The Other McCain

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The Final Push in South Carolina: Candidate Showdown at Aunt Chilada’s

Posted on | April 1, 2013 | 10 Comments

CHARLESTON, S.C.
It’s about 100 miles to Hilton Head and took me more than two hours today, but I wanted to be there for this event:

Republicans crowded into a Hilton Head restaurant Monday afternoon to hear Republican congressional candidates Curtis Bostic and Mark Sanford discuss issues in their final meeting before Tuesday’s runoff in the 1st District special election.
The two candidates took questions for more than an hour during the “First Monday” forum at Aunt Chilada’s, a day before voters in the Lowcountry district choose the GOP nominee who will face Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Bush in the May 7 special election to fill the House seat vacated by the appointment of Tim Scott to the Senate. . . .

You can read the whole thing. The big national news from SC-1 today was that Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch scrubbed her Twitter account, perhaps in an effort to hide messages that would estrange Republican voters. What does this mean? If Sanford wins Tuesday, Democrat think Colbert Busch can peel off some GOP voters disgusted with Sanford.

The potential for a backlash against Republicans if they nominate Sanford is a factor his supporters refuse to acknowledge. Dana Pico at First Street Journal sees it:

Mr. Sanford’s affair is not the disqualifying issue for me. Rather, the problem is that he showed terrible, terrible judgment in thinking he could get away with his actions, and he abandoned his post!
He abandoned his post. That is disqualifying. . . .
The way he did it, just taking off, virtually guaranteed that the whole smarmy thing would become known; sitting Governors don’t just take off like that. If he had somehow thought that he would get away with it, he’s an idiot. That stupidity alone makes him a lousy candidate; abandoning his post makes him a completely unacceptable one.

 Democrats have a poll showing Colbert Busch leading in this district. Do voters really want to make these cute kids cry?

CURTIS BOSTIC for U.S. CONGRESS

 


 

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Category: Election, South Carolina

Sometimes, It Really Matters

Posted on | April 1, 2013 | 18 Comments

Social media a key part of the campaign
for Mark Sanford, Curtis Bostic
— Charleston Post and Courier

CHARLESTON, S.C.
The campaign action today is down on the south side of the district with events in Beaufort and Hilton Head and, with the Republican runoff Tuesday, we’re down to the point of the race where it’s all about turnout: Get out the vote.

What “social media” has accomplished for Curtis Bostic here is to raise awareness of who he is — a Marine Corps veteran of Operation Desert Storm and married father of five — and to inform the public that this runoff offers an important choice. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter, Dr. James Dobson, Concerned Women for America, the 60 Plus Seniors Association, One Nation PAC and former Congressman Henry Brown have endorsed Bostic. Not just the fate of the 1st District, but the reputation of the Republican Party is at stake on Tuesday. The Hilton Head Island Packet:

Sanford disappeared for five days while he was governor in 2009, telling his staff he was out hiking the Appalachian Trial. Later, he tearfully revealed at a Statehouse news conference he was in Argentina seeing a woman he later called his soul mate and to whom is now engaged.
Sanford, mentioned then as a possible presidential candidate, ended up divorcing his wife, Jenny.
Bostic says that behavior has left Sanford a compromised candidate who would give the Democrats a shot at taking back a district they have not held in more than three decades.

Given a credible alternative to Sanford, an alternative to handing Democrats and the media — but I repeat myself — a chance to use the Appalachian Trail hiker as a club to beat up Republicans and revive the “war on women” meme, what conservative wouldn’t choose Curtis Bostic instead?

That was what was on my mind the morning of March 20 when I wrote, “S.C. Primary: Will Tea Party Rally Behind Curtis Bostic Against Mark Sanford?” It seemed obvious to me then, and still seems equally obvious to me now, that this was the opportunity to make a difference. Others disagree, and we don’t need to name names of people who made the calculation that the “name-ID” factor was so overwhelmingly in Sanford’s favor that there was no way Bostic could close the gap.

Maybe they’re right. And maybe Will Folks is right, too.

The other day, I used the term “narcissistic sociopath” to describe Folks, who became nationally notorious in 2010 when he claimed to have had an affair with Nikki Haley. Today, Folks responded — you knew he would, right? — to that description, and his response amounted to an apologia for utter cynicism about the political process in America:

Here’s the thing, though: America is almost $17 trillion in debt, has over $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities and has decided the one thing it wants to “create” above everything else is more dependency. So, whether Mark Sanford beats Curtis Bostic (or Curtis Bostic beats Mark Sanford) – all we’re talking about at the end of the day is which gnat won a wrestling match on Topsy the elephant’s ass just prior to Thomas Edison switching on 6,600 volt current that killed the poor beast . . .
It just doesn’t matter that much anymore.
Like that guy from Deadspin says, “it’s all professional wrestling.”
More to the point, South Carolina is on the verge of not mattering that much to me anyone because it is clearly never, ever, ever going to change.

The thing about cynicism is, it’s too easy nowadays.

Believing that elections really matter? That’s hard.

Nevertheless, I choose to believe. As bad as it is — and South Carolina GOP politics is about as ugly as it gets — surrendering to cynicism would be a coward’s choice, because you can’t make a difference if you don’t think it makes a difference.

CURTIS BOSTIC for U.S. CONGRESS

 


 

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Category: South Carolina

Bostic Campaign ‘Surging’ Before Runoff?

Posted on | March 31, 2013 | 21 Comments

Volunteers at Curtis Bostic campaign headquarters make phone calls Friday

CHARLESTON, S.C.
What a way to celebrate Easter Sunday — out on the campaign trail. Well, it’s better than a Cesar Chavez tribute, I suppose.

The fact that the 1st District runoff will occur on the Tuesday after Easter adds an extra element of uncertainty to the outcome, because many people will be on vacation, which will likely mean an even lower turnout. Slightly more than 50,000 cast ballots in the March 19 GOP primary, about 20,000 of them for Mark Sanford and 7,000 for Curtis Bostic. Exactly how many of the 33,000 who voted for the 14 other candidates will show up Tuesday and — who they will vote for — is a mystery. A Daily Kos report Friday wondered if the race was shifting against Sanford:

Is Curtis Bostic surging at the last possible moment? He and Mark Sanford, his Republican runoff opponent, met on Thursday night for their only debate, and surprisingly, Sanford went on the attack. (So did Bostic, over Sanford’s infamous misdeeds while governor, but you expect the underdog to do that.) Sanford went after Bostic for voting in favor of spending increases while serving on the Charleston County Council, and also criticized his attendance record.
The fact that Stanford wasn’t content to play nice just days before Tuesday’s election is noteworthy in and of itself, but here’s an added twist: Sanford may have seriously stepped in it. Bostic says his absences from the council “were related to his wife’s battle with cancer.” Ouch.

How many voters are even aware of that debate gaffe? Will it make a difference? It’s hard to tell. A head-to-head match-up between Sanford and Bostic, based on a poll taken before the March 19 primary, showed Sanford leading by 13 points.

Since then, however, Bostic has appeared in two debates opposite Sanford, has run a new TV ad, and has sent out campaign mailers that describe him as a “fiscally conservative leader we can trust.” This, in addition to endorsements by Rick Santorum, Ann Coulter and former Rep. Henry Brown, who represented the 1st District for a decade. That’s probably what “surging” looks like, and one South Carolina blog cites a “source within the Democrat Party” as saying that their own polling shows a “very tight race” in the runoff.

UPDATE: Photos illustrating the campaign (click to enlarge):


The full-color mailer the Bostic campaign sent to Republican voters on Friday. Another mailer is scheduled to hit local mailboxes on Monday.

Headlines in the Charleston Post and Courier from Friday, Saturday and Sunday show how the local paper is covering the runoff.

UPDATE II: Linked by Donald Douglas at American Power — thanks! — and you can see the full-page newspaper ad that Mark Sanford’s campaign ran today. For some reason, neither Sanford’s ex-wife nor his fiancée is pictured in the ad.

UPDATE III: Headline at the Summerville (S.C.) Patch:

Social Media Analysis Predicts Bostic Win Tuesday

Hmmm. Wonder how that happened . . .

UPDATE IV: Mark Sanford’s sister is worried and sent an e-mail:

I’ve heard from as far away as Greenville (a huge evangelical church there from which the Bostic Campaign has requested phone calls and additional vans) exactly what the Bostic Campaign is doing. They are working in many evangelical churches, and they have the respective church leaderships organizing vanloads of their parishioners going to the Board of Elections all this week to vote early. They’re keeping the vans through Election Day next Tuesday. In Beaufort, they are working with several large churches — one is the Community Bible Church in Shell Point (a man I know there said he was going to vote for another candidate in the primary, but had been told directly by his pastor to vote for Bostic.) There are lots of others of these very large churches up in Charleston, Mount Pleasant, and North Charleston that they’re working with as well.

UPDATE V: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Meanwhile, the irrepressible Will Folks responds to my description of him as a “narcissistic sociopath.” Small egos are rare in politics.

 


 

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Category: South Carolina

FMJRA 2.0: No Bicycles

Posted on | March 31, 2013 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The 1% Progressive Bloggers Club and the Bourgeois Dialectic of Comrade Yglesias

Why John Avlon Hates Sarah Palin

Headin’ to South Cackalacky!

‘The Dream Is Dead’

The Other War on Women, or: It’s Not Harassment When Democrats Do It

How Franklin Foer Fired Timothy Noah

‘You Better Back It Up’: Security Guard Tasers Aggressive Woman on Video

FMJRA 2.0: March Madness

Rule 5 Sunday: Time After Time

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.25.13

#TrustCurtis @Bostic4Congress Campaign Has Eight Days to Stop Sanford in S.C.

Syria: It’s Complicated. Also, It Sucks.

Headline Contrast

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.26.13

South Carolina ‘Cash Money’ Loyalty

‘We Record What Is to All Known’

The Power of Prejudice

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.27.13

Can the Shoe Leather Fund Send Me to South Carolina? O, Ye of Little Faith!

The Fanatic Disciples of Equality

Vote Democrat! ‘Your Slave-Holding, Murdering, Adulterous, Baby-Raping, Incestuous, Snaggle-Toothed, Backward-A**ed, Inbreed, Imported Criminal-Minded Kin Folk’

Gold Price Jumps — Unexpectedly! — as Cyprus Tries to Halt Capital Flight

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.28.13

Greetings from Charleston! Debate Between Bostic and Sanford 7 p.m. ET UPDATE: BOSTIC WINS DEBATE

South Carolina Debate Aftermath

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (13 the hard way)
  2. Da Tech Guy (5)

Bunch of folks who just missed the cutoff this week, and a bunch of first-time linkers. Stick around, folks! Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA is Friday, April 5.


 

Category: FMJRA Award

Obama Hasn’t ‘Evolved’ That Far … Yet

Posted on | March 31, 2013 | 12 Comments

Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services requested public comment on a proposal to provide taxpayer-funded sex-change surgery, but scrubbed the proposal off their Web site as soon as it was reported by news agencies. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air understands the Obama-logic:

Congress has been arguing over how to limit the current Medicare/Medicaid systems to keep them from going broke and taking the American economic system with them.  Some genius at HHS thinks this is the most propitious moment to talk about sticking taxpayers with sex-change surgery bills?
Smooth move.  But don’t think for a moment this won’t come back later, either.

Of course not: Under the radical dispensation, that which is not forbidden is mandatory, and to say that someone has a “right” to do something will be interpreted to mean that taxpayers are obligated to pay them to do it. This is what the entire fight about “marriage equality” is about: Granting same-sex couples access to whatever government benefits married couples get.

Our national motto has been changed from “E Pluribus Unum” to “What’s In It For Me?”

There is no real opposition to people cohabiting, having wedding ceremonies and calling their unions “marriages” — live and let live, whatever floats your boat — but there is understandable resistance to government action that requires us to treat such pairings as perfect analogs of man and wife. In addition to any traditional moral objections, there is the suspicion that this sort of radical “equality” will end up costing taxpayers money and restricting individual freedom. And one individual freedom that is already being eroded is the right to express traditional moral objections, so that the Family Research Council can be stigmatized as a “hate group” and targeted for terrorism by the sans-culottes of the new Jacobinism.

Remember: Sandra Fluke argued that it is “discrimination” for insurers not to cover sex-change surgery and, last year, a federal judge invoked the Eighth Amendment in ruling that Robert Kosilek, imprisoned for murdering his wife in 1990, has a constitutional right to a  taxpayer-funded sex-change. My reaction at the time:

The Eight Amendment? If a convicted murderer doesn’t have a vagina, that’s “cruel and unusual punishment”? As strange as this sounds, it is entirely logical if you accept the premise of sexual “rights” as understood by liberals.

Please read (or re-read) “The Problem With Sexual Rights.” We are traveling a road paved with weird intentions.

 

 


Category: Barack Obama, Culture, Sex

Mayor Bloomberg’s Sexy Teen App

Posted on | March 31, 2013 | 5 Comments

New Yorkers are so sophisticated, aren’t they?

The Bloomberg administration has launched an app intended to reduce teen pregnancy called “Teens in NYC Protection+” that provides a wealth of health data for kids who are — or are thinking about becoming — sexually active, The Post has learned.
Information about everything from free clinics for HIV and STD testing to receiving condoms and emergency contraception is just a touch away on a smartphone. . . .
Parents who visit the site are in for a surprising lesson about state law.
“Teens in New York state have a legal right to get sexual-health services without the permission of parents, guardians, boyfriends, girlfriends, relatives or anyone else,” the site advises.
By comparison, a teen is not allowed to go on a school trip without parental consent. . . .
“While the percent of high-school teens who have had sex declined by 26 percent over the last 10 years, there are more than 19,000 teen pregnancies each year and most — 87 percent — are unintended,” the Health Department said.

Perhaps teens would not be so careless if they didn’t have a gigantic Nanny State welfare apparatus constantly ready to intervene between them and responsibility. The helplessness of the populace — who presumably can neither pay for their own condoms nor find where to get them free without a special smart-phone app — becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you start with the assumption that people are in constant need of guidance and aid from government, then spend millions to provide such “help,” you will eventually produce a certain clientele who are as helpless as you thought them to be.

Mankind survived for thousands of years without smart-phone apps to tell teenagers where to get free condoms. I’m not sure how long we can survive Bloomberg-ism.

Also, isn’t the description of teenagers “who are — or are thinking about becoming — sexually active” kind of all-inclusive? I mean, what teenager doesn’t think about becoming sexually active? What did we do before we had an app for that?

 

Category: New York, Sex

World’s Youngest Blogger:
The Cuteman Cometh

Posted on | March 30, 2013 | 14 Comments

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

Will Folks: ‘My Sacred Honor Requires Me to Endorse DCCC Fundraising Poster Boy’

Posted on | March 30, 2013 | 20 Comments

CHARLESTON, S.C.
Surely everyone remembers how the gallant gentleman Will Folks tried to derail Gov. Nikki Haley’s campaign by asserting that “his sacred honor” required him to claim that he had a sexual affair with her when he worked as a political consultant to her.

And now Folks, whose career in South Carolina politics included a stint as press secretary to Mark Sanford, employs his bizarre habit of first-person plural references to himself — “our founding editor” — to provide an “unenthused” endorsement to his former boss in Tuesday’s primary runoff. In the 16-candidate GOP primary, Folks had endorsed state Sen. Larry Grooms, who finished third behind Curtis Bostic on March 19.

In the Byzantine world of South Carolina politics, a corrupt cesspool of power-crazed backstabbers that is to Republicans what Chicago is to Democrats, Folks is a local legend. He went from playing bass in a rock band to working for Sanford, but got thrown under the bus in an ugly scandal; some still insist Folks was the victim of a “honey trap” set-up.

The subject of Will Folks came up over dinner with sources Friday at R.B.’s Seafood (where I had grilled flounder with hushpuppies, fries and collard greens to die for). One veteran South Carolina politico told me that Folks is dangerous because he is loyal to no one: “He’s his own man.” My observation that Folks seems like a narcissistic sociopath drew only a shrug in response. Evidently, narcissistic sociopaths are so commonplace in GOP politics here that nobody even notices.

Are these people indifferent to the public interest, or just blind to the downside risk of backing Sanford? Having seen the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in more than a few special elections, I think South Carolina Republicans might be underestimating what kind of political hell is about to be unleashed on the 1st District. Sure, Cook rates it R+11, but when the entirety of the Democrat machinery concentrates on one district — and keep in mind, OFA has got nothing better to do between now and the May 7 special election — it’s hard to say that any district is “safe.” Plus, there’s the fact that Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch (who’s raised $3 million for the race) has a celebrity-media connection.

While the Sanford forces talk about “redemption” and “forgiveness,” the unforgiving Democrats will make his past a national issue — reviving the “war on women” meme — which is why Ann Coulter endorsed Curtis Bostic:

Already polls show Sanford tied with, or losing to, the Democratic nominee. MSNBC has barely been able to conceal its glee. This is one they hadn’t even counted on!
Win or lose, MSNBC will be able to gloat nonstop about Republicans being a Party of the serial adulterers. So it’s win-win-win for the Democrats.
There’s no “win” for the GOP with Sanford, except that Mark Sanford is bored and no one will hire him. So the country has to take one for the team — Team Sanford!
The country is important, but Mark Sanford thinks his redemption is more important.

Of course, the Sanford campaign is doing a “kitchen sink” attack on Bostic, accusing him of everything from RINO-dom to international human trafficking, in order to create the idea that Bostic — a Marine veteran and married father of five — is as scandalous as the Appalachian Trail hiker.

Will voters here join the gallant gentleman Will Folks in backing Mark Sanford? Or will they rally behind Curtis Bostic?

 

Category: South Carolina
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