I can't say I'm particularly surprised by this move, given that it is an easy pander to the black voters in South Carolina who she is actively courting.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that South Carolina should remove the Confederate flag from its Statehouse grounds, in part because the nation should unite under one banner while at war.

"I think about how many South Carolinians have served in our military and who are serving today under our flag and I believe that we should have one flag that we all pay honor to, as I know that most people in South Carolina do every single day," Clinton told The Associated Press in an interview.

"I personally would like to see it removed from the Statehouse grounds," the New York senator said during her first trip to the early voting state since announcing her White House bid.

Other Democratic hopefuls, including Sens. Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, have said the flag should come down. The banner, which once flew over the Statehouse dome and now flies nearby, is the subject of an ongoing NAACP boycott.

Personally, I'm pleased that the flag does not fly over the state capitol building any longer, but I'm troubled by efforts to remove it from what is, after all, essentially a memorial to the state's Confederate war dead. Even if the battle flag is removed, some flag of the Confederacy should fly as a part of that memorial, simply as a matter of historical accuracy and perspective.

However, if Senator Clinton is going to take this stand, she really needs to go further and condemn not just the flying of that flag, but also those who put it over the state capitol building in the first place as a sign of opposition to the civil rights movement. That would involve condemning, by name, former Senator Fritz Hollings, the grand old man of the DemocrtatICK Party in South Carolina, who supported and signed into law the bill raising that flag over the capitol dome. Not only that, but she should condemn, by name, the political party that supported secession in the South and capitulation in the North -- the DemocratICK Party, which in 1864 ran on a platform of appeasement and negotiated peace with the Confederacy even as victory was within grasp.

But then again, doing either of those things would cost Hilary Clinton votes -- the former because it would cost her the support of Hollings and his political heirs, and the latter because the position of latter-day Democrats on the Iraq War is eerily similar to the Copperheads of 1864.

Posted by: Greg at 07:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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