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Whenever I think of South Carolina, my first thought is: I know some very fine people there. And my second thought is: Holy shit! Those friends of mine are a small archipelago of sanity surrounded by The Great Sea of Un-Reconstructed Wackadoodles!
Everyone of good will, for example, supported the Supreme Court's Loving v Virginia (1967), which invalidated as unconstitutional state laws prohibiting marriage between persons of different skin color -- but South Carolina didn't remove the prohibition from their books until some thirty years later. And from 1962 until 2000, South Carolina flew a confederate battle banner over its state capitol, with the explanation they were honoring the "centenary" of the Civil War (1861-1865): perhaps most South Carolinians simply never learned the meaning of the word "centenary," or perhaps too few were able to do the arithmetic to compute the centenary correctly (1961 - 1965), or perhaps it was just that Many South Carolinians never accepted the War had ended long ago or that the Confederacy had been defeated. And to convince yourself how little has changed, you can follow the continuing saga of the state's Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission -- if you can afford the ulcers and high blood pressure that will result
When I say South Carolina has some very fine people, I (sadly) do not include their junior Senator, a nutbar named Jim DeMint, who is a man of many unattractive prejudices: he does not think, for example, that gays should be allowed to teach in the public schools. Jim made his reputation during the Confederate banner flap a few years ago, by his enthusiastic support for display of the banner -- and there is no question what that banner really means in South Carolina, since the state's December 1860 declaration of secession explicitly recoils in horror from the prospect that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction due to the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery and who has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free." Jim (naturally!) appeared at the Teabagger's march last month, where he carefully followed the long-familiar advice of Dixie (Look away! look away! look away!) and so managed not to notice officially any of racist placards widely in evidence. In recent months, besides opposing hate crimes legislation, he has compared the United States to Nazi Germany and has made clear that he intends to oppose health care reform -- in order to "break" Obama, who is (I suppose) rather too uppity for Jim's tastes
And Jim visited Honduras last week. Honduras, you may recall, had some extracurricular excitement this summer: rightwingers shut down the media and spread rumors that Hugo Chavez was invading the country, while the military patrolled the streets and expelled the elected President (still wearing his PJ's) to neighboring Costa Rica, after which a new President was appointed. Quite a few people in Honduras still harbor significant doubts about whether that was really kosher, and no government anywhere outside of Honduras thinks it was. Jim, on the other hand, still being eager to "break" Obama, set off on what he called a "fact-finding" mission -- which means he went to Honduras, met with members of the unrecognized replacement government (but not with the members of the recognized displaced government) and said he found the Honduran transition indistinguishable from Ford's becoming President in 1974 or Franken's more recently becoming Senator
So what was Jim really up to? Well, he's facing re-election in 2010, and that means he needs to consolidate his un-reconstructed wackadoodle base. We know who they are: they're the teabagging wingnuts, who swallow the cranked-up rhetoric. World Net Daily published a piece for them this week, hoping for a coup in the US. Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, has been trying to keep them angry and nervous by comparing Obama's health care advisor to Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele. Jim is dog-whistling to them and telling them what they want to hear -- namely, that he would support a coup
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