I read an outstanding commentary this morning by Condoleezza Rice, our former secretary of state appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005. She was previously the director of the prestigious Hoover Institution. Not a single State Department appointee under the current administration rivals her intellect and leadership.

In a piece titled “Juneteenth Is Our Second Independence Day, Rice, the great-grandchild of a slave, wrote about June 19, 1865, when soldiers under orders from Republican President Abraham Lincoln "arrived in the farthest territory of the Confederate states — in Galveston Bay, Texas — bringing with them the news that slavery had been abolished.” It was, she noted, “an important step for the 250,000 people still enslaved in Texas, and one they probably didn’t believe would ever come to pass.”

She wrote of her personal experience a century later, “growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, which was then the most segregated city in the country,” and recounted: “I was eight years old when, on a Sunday morning in September 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed. I felt the blast a few blocks away in the church where my father was the pastor. Four little girls, two of whom I knew, were killed.”

She observes: “To me, Juneteenth is a recognition of what I call America’s second founding. Despite our nation’s extraordinary founding documents about equality, this country was founded as a slave-owning state. That is our birth defect. But the words in those carefully crafted documents — written by great men who were themselves flawed human beings — ultimately lit the way toward a more perfect union.”

She concludes: “Today, just as I once did with my parents, I will celebrate Juneteenth. I will think about my ancestors and what they must have felt when they were liberated from slavery. And I will give thanks for being born in a country where such moral progress is possible. That is worth celebrating not just by black Americans but by all of us.”

Indeed. Well said.

But in the years since she was a child in Birmingham, that “moral progress” has been subjugated to the Democrat Party’s politics of hate and division.

Democrats pretend to be the saviors of black Americans on Juneteenth. They may trot out their slave-trader garb to keep their hate-hustling division front and center, in defiance of what the once-great civil rights leaders declared of such hateful divisiveness.

They won’t mention that this federal holiday was proposed by their arch nemesis, Republican President Donald Trump, and their black salvation pretense is far from the truth.

Democrats were and remain the architects of white supremacy and the political beneficiaries of the “systemic racism” they propagate. Democrats turned Martin Luther King’s dream into a nightmare for tens of millions of black men, women, and children.

Their “Great Society” programs institutionalized systemic poverty, enslaving generations of poor black Americans on urban poverty plantations. And they are responsible for the unmitigated black-on-black violence plaguing those urban centers.

Earlier this week, Joe Biden was commemorating the murders of “nine beautiful souls of Mother Emanuel AME who lost their lives on June 17, 2015.” He added, “Even though the word of God was pierced by bullets in hate and rage nine years ago today, the grace of this congregation remains a powerful testament to all Americans.”

Indeed, the response from the leadership of Emanuel AME demonstrated faithful grace that defies the logic of the world.

But Biden never, EVER mentions the NINETEEN THOUSAND+ black souls murdered by other black people since then. Clearly those black lives don’t matter. Those murders shine a bright light on Democrat urban policy failures and, consequently, Biden and his leftist political cadres across the nation vigorously avoid any mention of those souls.

My friend Allen West, former Chairman of the Texas Republican Party, notes: “Today, the Democrats are economically enslaving Blacks and have turned inner city communities into modern plantations of welfare and economic dependence. Juneteenth is a celebration of why the Republican Party was established in 1854, the abolition of slavery. Only a flaming incompetent idiot would give the party of the jackass any credit for Juneteenth.”

Of course, slavery officially ended on December 6, 1865, after ratification of the 13th Amendment, which raises the question, to keep their race-bait agenda steaming, will Democrats push for all dates associated with emancipation to be national holidays? Currently, “Emancipation Day” (April 16) commemorates that date in 1862 when Lincoln signed legislation outlawing slavery in Washington, D.C. (and compensating owners – you know, reparations). What about September 22 (1862) when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, or January 1 (1863) when that executive order took effect?

Americans could move beyond the Demos’ racial hate and division rhetoric if it weren’t a staple of the Democrat Party platform. And that has been and remains the biggest obstacle to the future of “moral progress” referenced by Condoleezza Rice.