There's the flag, and there's his gun. Hey look, a connection.
I was wondering how long it would take for the nation's dumbest citizens to start weighing in on why the Confederate flag waved around by so many of America's racist killers was actually the symbol of goodness and light. They're pretty damn dumb, so it took a while, but the South Carolina "division" of the Sons of Confederate Veterans finally weighs in with all the glorious stupidity that their "cause"
is known for.
“For one hundred and fifty years, Southerners have been maligned by the victors of an unnecessary war. In recent years some headway has been made in educating our fellow countrymen as to the true facts of our shared history,” the post said. “But even though Confederate history and the symbols of the South had no connection whatsoever with the senseless crime in question, a loud cry for punitive reparations (first) demanding the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the Confederate monument at the Statehouse in Columbia, SC.”
It had no connection whatsoever to the senseless crime, except for the racist murderer's well-photographed obsession with the flag and his manifesto declaring allegiance to neo-confederate principles and the bit where he murdered nine black residents of his state in order to start a "race war" based on the things he was taught by modern flag-waving Confederate apologist groups and the history of the same flag being used as a commonplace symbol of all the other racist murderers seeking to start race wars or burn down black churches or hang black Americans from trees. Other than that.
I realize I have unflatteringly portrayed some of our fellow citizens as uniquely and spectacularly dumb and that's the sort of very rude thing that you are simply not supposed to do in polite conversation, but ... c'mon.
“It seems like they were looking for the opportunity to make a big deal of the Confederate monuments,” Barrow said in the interview with TPM, comparing the effort to ISIS’s destruction of ancient monuments or the Nazis’ plunder of art during World War II. “First it’s going to be the Confederate flag, and then it will be Confederate monuments.”
Billy Redneck here thinks voting to take the most prominent symbol of American racism off a state flagpole is what the Nazis would have done to fine art? I'm not sure what "heritage" this fellow thinks he's protecting, but unless his great-grandpappy fought and died for the right to huff paint out of a paper bag, he may be doing it wrong.
All right, now that we've heard from the "other side" in this debate I think we've got a pretty full picture of where the two sides are coming from. I can see why so many politicians have had such a tough time deciding where they stand on this one.