RUSH: To the audio sound bites we go.  We’re gonna start here at the top.  This morning on Washington Journal on C-SPAN, the guest is — and this is good, by the way — a Republican congressman from Alabama named Bradley Byrne.  And, in the old days, this might have gone the other way, but it’s a new day out there.  We have a call from a guy named Mike in Ohio, and he had a complaint about me and Sheets Byrd.

C-SPAN CALLER:  Could you look into the camera, you and Jeff Sessions, and say a word to both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, ’cause every time those two people mention the deceased Robert Byrd, they put KKK in the middle of his name.  Would you please look into the camera and say, “Please, Rush Limbaugh, please stop doing that.”  The guy’s passed away, he cannot defend himself, and he did apologize for anything he did with the KKK when he was a young man.

RUSH:  I never call him KKK.  I may say Grand Kleagle, but I don’t say KKK.  I call him Sheets.  This guy’s confusing me with somebody.  I call him Robert “Sheets” Byrd.  Okay, so you have a Republican congressman here — again, his name Bradley Byrne — and here’s a caller from Ohio. “Would you tell Rush Limbaugh to cut it out?  You agree with Rush Limbaugh?”  Most… In many cases, the Republican would kind of waffle and get out of the way, and not condemn me because they’re supposedly afraid to do that. But they wouldn’t come out and tell the caller to take a hike.  But listen to this…

BYRNE:  There were people in the South who were racist, who were members of the Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens’ Councils, who did change their minds.  I’m glad Senator Byrd said that.  But to come out and attack Republicans without understanding the history of the Democratic Party is not fair, and it’s appropriate for us to bring that up to make sure we all understand the history of it.

RUSH:  Amen!  The guy didn’t back down.  He told the caller, “Hey, look, it’s the Democrat Party that was the Ku Klux Klan.  It was the Democrat Party that was the party segregation, the Democrat Party that was the party of Bull Connor and fire hosing and throwing the dogs on the protesters at Selma.  It was the Democrats that did that.  It was the Democrats that blocked the doors of their university, Democrat governors — and Sheets Byrd was a Grand Kleagle in the Ku Klux Klan.”  Now, he did apologize for it.  In one of his apologies on Fox, he actually uttered the N-word, and he was applauded for having the courage to do so within the context that he so mentioned.

But this is another, I think, positive sign that there is less tendency now to cower from these kinds of assault, verbal assaults that the Democrats and their unhinged acolytes are known for.