SC 2016: Again, with THIS ????
Well, the run-up to South Carolina’s presidential primary is already underway. It’s an every-four-years ritual. A
nd with that ritual comes another ritual — moaning and hand-wringing about the Confederate flag on the grounds of the state Capitol in Columbia.
*Speaking as a native-born Southerner, I can’t begin to tell you how much we, um, appreciate it when arrogant Yankees lecture us on what’s good and proper for us. Especially after seeing what those same Yankees have done to their own states and major cities.* (But, I digress.)
Anyway, every time this primary rolls around — or when there is a major statewide race in The Palmetto State — the drivebys get overheated demanding of all of the candidates ‘When is the flag coming down ????”
Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney have already given the drivebys what they want. The other candidates — who actually want to win the state — are not touching the issue with a 10-foot pole. Former South Carolina governor David Beasley (R) tried to appease the drivebys by calling for the flag to be removed. That gaffe, during his 1998 reelection bid, took what had been a slam-dunk win and turned it into the first win of the governor’s office by Democrats in decades. (It was also the last time a Democrat held the office.)
The Washington Examiner says the SC GOP needs to take down the Confederate flag in order to “save” itself. Really? The GOP owns South Carolina government at every level. The state’s Democrat Party is pretty much a non-factor. (I think they have a handful of legislators and Jim Clyburn.) The Stars and Bars is still flying on the Capitol grounds. I don’t see this suffering the Washington and New York media claim the GOP is undergoing. 
The drivebys and the Democrats are trying hard to tie the flag to the shooting in that Charleston church. That kid was mentally deranged. I believe — if you look into his case close enough — you’ll see more of a failure of the social welfare net to properly deal with someone who needed serious mental health care than you will any kind of political meme.
Many South Carolinians — as well as Southerners, in general — see the Stars and Bars as an important symbol of their heritage. Contrary to what leftist revisionists want you to believe, the War Between The States was not about slavery. The great majority of people who wore the grey of the Confederacy in battle never owned slaves. Most people saw that bloody struggle as an effort to resist government tyranny ( oppressive tariffs, et al.).
Of course, neo-Nazis and the Klan have misused the Stars and Bars. But do the actions of a dwindling number of extremists, and the awful acts of a seriously disturbed young man, really warrant going here?
This actually reminds me a lot of the old birth control distraction George Stephanopoulos hit Romney with in 2012. We’ve got terrorism back on the rise, a disastrous economy, ObamaCare ravaging our society, and our presidential campaign coverage is basically parroting a story line from an episode of Jerry Springer?
Seriously?
Our drivebys have done more damage to American society in the last few decades than that flag has. (Ask the folks who live in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore.)
Among the many things we need to body slam into our Republican “leaders” is the basic maxim that you do not appease. It will get you nothing except more demands by those that they seek to appease.
I am always amazed that so many of the candidates are willing to answer questions like that, or any questions at all, since they know no matter what they say it is going to be used to eviscerate them.
Nothing but total liberal nonsense led by the leftwing media and the NAACP grasping for any issue to suck on. Only stupid Republicans like Romney, Bush, and McCain would fall for such ignorance. They actually believe the Republican base must live in Detroit, Baltimore, or Harlem.
As long as Americans, as a whole, see the Confederate flag as a symbol of hate groups it will continue to draw this sort of attention from the media etc.. Since the Civil War, the flag has not been identified with good virtues by most Americans. To most the symbol’s “brand” has not climbed up from hate.
Only the truly ignorant, and the hopelessly leftwing view the Confederate flag that way. Of course, the fact that modern education contains more ideological propaganda than actual education (and it gets more worse with Common Core) leaves far too many people ignorant on things like this.
The media also has more ideological propagandists than journalists these days, and plays their own devious propaganda games. This is not the issue to do it on, but with the low trust levels for media already appearing in the polls, the GOP candidates really ought to start calling out the media regularly and loudly for their bias.
When it comes to ”hate” during the War Between the States, I think what Sherman did in Georgia and the Carolinas to Confederate civilians, white and black, which also constituted war crimes under the Geneva Convention of 1863, shows more hate than anything from the Confederacy. And other Union generals did the same thing like Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley.
And as to ”hate groups”, after achieving their legitimate civil rights goals (which was laudable) the NAACP still needed a reason to exist and raise money, so it has become a bigoted anti-southern hate group attacking southern heritage. The current NAACP has almost as much hate in them as the KKK did in its heyday.
Yep, the American Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy legitimized the antebellum South, and Joe Wilson shouting, “You lie,” had nothing to do with racism. We need to shine a little more sunlight on the South to disinfect it.
Listen to your leftist hero, Karl Marx, who wrote while observing the War Between the States from the UK, ”the war is not about slavery; it is a war of economic subjugation by the north against the south”.
For the rest of us, Sir Winston Churchill, the greatest statesman of the 20th century set it all out in the history of the US he wrote entitled ”The Great Republic” where he devoted an entire chapter to the cause of the War Between the States. Churchill concluded that the main cause of the war was a final rupture between competing theories of government that had been festering since the country was founded, between the Hamiltonian philosophy of a strong central government represented by Lincoln and the north, and the Jeffersonian philosophy of limited government represented by Davis and the south. Big government won, and we see the result in the levianthan that we have today.
The national Republican Party is behind this effort to remove the flag. The GOP is simply reverting to its 1865 reconstructionist roots, aided once again by southern scalawags. Pathetic.The stupid party on full display.