans are making today. This is entirely false. Why? Because the Senate liberalized the filibuster rule in 1975! If the Senate had the same filibuster rule that it had in the 1960s, this year's health care reform bills would have been killed and buried months ago.