As painfully lame as this is, I’m sort of impressed that Clinton felt obliged to acknowledge Byrd’s Klan past as frankly as he did. Jake Tapper’s complained more than once this week on Twitter about lefties giving him grief for daring to note that the former president pro temp of the Senate is also a former sheethead. The Chappaquiddick rules apply, it seems: When a liberal icon dies, it’s simply ungracious to recall moments where he might have, say, left someone for dead or burned a cross on someone’s lawn. Accentuate the positive, America.

Also, contra Billy Jeff, Byrd’s association with the Klan wasn’t exactly “fleeting.” He joined in 1942; four years later, he was still babbling about his hope for a KKK renaissance in West Virginia. And 18 years after that, he famously filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Nothing necessarily racist about opposing a statute, of course, but then that logic didn’t save Rand Paul a few months ago when he raised libertarian concerns about a single section of that same law (before reiterating that he would have voted for it anyway). Exit question: How bad, precisely, do your actions have to be before the “he was just trying to get elected” defense doesn’t cut it? Click the image to watch.