Tag Archives: South Carolina statehouse

media news, national news

Gov. Haley is working through her pain

haley

Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C., today ended a nationally televised interview with an extraordinary answer.

I think she has just emerged as perhaps my favorite Republican.

“Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd asked Gov. Haley how she felt about her probable rise in polling as a potential national candidate on a GOP presidential ticket. She called it “painful.”

She was on the broadcast to talk about the striking of the Confederate battle flag that had flown over the South Carolina statehouse grounds since the 1960s in defiance of the Voting Rights Act. The flag came down and Haley has become a national figure as a result.

SC governor: National spotlight is ‘painful’

Mentioning the slaughter of African-Americans in the Charleston church, Haley said: “Nine people died. We have been dealing with nine funerals.”

“That’s what I want people talking about – the Emanuel nine and how they forever changed this country,” Haley added.

Haley’s response to a question posed in good faith brought a visible response from Todd, who had asked the question. I don’t think he expected such an eloquent and graceful answer.

“We’ve already been moving in this direction,” she said of the flag removal. “We’re not the state that everybody thinks we are. “We didn’t have people getting out of hand – we had hugs,” Haley said of the flag’s lowering.“We love our God, we love our country, we love our state and we love each other,” Haley said of South Carolina’s people.

Yes, she was thinking of those nine men and women, one of whom, Haley recalled, begged the shooter to stop the carnage. The gunman killed him anyway.

It was an astonishing end to a gripping interview.

Well said, Gov. Haley.

national news

Glad to have this flag debate

Nothing good has come from the Charleston, S.C., massacre.

However, I am glad that we’re having this discussion of the Confederate flag and its place in U.S. history and in contemporary times.

Those who see the flag now are more willing to call attention to the hate that it symbolizes in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans.

Dylann Roof apparently thought enough of the flag to wave it — apparently with some pride — prior the event that took the lives of those nine church members in Charleston. Roof has been accused of nine counts of murder.

But back to the flag.

None of reasons I’ve read that seek to justify reasons for flying the Confederate flag works, in my view. It all goes back to what the flag represents today and how it now stands as a symbol of hate, oppression, enslavement, and indeed treason.

Those calls we’ve heard since, oh, about January 2009 about secession? They sound a good bit more offensive today, given the tragedy in Charleston and the debate that’s ensued about whether the Confederate flag should fly at all — let alone on public property, as it does in front of the South Carolina statehouse.