Then, on the eve of the 2000 election, the NAACP ran an ad in which the daughter of James Byrd Jr., murdered in a 1998 hate crime in Texas, said that Bush's refusal to sign hate-crime legislation while he was governor of Texas was like watching her father die "all over again." The ad featured a horrifying image of a truck with a chain dangling behind it. The not so subtle message: Bush is indifferent to race-based crime. For obvious reasons, the ad did not mention that Byrd's attackers were found guilty and sentenced to death.

That was the NAACP's campaign ad during the 2000 election. That is where they poured their money. They produced no ads about lifting black people up. The sum of their message was that the Republicans are bad. To this day, the majority of the civil rights work currently being done by the NAACP has to do with drumming up support of the Democratic party - in the form of voter drives, yes, but also in the form of opposition to school vouchers, faith-based charities and countless other programs that the black voting populace actually supports in public opinion polls.

When anyone within the NAACP suggests doing things differently, they are made to pay.

During the contentious 2000 election, the NAACP fired its Colorado chapter president because he went public with his support of school vouchers. A couple months later it suspended one of its Virginia representatives for having the audacity to endorse a Republican.

Were these NAACP representatives wrong to admit they supported the Republicans on certain issues? I suspect they were just plain na?, not realizing that the civil rights movement in the United States ended a decade ago. There is no room within the NAACP for intellectual diversity anymore, just loyal servitude to the Democratic Party

This is a crime. This is a shame. This is the sad state of the nation's oldest and most storied civil rights organization.

So explain to me again, Mr. Bond, why President Bush would consider appearing at the NAACP's annual convention.