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You know how when you watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report and you have that moment of wondering "Is this funny or frightening? Should I laugh or cry?"
That's how I feel about South Carolina politics. Is it funny that Nikki Haley won the GOP primary despite allegations from (Republican sponsored?) men all around the state that they had "innappropriate sexual relations with her" and being called a "rag head" by a GOP state senator? Is South Carolina amusing or just so unbelievably scary that it's time to send in the National Guard to take control?
This is particularly true with the strange case of Alvin Greene's victory in the Democratic primaries on Tuesday. Supposedly Mr. Greene won without running a campaign, without any party machinery, hell, without even a website! When asked whether the election was the result of GOP dirty tricks, senior White House adviser David Axelrod said:
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It was a mysterious deal. The whole thing is odd. I don't really know how to explain it and I don't think anybody else does either. ... How [Greene] won the primary is a big mystery, and until you resolve that I don't think he can claim to be a strong, credible candidate."Mysterious indeed. Greene defeated the very popular Vic Rawls by 59% to 41% without running a campaign. What the voters know about Greene is sketchy: he's unemployed and faces felony obscenity charges. What the voters don't know about Greene is scarier: rather than being the "Everyman" some think he is, Alvin Greene has a college degree and worked as an "intelligence specialist" for the Army. Oh, and one more thing, Greene received more votes than were actually cast. To make the whole thing even funnier, not in the ha ha sense, but as in the something ain't right sense, South Carolina Democratic Representative James Clyburn accused the GOP of planting fake candidates to ruin the Democratic primaries.
[I]t turned up after the elections, we found out, as I said earlier, something untoward was going on...we see that Congressman Joe Wilson's campaign manager was, in fact, managing the campaign of my primary opponent. I saw the patterns in this. I know a Democratic pattern, I know a Republican pattern, and I saw in the Democratic primary, elephant dung all over the place. So I knew something was wrong in that primary. And this result tells us that."If this really is GOP skullduggery, we have truly entered into territory that is dangerously close to fascism- or at least South Carolina has. In a recent email from Ann Coulter (yes, I signed up for her emails), she says:
One of the first things Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other totalitarians did during their reign was rewrite the histories of their nations, remaking the past to foster their control of the present.Actually, Ann is wrong. The first thing any fascistic regime does is illegally grab power. It's by stealing power that fascistic regimes can rewrite the history books, the Constitution, and put everyone in camps later on. When regimes steal power, they also rob the people of a chance to respond. The only response to South Carolina is a federal investigation that will hold the GOP criminally accountable if they planted false candidates, rigged the votes, and took away from every American, not just those in South Carolina, the fundamental belief in a free and fair election.