'Glenn Beck': Holder Says America Continues to be a 'Nation of Cowards'

This is a rush transcript from "Glenn Beck," July 7, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

GLENN BECK, HOST: It kills me that the people who are running our country right now really have — they despise the Founding Fathers. They're the first to point out they were slave owners and racists and everything else.

And yet, when Robert Byrd dies, they were the first to say, "Yes, that was fleeting. No big deal." Really? Lynching people, no big deal. Burning crosses, no big deal.

Democratic Party, Bill Clinton, summing up Robert Byrd's Klan years as, quoting, "A country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia, just trying to get elected."

The implication there, you know, should be pretty insulting to the people of West Virginia. But they and we have all been insulted before on race. Remember when Attorney General Eric Holder has said that we — well, here, I'll let him sum it up for you.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIC HOLDER, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BECK: Is that who you are? Is that who America is? A nation of cowards. I've never heard that. We are a nation of imperfect human beings who have struggled and continue to struggle to overcome our shortcomings.

We recognize our wrongs, or we try to, sometimes very, very late and we try to right them. We face our history. We deal with it and we try to make a better future for ourselves and our children, but we don't live in the past. We learn from the past.

Progressives like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, on the other hand, have been trying to erase our history, create problems where none exist, ignore problems where they do exist.

It seems to me a pretty good case of cowardice can be made right now against the DOJ for dropping the case of voter intimidation against the new Black Panthers. Do you remember this scene in Philadelphia at the polling site?

This is 2008. Here is a Black Panther. Look at this. Like he is in military garb, here he is with a nightstick. They're calling out racial slurs to voters. OK? Now, if we were a nation of cowards, what would we do here? What would we do?

We wouldn't have stopped this the last time this occurred, because the nation of cowards wouldn't have stopped it. But this scene seems familiar. Watch this. Oh. Oh, yes, that's right. The Klan. Not a nightstick. A noose. Voting night. Same crime, race reversed.

The difference now is in the content of character of those in power, those who have the ability to stop this kind of racism because they have seen it in the past. They might have read about it in the past.

Intimidation, white or black, is wrong. Wrong. Is there anybody this time around that will do anything about it? Is this the lesson we learned from Martin Luther King? I don't think so.

But then again, I don't think it's hijacking his legacy to say that. This is exactly what that man fought against.

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