Interestingly, Michael Gerson doesn’t have any nostalgia for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for the presidency. In fact, he thinks it was a disaster that was brought about, in large measure, because Goldwater declared an intraparty war on Republicans who made accommodations with the New Deal. And he sees the same thing happening now as the Natives take out their long knives and go stalking big game like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
Although he only mentions him once, I’m quite certain that he’s more concerned about the future of the other senator from Kentucky. You know, the one who thought it would be a good idea to put the Southern Avenger on his congressional staff.
This Southern Avenger:
While a member of the City Paper’s stable of freelancers, Jack wrote in support of racially profiling Hispanics, praised white supremacist Sam Francis, blasted the House of Representative’s apology for slavery, claimed that black people should apologize to white people for high crime rates, defended former Atlanta Braves pitcher and racist John Rocker and Charleston County School District board member Nancy Cook after she said some mothers should be sterilized, argued that Islam was an innately dangerous threat to the U.S, professed that he would have voted for a member a British neo-Nazi political party if he could have, considered endorsing former Council of Conservative Citizens member Buddy Witherspoon in his bid to unseat Sen. Lindsey Graham, compared Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler and Ike Turner, and continued to profess the erroneous claim that the primary cause of the Civil War was not the fight over slavery, ignoring the decades of American history leading up to war and South Carolina’s very own Declaration of the Immediate Causes for Secession, which clearly note that protecting slavery was the preeminent motivation of state leaders.
Over the course of editing Jack for years, it was clear to me that when he spoke of Southerners, Southern values, and the Southern way of life, it was as if the South to him was solely populated by white people, and everyone else was an intruder or at best a historical inconvenience. Jack Hunter may have never railed against miscegenation, championed segregation, uttered a racial slur, or participated in a lynching, but it was my opinion then and it is my opinion now that Jack is the most common kind of racist, the one that doesn’t realize that he is one.
That’s Rand Paul for you. Serial plagiarist, self-certified ophthalmologist, and the guy who brought the Southern Avenger to the nation’s capital. I’d tell Mr. Gerson that he has nothing to worry about, but I’m not a Republican.
