Althouse: What the South Carolina Democratic Chairman meant when he said "send Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from."

May 5, 2013

What the South Carolina Democratic Chairman meant when he said "send Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from."

Dick Harpootlian — great name! — says he just meant send her back to Lexington County. No reference to her ethnicity. (Her parents immigrated from India, and her religious heritage is Sikh.)

He has to say that, of course, but the "wherever the hell" locution makes the excuse utterly unbelievable. In a situation like this — where you've got a shred, but only a shred of deniability — is it better to deny or better to apologize?

Speaking of shreds... a Republican would be shredded if he said anything close to that about an opponent's ethnicity.

The Republican's fart is the Democrat's poot.

42 comments:

rhhardin said...: It's a good thing she didn't come from Mexico.; 5/5/13, 7:51 AM
Jason (the commenter) said...: So all the crazy racist Southern Democrats didn't become Republicans?; 5/5/13, 7:56 AM
pm317 said...: Yep, read this yesterday and was hoping you would put it up. Another Democrat called her "Sikh Jesus". Nice going Dems, the non-racist, liberal, tolerant, divers, multicultural, multiethnic party!

I don't think we should say, "oh if Republican did this, they would be worse off". Our reaction should be Dems claim all this, but they are not that. Same thing with canned response like "if Bush had done this, he would be crucified"..Dems don't care either way but at least highlighting their hypocrisy might persuade others.; 5/5/13, 7:57 AM
Expat(ish) said...: I've liked what I've seen of NH, but I also read her stinker of a biography (really, really badly written) which taints my perception of her.

I am not shocked about that comment, I'm just surprised that it doesn't happen more. I can only imagine what Jindal's had to put up with.

-XC; 5/5/13, 7:58 AM
KCFleming said...: The left can say whatever racist, misogynist, sexist thing they want and the lefty media will cover it up.

Fens law in action.

Evil ascendant.; 5/5/13, 7:58 AM
edutcher said...: Harpootlian (God, what a name) has a long history of shooting off his mouth without checking to see if the ammo was live.

Kind of a southern-fried Joe.

Just goes to show how the Lefties really think.

rhhardin said...

It's a good thing she didn't come from Mexico.

Or San Francisco.

Or Hawaii.; 5/5/13, 7:59 AM
FedkaTheConvict said...: Dick Harpootlian is South Carolina's version of Graeme Zielinski.; 5/5/13, 8:04 AM
George M. Spencer said...: This is what we Southerners call progress.

I recently finished reading a book about lynchings, possibly the most suppressed topic in American consciousness.

These were nothing like the scene from "To Kill a Mockingbird" in which four kindly middle-age men calmly approach the jail and are turned away by a girl.

For example, in the summer of 1904 in rural Georgia, two black men entered a farm house in the middle of the night, seeking buried money. They killed the family, including a baby and a nine-year-old girl who begged for her life. She offered the killers a nickel if they would spare her.

Within weeks, the men were tried and found guilty.

Thousands--thousands of people!--gathered outside the jail. Such mobs were often led by white-collar civic leaders. Members of the crowd came from around the state. People were given the day off from work so they could attend.

The brother of the victim--a minister--begged the crowd to disperse.

"We want blood, not religion," the crowd screamed.

With that, fiends hauled the men out. Nooses around their necks, they were led for many miles, past homes where housewives came out with jars of kerosene to give to the mob.

The men were tied to pyres. Gallons of oil were poured over them. They were tortured. They begged for mercy. They begged to be shot.

After the flames died down, ghouls picked through the ashes for souvenir bones.

This sort of thing used to go on most everywhere until around the 1920s and 1930s, even in California and Minnesota, the site of a lynching near Dylan's hometown, thus the line "They're sending postcards from the hanging."

This, too, was commonplace. Professional photographers would photograph folks standing in front of the often dangling remains. The resulting postcards would be sent to relatives.

"Hi, Mom!"; 5/5/13, 8:15 AM
Brian Brown said...: These people are open minded and tolerant.

Just ask them.; 5/5/13, 8:25 AM
MayBee said...: St George- that does indeed sound horrifying. I guess it doesn't surprise me, considering what the Italians did to Mussolini's body.

I think people had an appetite for this kind of thing even through the 1940s. What's interesting is how quickly it all went away in western society.( not in places like Mogadishu); 5/5/13, 8:28 AM
Gahrie said...: .....and now we know why the Left hates Fox News and Rush Limbaugh so much and are aghast that the Koch brothers might buy the L.A. Times. The Left needs its monopoly on the media in order to protect the progressives and attack the conservatives.; 5/5/13, 8:29 AM
Cody Jarrett said...: Slaid Cleaves song about hanging

BTW, Ron White's nickname for his son (back when Marshall was young) was Poot.; 5/5/13, 8:37 AM
ricpic said...: Which was worse, St. George, what the black men did or the revenge taken on them? By the time I read to the end of your telling what the blacks did barely registered in the horror! the horror! of the perfectly natural reaction to what they'd done. It isn't progress that compassion is shown to monsters.; 5/5/13, 8:39 AM
Cody Jarrett said...: video of the song; 5/5/13, 8:40 AM
Mitch H. said...: It isn't progress that compassion is shown to monsters.

The evil that the men did was horrible, yes, but the horror the the entire society did in return was monstrous, that response was as if the whole community had been infected by evil. Law exists to firewall societies from this very exact infection, of blood for blood. The courts take on the guilt, and by ritual bury the evil with the men themselves. Lynching propagates the passing evil with a virulence which contaminates all who had a hand in it.

This public, lawless ritual bound the participants as much as those atrocities that petty African warlords make their children-captives engage in to make them children-soldiers. Once someone has sinned, truly and irrevokably sinned at your command, he is yours, complicit.; 5/5/13, 8:48 AM
PaulV said...: Jason, democrats started to lose solid South when Eisenhower ran for President. The anti-war democrats drove the South away and gave Nixon the win in 1968. Democrats hate conservative minorities like Cruz, Haley, Justice Thomas and Jindal. They fear all who stray from democrat plantation.; 5/5/13, 8:59 AM
Insufficiently Sensitive said...: Before sniggering at the Harpootlian name, pause a moment to consider the burning of Smyrna in 1922 by the Turks, beginning with the Armenian community there. There were Harpootlians among the exodus of the surviving Armenians to the US.; 5/5/13, 8:59 AM
Phil 314 said...: It isn't progress that compassion is shown to monsters.

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Matt. 5:44

and from St. George's account:

The brother of the victim--a minister--begged the crowd to disperse.; 5/5/13, 9:03 AM
mariner said...: Let's send Barack Obama back to wherever-the-hell he came from.; 5/5/13, 9:17 AM
Titus said...: South Carolina has a democrat party?

That's like saying Mass has a republican party.

tits, big bouncing tits with large nipples.; 5/5/13, 9:31 AM
Scott said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 5/5/13, 9:42 AM
Scott said...: Democrats continue to have a hard time washing the blood of Jim Crow from their filthy hands.; 5/5/13, 9:42 AM
Sam L. said...: Dems are just so...tolerant? Nah, don't think so. Not the word. Think it starts with an a and ends in holes.; 5/5/13, 9:47 AM
edutcher said...: Insufficiently Sensitive said...

Before sniggering at the Harpootlian name, pause a moment to consider the burning of Smyrna in 1922 by the Turks, beginning with the Armenian community there. There were Harpootlians among the exodus of the surviving Armenians to the US.

I am fully aware of the history of the Aremnians, particularly in WWI, but the name "Dick Harpootlian" conjures up the image of some beer-bellied union gauleiter in IL or IN, not a Southern politician.

In any case, this particular Dick profanes the memory of those of his name who suffered exactly what he'd wish in Ms Haley and anyone else of immigrant stock who would oppose the new National Socialism.

He has more in common with Robert Simmons and Edwin Walker.; 5/5/13, 9:53 AM
MisterBuddwing said...: Been sifting through the comments at the Huffington Post.

Some Democratic/liberal posters, to their credit, denounce Harpootlian.

But some, rather depressingly, are defending him on the grounds that the Republicans are a million times worse, so it doesn't matter what Harpootlian said about Haley. Some even go on to say that Harpootlian and other Democrats need to double down to take on those "despicable" Republicans.

And some maintain with a straight face that Harpootlian was merely saying Haley should be sent back to her place of birth in South Carolina. One poster even wrote that her father routinely tells her to go back where she came from, so that makes it OK so say it about people in general.; 5/5/13, 10:03 AM
Unknown said...: Maybe we should all go back where we came from.
Where is that exactly?; 5/5/13, 10:38 AM
Cedarford said...: Mitch H. said...
"It isn't progress that compassion is shown to monsters."

The evil that the men did was horrible, yes, but the horror the the entire society did in return was monstrous, that response was as if the whole community had been infected by evil. Law exists to firewall societies from this very exact infection, of blood for blood.

----------------
Liberal poofery.
The belief back then was in swift and sure justice and every criminal knowing that certain things could have them burning or strangled at the end of a short-drop hanging in days.

Before Talmudic , endless due process perverted American law and enriched the lawyers, put verdicts years off (or in KSM's case - over a decade)...
And quadrupled crime rates.

There is a lot to be said that was positive about lynching, besides low crime rates it helped foster.

Two of 5 people lynched were white. Which is an accurate ratio of black vs. white capital felonies then, vs. now. So lynching was per se, not racist. Old photos of crowds at a lynching show a mixed race attendance. Blacks often lynched blacks that had killed or raped other blacks in small black towns.

Imagine what Chicagos crime rate would be if the public was permitted to arm and track down gangstas preying on the community and hand several from lamposts - vs. face a diffendent Lawyer Elite that ignores or barters down black crime because there is no real money in it for lawyers to do "endless due process".

The only beefs I have about stringing thugs up are:

1. Most of the "innocent and lynched claims" arise from rape cases and females doing false rape accusations. Back then, rape was a capital crime. It isn't so now.

2. While effective (the place that had the two blacks that killed a farming family in 1904 probably resumed 30+ years of unlocked doors fairly sure black thugs would not try it again) - it was ugly..And people who believed in education, lawyers, and civilizing the savages back in the early 20th century were probably right that the country as a whole was ready to see if lawyers, prisons to rehabilitate thugs, and Talmudic-style endless due process in wise lawyer rituals was a better, less bloody way to safeguard the citizenry.
Chicago and places like Compton, Philadelphia, and whatever brig Major Hasas presumed innocent and still getting paid each month - show the results of having lawyers run the show.

As for the old saw that it is better that 100 murderers walk free than a single innocent be punished...Objectively, that is stupid when you can predict 30 more murders of innocents coming from the freed thugs, vs. the old way where one innocent was unfairly sentenced or taken down by a mob. Its as stupid as saying, better not shoot 100 enemy on the chance one may be an enemy non-combatant.
And a fairly good percentage of the few "innocents believed lynched - aside from false rape accusations - were nere do wells known to the community to be violent and dangerous - or close companions of the acyual perps.; 5/5/13, 10:40 AM
Gary Rosen said...: Hey Fudd, I see you pussied out on the Hitler thread last night after we all tooled you for your relentless pimping, whitewashing and apologies for rapists and molesters. Now you're trying to give us some lectures in morality bwahahaha. Somewhere your buds Polanski and Sandusky are laughing their asses off, after raping some kids' asses.; 5/5/13, 11:08 AM
Cedarford said...: I'm convinced that Gary Rosen is a Trooper York sockpuppet, much as Baron Zemo is.
With Rosen, Trooper (I think), takes the persona of a big-talking, craven Anthony Weiner-like Jew.; 5/5/13, 11:15 AM
Gary Rosen said...: Bad day at the flophouse JO, Fudd? Noted that you can't refute me.; 5/5/13, 11:20 AM
Mitch H. said...: Cedarford and his kind would bind entire communities to his notions of justice-through-atrocity by making each child dip her handkerchief in the blood of a thief or a saint. Either will do, on the one hand to terrorize the right sort - the Jews, the Catholics, the Colored - and on the other to lock the rest into this interpretation of the event - that it was true Rousseau-esque "will of the people" justice against inferior brutes - so that the atrocity was an expression of righteous communal will. To deny the righteousness of the atrocity, to call it for the mutual damnable sin that it was, was to declare yourself outcast.; 5/5/13, 11:22 AM
MaggotAtBroad&Wall said...: Whatever. Does it matter to anybody that her feelings got hurt?

I find it tedious that the paid stooges at Think Progress analyze every word uttered by a Republican, then when they hear something politically correct, they blow the dog whistle and the entire leftsphere phony outrage machines springs into motion. Just stop it. It's old.

What ought to matter to South Carolinians are Haley's policies, governing, and leadership. Are South Carolinians happy with current government services like education? Taxes? Is she luring new industry to SC to create jobs?

Some dope made a stupid remark that reflects poorly on his personal character. So what?; 5/5/13, 11:28 AM
MisterBuddwing said...: Whatever. Does it matter to anybody that her feelings got hurt?

Were Gov. Haley's feelings hurt? Hadn't heard that.; 5/5/13, 11:33 AM
Gary Rosen said...: "Were Gov. Haley's feelings hurt? Hadn't heard that"

Very unlikely. Any non-white or female who's gotten that far in politics as a Republican has had to put up with that kind of crap and a lot worse because there is nothing that sends libs into a frenzy like one of their "owned" interest groups straying off the reservation.; 5/5/13, 11:38 AM
Taylor said...: Pales in comparison to "down in the bunker a la Eva Braun." Once you call her Hitler's mistress, everything else is softball.

This sort of stuff isn't actually journalism. It's normal to hate on your enemies. People do it all the time, even Christians who know better.

The only angle is that it's a covert appeal to xenophobia. And maybe it is, but its just as likely that he's thinking, "Send her back to the seventh circle of hell."; 5/5/13, 11:54 AM
DavidH said...: @ St George

What was the name of the book?; 5/5/13, 12:12 PM
Taylor said...: The media, stuck on stupid, continually overrates the importance of race in the South, while it underrates the importance of religion. Both Haley and Jindal are Christians.; 5/5/13, 12:16 PM
From Inwood said...: A Republican Fart is a Democrat HarPOOTlian.; 5/5/13, 12:32 PM
Pianoman said...: This happens so frequently nowadays, it's hard to work up outrage. The MSM doesn't have time to attack Democrats for these things, because they're busy attacking the GOP.

That reminds me, I need to go check out www.its-all-the-fault-of-george-bush.com today for my daily GOP-hatin' talking points; 5/5/13, 12:35 PM
ken in tx said...: I think Haley is doing a pretty good job. She was instrumental in getting Boeing to build the Dreamliner in SC. However, she is taking a lot of flack from Good Ole Boy Republicans as well as the Democrats. Entrenched legislators don't like new comers who won't play along with their games.; 5/5/13, 1:22 PM
Michelle Dulak Thomson said...: I don't know, folks; between Haley and Jindal the "all Southern voters are racists" trope isn't really all that healthy these days. It's a bit embarrassing that the two non-white governors in the US are Republicans in the Deep South.; 5/5/13, 7:33 PM
Methadras said...: What do you expect from the Democrats. The party of the KKK and the racist south. They will spend every single dime this country has to ensure that no one knows this... Oh wait...; 5/6/13, 3:56 PM