Thursday, August 12, 2010

South Carolina is Perhaps the Wackiest, Most Morally Hypocritical GOP State, And That's Saying Something

Y’know...when I don’t have any material to post...I need only look for another hypocrite in the Republican Party and, Voila! A treasure trove of hypocrisy!
 

MARK SANFORD

Glory be, Mark "Adulterer in Buenos Aires" Sanford was a leader in the GOP rebellion against federal stimulus money.  Well, that was until a short time ago when he accepted stimulus funds for South Carolina's unemployment fund.

As the New York Times noted:

The governors [including Sanford] focused their ire, in particular, on provisions that pushed states to expand jobless benefits to some previously ineligible workers, like those seeking only part-time work or people new to the work force. They argued that the changes would lead to tax increases.

Two months ago, however, with the bright lights of political promise dimmed by a scandal involving an extramarital affair, Mr. Sanford quietly signed a bill passed by the Legislature that expanded eligibility for unemployment benefits. The move paved the way for the state to claim $97.5 million in stimulus money to bolster its financially ailing unemployment insurance trust fund.

Somehow South Carolina -- with its current GOP candidate for governor a woman, Nikki Haley, accused of two  adulterous affairs who won the GOP primary by saying that she would resign if elected and someone could prove the affairs -- appears to be one of the wackiest Republican states, sort of like a seedy cartoon.  Maybe it's no coincidence that the the Civil War started in South Carolina when the Union's Fort Sumter was attacked by an S.C. state militia.

When BuzzFlash peruses the news, there seems to be no state so insidiously infected with bigotry, hypocrisy, and flat out ignorance as much as South Carolina, although Oklahoma comes a close second.  Elected officials from dog catcher to U.S. senators say the most ignorant, racist things, and act in the most hypocritical fashion that it makes the "Harper Valley PTA" seem like a model of virtue.

Remember Strom Thurmond represented the "virtue" of South Carolina in the Senate until he was mentally dead before he was clinically dead. When his obituaries were written, many of them noted that he was a scoundrel and womanizer, even bearing a daughter by a black woman.  It was the kind of behavior men appear to look up to in South Carolina, even as they claim that liberals are causing the moral decline of America.

So if Mark Sanford accepts federal stimulus money he once decried, he's just acting in the great South Carolina tradition of bi-polar behavior; glorifying morality and principles, while living a personal life and taking public actions that are totally self-indulgent and dishonest.

For that reason and many more, BuzzFlash names Mark "I Left My Love in Argentina" Sanford the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week.