Black Intel

I get home late yesterday after a full day of classes, and I’m turn on the news to see what one liners the President delivered in his speech about health reform. However I was surprise to find the top story was about Congressman Joe Wilson making a fool out of himself as he heckled the President during a speech. I started to think about this more and more and I’ve came to conclusion that there is a big part of the American public, including congressmen, ex vice president’s and a certain “news” channel that have no respect for the current President of the United States. At first I thought it was just more of a dislike because of policies or maybe a hatred towards Democrats, but now it is clear, it is a deep and profound disrespect of the President based on his race.  I’m only 25, but I’ve never in my life seen anyone show up to a town hall meeting with  a gun where the leader of the free world is speaking. I’ve never seen congress people actually question the Presidents authority to be President or if he is in fact an American. Last night when I saw Mr. Wilson yell at the President, my heart sank and my head started to hurt. The country that made me so honored and proud to be apart of last November has now openly insulted me because of my culture. There is TV now folks we can see you and hear you and were not going to forget what is going on. Surprise surprise, it’s our country too.

Below is an article from the New York Times… comments?

Over the Line in South Carolina

Photo, left to right: Virginia Postic/Associated Press, Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press, Stephen Jaffe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Gov. Mark Sanford at a news conference in August; Rep. Joe Wilson on Capital Hill on Wednesday; Senator Strom Thurmond in 1997.

Is it just a fluke that South Carolina has another politician in trouble for behaving badly?

Representative Joe Wilson, a Republican whose district includes Hilton Head, spent Thursday apologizing for yelling “you lie!” at Mr. Obama during his health care address on Wednesday night.

Meanwhile, South Carolina’s governor, Mark Sanford, whose acknowledgment of an extramarital affair has opened up broader accusations of official misconduct, has been asked to resign by 61 of the 72 Republicans in the state House of Representatives. Mr. Sanford is standing firm. “God can use imperfect people to perform His will,” he said on Tuesday.

We asked some historians and analysts to offer some thoughts on the political culture of South Carolina, and its history.

• Jack Bass, humanities professor, College of Charleston
• Armstrong Williams, radio commentator
• Lacy K. Ford Jr., historian, University of South Carolina
• Thomas F. Schaller, political scientist

Helping the Opposition

Jack Bass, a professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the College of Charleston, is author of several books about the American South and co-author of “Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond.”

Joe Wilson apparently has become infected with the peculiarly South Carolina disease known as politicus apologia, for which Gov. Mark Sanford apparently became the first known victim. The governor has gone statewide for weeks with personal displays of the symptoms, which range from a combination of feverish denials of wrongdoing to sweaty speeches of apology for other doings before civic clubs and through media outlets.

Another symptom, as Mr. Wilson is already demonstrating, is a painful boost in fundraising for one’s already announced opponent, in this case former Marine captain and Iraqi war veteran Rob Miller. By mid-afternoon, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced Mr. Miller had raised $400,000 since Joe Wilson shouted, “You lie.” Mr. Miller’s almost 47 percent of the vote against Mr. Wilson’s in 2008 chopped 10 percentage points off the incumbent’s showing two years earlier.

Research continues on whether this infection in the state is limited to the South Carolina G.O.P.’s DNA. Earlier indicators of Mr. Wilson’s infection were displayed several years ago when he loudly denounced the claim of Essie Mae Washington-Williams as being a daughter of Strom Thurmond. Mr. Wilson called her story “unseemly” and a “smear.” Her name today is listed on the State House monument to her father, alongside those of his white children.

It’s a great time to live in South Carolina. Nobody’s bored.

An Honest Gut Reaction

Armstrong Williams can be heard nightly on Sirius/XM Power 169 from 9 pm to 10 pm.

I’ve often heard the phrase growing up around the fields of South Carolina that if you don’t make dust, you eat dust. In many respects, that phrase personifies how my South Carolina brothers view themselves and the rapid way they jump on issues.

Passion supplants civility. Not too often, but when it does, it is often perceived as warranted. Some would liken it to a hair-trigger mentality, but it’s more a verbal gut reaction and their wide-eyed views of what’s right and what’s wrong with the world, as they see it.

In many respects, Joe Wilson’s outburst last night was more from the gut as it was from the heart. I know Joe Wilson. He’s a self-effacing, humble man, like many in his district. He’s not prone to such antics, which is why I was shocked to discover listening to the president’s speech that his was the voice that screamed those words.

Poor taste? You bet. But to many in the Palmetto State, Congressman Wilson’s lapse reflected weeks of pent up frustration from the thousands of constituents he and several of his colleagues heard at their own town halls.

He’ll be regarded as a hero in some circles; not for his disrespect, these are, after all, gentrified southerners. But rather, Joe Wilson will be viewed for doing the right thing — for calling out the falsehoods of the Obama message machine, there and then. No dawdling, no delay.

It may have taken Joe an errant syllable or two last night with his syrupy drawl, but he was going to make his point, all else be damned.

Lacy K. Ford Jr.is professor of history and chair of the department at the University of South Carolina. His most recent book, “Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South,” was published by Oxford University Press this month.

Many South Carolinians of both parties have suffered unexpected embarrassment from two of the state’s most prominent Republicans — Governor Mark Sanford, who admitted an affair with an Argentinian woman, and Congressman Joe Wilson, who broke all the rules of Congressional decorum by shouting “you lie” at President Obama during his speech.

There is certainly no shortage of historical precedents for bold and outlandish, and even uncivil behavior by prominent South Carolina political figures.

Perhaps the most famous of such precedents occurred in 1856 when South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, a nationalist, entered the Senate chamber and caned Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner after the latter had given a speech attacking slavery and insulting South Carolina politicians. Sumner was temporarily disabled by the beating and missed many months of senate duty; Brooks resigned his seat but received a hero’s welcome in South Carolina for defending the honor of the state.

During the 1890s, Ben Tillman, an avowed racist who worked to disfranchise all African Americans in the state, drew national attention by declaring that, if elected to the U.S. Senate, he would stick his pitchfork in the fleshy ribs of the rotund Grover Cleveland, who was of Tillman’s own party.

But as a historian, I would suggest that the explanations for South Carolina’s more recent round of bad political behavior lie as much in the nature of the state’s newly-crafted political culture of one-party domination as in its older lineage of provincial defiance.

A Tradition of Resistance

Thomas F. Schaller is associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, author of “Whistling Past Dixie,” and a blogger for fivethirtyeight.com.

Wednesday night’s bleating-heart outburst from Joe Wilson will surprise nobody familiar with the history of South Carolina politics. No state boasts a tradition of shrill resistance to the Republic comparable to South Carolina’s.

Thomas Jefferson removed condemnations of slavery from the Declaration of Independence to appease South Carolinian slaveholders. State loyalists helped the British recapture the state in 1780 from the patriots. By 1828, state icon and Vice President John C. Calhoun was advocating state “nullification” of federal powers.

In 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede — and even threatened to secede from the Confederacy because the other southern states refused to re-open the slave trade. In 1856, on the Senate floor Congressman Preston Brooks bloodied an abolitionist senator with a cane.

Well into the 20th century, South Carolina’s black citizens observed the Fourth of July mostly alone; the vast majority of whites preferred instead to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day. In 1920, the state legislature rejected the women’s suffrage amendment, finally ratifying it a half century later.