Months ago, during an uncharacteristically unpleasant period in what has been an over-erudite political environment too heavy on facts and pie charts, I wrote a long and extremely mean-spirited piece about South Carolina, which had broken off and floated into a magical fairy-land in the sky, where there was no NPR or re-useable grocery bags or desegregation and everything was well-preserved in amber in 1951. Ha! I'm kidding, of course — what South Carolina was actually doing was requiring terrorists to register with the state before, ostensibly, attempting to reduce to a smoking crater the state of South Carolina. (It's called record-keeping, people!) For people who write about the focal points of human idiocy for a living, and by that I mean a laughably meager figure that necessitates a third-shift side job at the wastewater plant, it was a little like walking into a castle made of key lime pie where margaritas were served to you daily by thousands of chambermaids who all looked like Megan Fox.
As a rule, I try to avoid revisiting topics, unless of course the topic is me, but we return this week to South Carolina, where, against the well-chiseled laws of human decency and basically physics at this point, politics IS EVEN MORE AWESOME THAN BEFORE, and by "awesome" I mean "there's more fat sweaty racists than there used to be." And there used to be quite a bit. Obviously.
First, some background: A few weeks ago, some gross blogger who writes about Palmetto state politics claimed he enjoyed plentifully inappropriate relations with one of the state's multitude of Republican gubernatorial candidates, a 38-year-old named Nikki Haley. And then some other dude piped up also claiming he slept with her, and etc., etc., I apologize for not knowing the details, but I'm afraid that if I keep looking this stuff up, South Carolina funk will get all over my hands, and washing that stuff off is like hosing down Gulf pelicans.
Anyway, obviously everything is horrible in Lee Atwaterville, but still the blogger-sex story was a formalwear-required reading of James Joyce at the public library compared with the subsequent mouth-blobbing of a deeply unpopular new liability named Jake Knotts, a Republican state senator and upstate mound of face-sweat and overbuttered side dishes who is basically Boss Hogg with an orange tie and who appears in campaign literature with his jacket thrown dangerously over his shoulder he was like Don Johnson dashingly going after coke dealers on a boat. Knotts went on some sort of Internet radio show called "Pub Politics" — I know, I can't believe I hadn't heard of it either — and called the Christian-of-Indian-Sikh-descent-and-as-such-evil-Martian-gay-Jesus-repeller Haley a "raghead." Actually, by way of ensuring everybody in the world kept thinking about South Carolina like everyone in the world thinks of South Carolina, what he said, according to the AP, was: “We have one [raghead] in the White House, we don’t need one in the governor’s mansion."
