At the risk of having my head explode, I've watched each of the debates between the non-Trump candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Well, except for the last debate, which was on some network that I'd never heard of.
Aside from Chris Christie, who I like when he bashes Trump, but not otherwise, the only other candidate who didn't totally disgust me is Nikki Haley. She actually made sense at times, particularly when she talked about foreign policy and the urgent need for the United States to keep supporting Ukraine.
Haley is supposed to be the moderate alternative to Trump. Well, judging by Haley's recent remarks about the cause of the Civil War, it's clear that "moderate" no longer means what it used to when it comes to Republican politics, because what she said is extreme right-wing crazy.
A NBC News story, "Nikki Haley backpedals amid criticism after omitting 'slavery' from Civil War causes," describes the softball question Haley was asked at a campaign event that she managed to whiff on, big time.
BERLIN, N.H. — Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley declined Wednesday to say slavery was a cause of the Civil War, arguing instead that it came down to “the role of government.”
At a New Hampshire town hall, a voter bluntly asked Haley, “What was the cause of the Civil War?”
Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who is aiming to present herself as the top Republican alternative to former President Donald Trump, gave a lengthy answer but did not mention slavery — the primary cause of the war.
“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” she said at the beginning of her response.
On Thursday, she appeared to backpedal, saying in a radio interview on “Good Morning New Hampshire” that “of course, the Civil War was about slavery” and that her comments reflect what it “means to us today.”
“What it means to us today is about freedom — that’s what that was all about. It was about individual freedom,” she said. “It was about economic freedom. It was about individual rights.”
Wow. Even when Haley had a second chance today to unequivocally make clear that the cause of the Civil War was slavery, she couldn't summon the courage to speak the truth, instead choosing to once again pander to Republican racism.
No, Nikki, today the Civil War doesn't mean that the southern states were concerned about individual freedom, economic freedom, and individual rights. That's total B.S. The southern states wanted to preserve slavery, plain and simple, notably including South Carolina, where Haley served as governor.
Haley should have read a Wikipedia article, "South Carolina Declaration of Secession."
The South Carolina Declaration of Secession, formally known as the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, was a proclamation issued on December 24, 1860, by the government of South Carolina to explain its reasons for seceding from the United States. It followed the brief Ordinance of Secession that had been issued on December 20. The declaration is a product of a convention organized by the state's government in the month following the election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. president, where it was drafted in a committee headed by Christopher Memminger.
The declaration laid out the primary reasoning behind South Carolina's declaring of secession from the U.S., which was described as "increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery." The Declaration states, in part, "A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery."
Not surprisingly, any appeal Haley had among Black Republicans has taken a well-deserved nose dive, as reported by a Politico story, "'She's toast': Republicans of color disappointed by Haley's slavery misstep."
Republicans of color said on Thursday they were dismayed by Nikki Haley’s initial refusal to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. It wasn’t just an offensive historical omission, they argued, but a tactical blunder too.
“She easily could’ve communicated better in that moment, but chose to use a tired old political stump tactic by tossing the same question back to the guy who asked,” said Rina Shah, a Republican strategist based in Washington, D.C., in a text to POLITICO.
“What I do see is her having left out the word ‘slavery’ because she was scared to talk about anything regarding our nation’s complicated history. I think by acknowledging slavery she felt she might be alienating” Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis voters.
This speaks volumes about the pathetic state of today's Republican Party. You can't hope to be the GOP presidential nominee if you talk about slavery being the cause of the Civil War. Worse, Haley has invoked the Lost Cause myth before, which wrongly claims that states rights and similar notions explains why southern states seceded from the union.
To learn about the Lost Cause myth, read a fascinating Politico story, "Why Was It So Hard for Nikki Haley to say 'Slavery'? History Has the Answer." Here's a brief excerpt.
But as Haley must know — after all, as governor of South Carolina, she presided over the removal of Confederate flags from the Statehouse — many Americans do question the fundamental fact that slavery precipitated the Civil War, and her equivocation played into a long-standing agenda to rewrite American history. Haley was effectively parroting the Lost Cause mythology, a revisionist school of thought born in the war’s immediate aftermath, which whitewashed the Confederacy’s cornerstone interest in raising arms to preserve slavery. Instead, a generation of Lost Cause mythologists chalked the war up to a battle over political abstractions like states’ rights.
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