Day after day of tributes and puff-pieces about Senator Robert Byrd on NPR. Had he been a Republican, with the exact same record the questions would have been:

1. He was a KKK leader who only apologized relatively recently for that association — was he truly repentant? What about his racist use of language in even recent years? Doesn't that undercut his alleged sincerity in race relations?

2. What has the GOP does to remove its racist taint for association with the KKK? (The KKK was actually an arm of the Democratic Party, not Republican.) What did it mean that they kept and backed an unrepentant Klan member for so long?

3. And what about his obstruction of the Civil Rights Act? Why hasn't his party publicly apologized for that?

4. He was always good at procuring pork and kickbacks for his political supporters; some might call this corruption but it kept him in office. Didn't he, in a way, represent everything which is wrong or broken about our political system?

Instead, questions 1-3 have been whitewashed and question four is turned on its head.

Jonah Goldberg:

The common interpretation is that Byrd's is a story of redemption. A one-time Exalted Cyclops of the KKK, Byrd recruited some 150 members to the chapter he led — that's led, not "joined," by the way. (If you doubt his commitment to the cause, try to recruit 150 people to do anything, never mind have them pay a hefty fee up front.)

Byrd filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As Bruce Bartlett notes in his book Wrong on Race, Byrd knew he would fail, but he stood on bedrock principle that integration was evil. His individual filibuster, the second longest in American history, fills 86 pages of fine print in the Congressional Record. "Only a true believer," writes Bartlett, "would ever undertake such a futile effort."

Unlike some segregationists', Byrd's arguments rested less on the principle of states' rights than on his conviction that black people were simply biologically inferior.

Sure, he lied for years about his repudiation of the Klan. Sure, he was still referring to "white n*ggers" as recently as 2001. But everyone agrees his change of heart is sincere. And for all I know, it was.

What's odd is what passes for proof of his sincerity. Yes, he voted to make Martin Luther King Day a holiday. But to listen to some eulogizers, the real proof came in the fact that he supported ever more lavish government programs — and opposed the Iraq War. Am I alone in taking offense at the idea that supporting big government and opposing the Iraq War somehow count as proof of racial enlightenment?

Robert Byrd was a complicated man, but the explanation for the outsized celebration of his career strikes me as far more simple. He was a powerful man who abandoned his bigoted principles in order to keep power. And his party loved him for it.

I wish him no ill at all, but the ongoing sycophantic lionization is surreal, to say the least.