While I have slagged Christopher Hitchens many times, I feel that when he puts down the Scotch long enough to say something worthwhile, I should probably recognize it. Hitchens quite rightly took race baiter presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to task for this little nugget of homespun wisdom;

“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell ‘em what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do.”

As Hitchens points out here;

1) The South Carolina flag is a perfectly nice flag, featuring the palmetto plant, about which no “outsider” has ever offered any free advice.

2) The Confederate battle flag, to which Gov. Huckabee was alluding, was first flown over the South Carolina state Capitol in 1962, as a deliberately belligerent riposte to the civil rights movement, and is not now, and never has been, the flag of that great state.

3) By a vote of both South Carolina houses in the year 2000, the Confederate battle flag ceased to be flown over the state capitol and now only waves (as quite possibly it should) over the memorial to fallen Confederate soldiers.

Thus, as well as crassly behaving exactly like someone “from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” former Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas deliberately aligned himself with the rancorous minority who are still not reconciled to the idea that South Carolina may not officially consecrate racism and slavery and secession. “Your flag”? What an insult, not just to the descendants of slavery but to the many, many other loyalists and Unionists who fought and died to bring their state back into the Union. And what is the point of the “outside the state” slur? Wasn’t this exactly what Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas used to say, as if to make it seem that all was hunky-dory in his own tight little dominion until them goddam “outside agitators” arrived? In the end, as Gov. Huckabee may or may not recall, the 101^st Airborne Division, most of them “outsiders” not from Arkansas, had to be sent by a Republican president to integrate the schools of Little Rock. That was a lot of trouble and expense that the big-mouth rednecks put us all to, but it was worth it. It’s insufferable to hear this glib idiot make a mockery of it now in order to try to get the Klan vote in South Carolina.

This is one of many, many reasons I hate the inflexible American political process for keeping in place a system of primaries from when the country was a fraction of its current size and of a different cultural makeup. It means candidates have to, every four years, act as down-homey as possible and pretend to suddenly be a bunch of good ol’ boys instead of the Northeast elites they are. I remember everyone in 2000 having to scramble to find a way to not tell the people of South Carolina that their flag was whack while not coming off as racists, and it churned my stomach. The same when this year the candidates all took pains in Iowa to seem as salt of earth as possible, even if, as in Fred Thompson’s case, they were wearing Gucci loafers while doing it. Or Mitt Romney continunally bashes the state he lived in for 30 years as some bastion of liberal snobbery. Enough already; America, ignorance isn’t cool. Every other industrialized nation, and many that aren’t, have caught onto that. Stop falling for this bizarre public theatre where everyone acts like they’re extras on Hee-Haw.

I would reccomend reading Hitchens’ piece. He pretty much nails it and shows that if he were not busy attacking Hannukah, writing bizarre critiques of Michael Moore, filming videos where he baffles Richard Dawkins with drunken outbursts, and cheering Christian agression in the name of Atheism, he could be one of America’s more important pundits.

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