SC Lunatic, Future Congresslady, Real Mad You Hypocrites Ain't Taking Down Memorials To Slavery

We like this picture. Makes knowing what she's like really easy.

Oh, goody! In another of the special elections to replace a member of Congress elevated to the Trump administration, one Republican candidate is working her hardest to out-wingnut all the rest. Meet South Carolina's Sheri Few, the nice lady pictured above with two of the main planks in her campaign to fill the seat Mick Mulvaney left open when he went off to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget. But while any ol' nut can pose with an AR-15 and a flag, Ms. Few has another hobbyhorse she thinks she can ride to Washington:  wingnut butthurt over the removal of Confederate flags and memorials from public places. You might think she'd see the cognitive disconnect of posing with a gigantic flag of the USA and arguing in favor of preserving public monuments to a bunch of traitors who went to war with people flying an earlier version of that flag with fewer stars, but it doesn't sound like Ms. Few is especially good at making such subtle distinctions.

In a wonderfully bad campaign ad aimed at getting her the GOP nomination for S.C.'s Fifth Congressional District, Few castigates "weak politicians" who ignorantly think the Confederate flag somehow had something to do with the 2015 massacre at Emanuel AME church, just because the white-supremacist gunman happened to pose a whole bunch with that flag, as have any number of Klansmen and Nazis and other people who haven't yet understood Confederate imagery is about heritage, not hate.

Sort of have to wonder whether her campaign disabled comments on the YouTube video due to comments from people who oppose the Few's message, or because too many supporters let their enthusiasm for keeping the blacks in their place run away with them.

Few told The Guardian that if she's elected to Congress, she'll focus on “fighting the destruction of every bit of Confederate memorabilia in our country,” which may not actually be quite enough to sustain a career in the House. Just wait til she finds out she'll also have to think about ethanol subsidies and bridges and all sorts of things that don't involve the people who lost an insurrection 150 years ago.

Even so, Few is absolutely committed to preserving a memorial to the Confederacy on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse, which still stands after former Gov. Nikki Haley ordered the removal of the Treason Flag. Nobody in state government is actually trying to get rid of the Confederate monument, but if it does get removed, says Few, then by golly it would only be fair to pull down another monument to the victims of slavery. In fact, since the slavery monument was installed as part of a 2001 compromise that moved the Treason Flag from a pole on top of the statehouse to the lawn, that stupid slave monument is already getting an unfair advantage since the flag came down:

“So that issue had supposedly already been settled,” Few said.

“So then there’s this huge monument to African Americans that is still on the statehouse grounds.

“And, you know, why hasn’t anyone called for the removal of that? Because that was a part of the compromise. So that doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

And by gosh, if the Confederacy monument is removed, then the monument to the African-Americans -- which we suspect Few may spell with two g 's in private -- would absolutely need to come down, since if we're not going to memorialize the people who fought to preserve slavery, then it would be unfair to still remember the people who were enslaved. It's just logic!

Few, since 2010 a perennial loser of elections for the state legislature, had a couple of specific people in mind with that line about "cowardly politicians": state reps Tommy Pope and Ralph Norman, her competitors for the GOP nomination in the special election. Both voted to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds; Few told the Guardian those votes were "a kneejerk, politically correct decision in response to the horrible shooting in Charleston."

Happily, Few doesn't yet appear to be getting traction with her pro-Confederate monomania; the most recent poll -- conducted for her own campaign in late February -- has her running third for the May 2 Republican primary behind Pope and Norman. If none of the six Republicans gets a majority, the top two candidates would go to a May 16 runoff. Even in Few's polling, Pope is in the lead with 19 points, but with over half of voters undecided a month ago, perhaps her pandering to fans of the Lost Cause will help her reach the coveted second-place position for the runoff. The actual election for Mulvaney's former seat will be held June 20.

And if nothing else, she can perhaps start a Flags-n-Guns club with ousted Nevada assemblywoman and failed Congressional candidate Michele Fiore. 

 Yr Wonkette is supported by reader donations. Please click the "Donate" linky below to help us continue not buying any Confederate memorabilia. 

[ Guardian / Sheri Few for Congress / Ballotpedia ]