Jack & Jill Politics

You may recall that last Friday SC Lt Governor Andre Bauer, second only to South Carolina Gov. Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford in the state said this regarding parents and children in need of public aid:

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. “You know why? Because they breed.”

Now you and I here at JJP — we ain’t dumb. We know that a state that has blocked stimulus money to repair SC’s decrepit schools including that of the brave Ty’Sheoma Bethea, an eighth-grader who wrote to Congress last year about the decay of her 112-year-old school in search of help and ended up at Obama’s first speech to Congress. Thanks to Mark Sanford and Andre Bauer — Ty’Sheoma’s dream is a dream deferred. Her school remains as pitiful and as unsuitable to education as it did a year ago.

And now this. These are men who want one type of outcomes for a certain shade of child and another entirely for those more in need than ever. Whenever someone is referring to people as animals, well, you and I both know they are talkin’ about us.

At a time with South Carolinians are suffering and minorities are suffering disproportionately, these are cruel and calculating words designed to impress the elite — and the ignorant.

Because the fact is that in these hard times: 58% percent of students in SC’s public schools participate in the free and reduced-price lunch program. Almost 20 percent of South Carolinians are without health insurance, among the highest percentages of uninsured in the country.

Thank you, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) who stood up as a South Carolinian to say straight-up that Bauer’s words are:

“a resurrection of the sort of thoughts that people in this country would rather not have in the forefront of our political discussions”.

Clyburn is House Majority Whip and a powerful man both in DC and SC.

Jed Lewison of DailyKos makes an excellent point on this:

It will be interesting to see whether Bauer’s backwards pronouncements will help him in his bid to win the GOP gubernatorial primary in South Carolina. Hopefully, South Carolina’s Republican voters will reject Bauer’s nonsense, but if they don’t, this is the kind of thing that a strong Democratic candidate could build a campaign around.

And if you live in South Carolina, please make sure to vote against this fool. I’d like to see more leaders – particularly white political leaders (paging Harry Reid!) — shout this jackass down, frankly. Americans of all shades and colors need help right now thanks in part to an out-of-control Bush Administration and its partner in crime, Wall Street. What they don’t need is to be treated like animals.