Campanastan occasionally makes fun of South Carolina, that bastion of the Old South. But Campanastan has proclaimed today "South Carolina Day" throughout the land after The Great Leader read the following guest editorial in The State, SC's largest newspaper. Pictures of the late Strom 
Thurmond will be displayed in all men's rooms.
Michael Dale, good friend and former South Carolinian turned Coloradan, sent this to me.
I am sure some South Carolinians are noting that one of the authors (Ron Manuto) is a Californian and the other is Sean Patrick O'Rourke. Hmmm...What kind of name is Manuto? And O'Rourke? Must be some of them Eye-talians, Irish, and Cath-o-lics.
Didn't SC Teach McCain Better Than This?
by Ron Manuto and Sean Patrick O'Rourke
The State, 15 October 2008
Here we go again. Politicians falling in the polls are resorting to character slurs and political smears. To the people of South Carolina it’s deja vu — all over again.
Last week John McCain’s campaign launched a web advertisement about Barack Obama’s ties to a “domestic terrorist.” Sarah Palin claimed that Obama sees America “as being so imperfect ... that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country” and repeatedly commented on Obama’s “association” with “terrorists.”
It is a chilling indictment. But false.
Such sad irony. In the 2000 primaries, after John McCain defeated a heavily favored George Bush by 19 percentage points in New Hampshire, the Texas governor’s campaign was in trouble. If Bush lost the S.C. primary, where his opponent was already popular, he had little chance of stopping McCain. Something had to be done. Anything.
Led by Karl Rove, a group of S.C. operatives started a campaign to smear McCain, to tarnish his reputation as a man and as a father.
The techniques have been known since antiquity. Use whatever it takes — innuendo, overstatement, distortion, dissembling, emotional appeal — to distract the public from the real issues of public policy, temperament, intellect and judgment. It is propaganda instead of persuasion, disingenuousness as art, and it is designed to circumvent rational thought.
The key? Turn virtue into vice.
During a visit to one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages in India, Cindy McCain had met a little girl who needed medical treatment. Moved by her story and spirit, the McCains arranged for treatment in the United States and eventually adopted the child, Bridget, who has dark skin.
Rove and his gang took the low road. They started an underground campaign of rumors and lies (push-polling, to be precise), claiming that McCain’s Bengali-born daughter was biologically his own illegitimate black daughter. In a race-conscious state, it was no small charge. Then they made additional accusations, some nearly hallucinatory: that McCain was “pro-abortion” and (in leaflets distributed across the state) “the fag candidate.”
McCain was shocked and devastated. In a later interview he expressed his anger with the people who used such tactics. “I believe,” he said, “that there is a special place in hell for people like those.”
But today McCain finds his own campaign in trouble. A growing number of Americans are leaning toward Obama and his proposals to fix the economy, remedy health care and get us out of a war conceived in deception. McCain is a genuine man, but many have come to the conclusion that he simply does not get it. It is not his character that we find deficient, but rather the substance of his proposed solutions.
The question now is whether John McCain will allow his operatives to misrepresent Obama’s past associations, religion or ethnicity.
And they are misrepresentations. Paradoxically, Palin quoted from a New York Times article that in fact cleared Obama of any ties to people of questionable character. The paper even quoted McCain backer Bradford Berenson, who went to law school with Obama and said that he “saw no evidence of a radical streak, either overt or covert.”
In the end, smear tactics work only if we allow them to, if we are so gullible as to buy this nonsense. They work only if we fail to recognize that the sunny, folksy and cute delivery of defamatory accusations is still nothing more than a desperate attempt to assassinate character. These tactics work only if we fail to hold those who smear accountable for their actions.
Have we learned nothing from the 2000 primary?
Perhaps not. Former S.C. Attorney General Charlie Condon worked against McCain in 2000 and works for him now. He claimed that the 2000 smear was justified because “our primaries have a way of doing that. There is a tradition of it, it is accepted behavior, and frankly it works.”
The reprehensible is acceptable behavior? By what kind of person? To what kind of people?
If accurate, it is a sad, ever so sad, time for the country. If accurate, we have become a nation where sleaze and lies crush the truth, crush any sense of self-respect or decency.
But hope flies on the wings of youth. Bridget McCain, now in high school, recently discovered the truth about the 2000 South Carolina racial slurs. Hurt and outraged, she asked her father to promise that he would not use similar tactics in his campaign.
Sen. McCain must now decide if he will take his daughter’s advice. No person knows better what is at stake.
Dr. Manuto, who writes on civil rights and legal issues from his home in California, is in South Carolina for the election season. Dr. O’Rourke teaches American public discourse and argumentation at Furman University, where he chairs the Communication Studies Department.
McCain's a good man; he's better than this.
Q: What's the difference between Mississippi and South Carolina?
A: At least Mississippi tries.
"Never was there a man who so dragged his feet through the sands of time." -- Unknown, referring to Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC)
In an unprecedented move to alleviate the suffering currently being endured by the Myanmar (Burmese) people and cement his credentials as a compassionate conservative, President George W. Bush offered the Myanmar ruling generals the services of Mike "Brownie" Brown as disaster-relief czar for the cyclone-ravaged country. Brown distinguished himself as the tough commissioner of Judges and Stewards in the rough-and-tumble world of the International Arabian Horse Association, now known as the Arabian Horse Association 
I'm sure you read about the 
Does that sound like a recipe for "objective analysis"? 
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