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I happened to notice that C-SPAN was airing some old Democratic National Convention speeches over the weekend ahead of the Democrats' upcoming convention this week, so I set the DVR to record some of them and thought I'd share a portion of President Harry Truman's speech from 1948.

All I can say is sadly when it comes to the Republican party, the more things change, the more they stay the same. There's so much of this speech that also applies directly to today's Republicans, it's really disheartening. Frankly it was a little creepy too after just having caught a portion of the Republicans voting on their recent platform at their convention this year.

Here's the portion from the first clip: HARRY S. TRUMAN: Speech to the Democratic National Convention

Philadelphia, July 15, 1948:

In the field of labor we needed moderate legislation to promote labor-management harmony, but Congress passed instead that so-called Taft-Hartley Act, which has disrupted labor-management relations and will cause strife and bitterness for years to come if it is not repealed, as the Democratic platform says it ought to be repealed.

On the Labor Department, the Republican platform of 1944said, if they were in power, that they would build up a strong Labor Department. They have simply torn it up. Only one bureau is left that is functioning, and they cut the appropriation of that so it can hardly function.

I recommended an increase in the minimum wage. What did I get? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I suggested that the schools in this country are crowded,teachers underpaid, and that there is a shortage of teachers. One of our greatest national needs is more and better schools.

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Fundamentalist Christian radio host Bryan Fischer says that the white supremacist who massacred six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin must have been a liberal because he hated former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and had a "a left-wing political philosophy."

On his Tuesday American Family Association radio show, Fisher said that Wade Michael Page could not be connected to the tea party because he had threatened to leave the country if Cain was elected president. But the conservative radio host failed to mention that Page's hate for African Americans may have trumped any desire to support the Republican candidate.

"The tea party [is] primarily made up of white people, of evangelicals, people of faith," Fischer explained. "We loved Herman Cain. He was a black guy. We loved him. We would have been happy to have him be our presidential candidate. This guy despised Herman Cain."

Fischer then made the claim that Page's identification as a neo-Nazi meant he also must have been a liberal.

"You know what the Nazi Party stands for? It's the National Socialist Party. What about the word 'socialist' do you not understand? They were the National Socialist Party - that is a left-wing political philosophy," he insisted.

Fischer continued: "And you think even here in the United States, who was the part of racism? It was the left, it was liberals who were the part of racism. It was Democrats that supported and defended the institution of slavery. It was Democrats that resisted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It was Democrats that instituted Jim Crow laws. It was Democrats that created the Ku Klux Klan. It was Democrats that filibustered the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s."

While Fischer often recounts the Democratic Party's opposition to rights for minorities, he always fails to mention that Democrats surpassed Republicans on civil rights when Democratic President Harry Truman became the first president since Abraham Lincoln to address civil rights issues in the 1940s. After attempting to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Southern Democrats have largely joined the national party in support of civil rights issues. Many of those that didn't agree with the party's civil rights agenda, defected to the Republican Party.

Earlier this week, televangelist Pat Robertson also attempted to disassociate Page with conservative Christians by suggesting that atheists were to blame for the shooting.

“What is it?” the TV preacher wondered. “Is it satanic? Is it some spiritual thing, people who are atheists, they hate God, they hate the expression of God? And they are angry with the world, angry with themselves, angry with society and they take it out on innocent people who are worshiping God.”

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

Thom Hartmann hits the corporate Democrats who are carping for the party to move even further to the right after the loss in Massachusetts and the choice President Obama faces now of whether to listen to them or not.