Given the leadership she's displayed earlier during the Dylann Roof kerfuffle, I was hoping that Governor Haley would be resistant to this kind of emotional erosion of conservative principle.
I guess I was wrong:
For five years, Governor Nikki Haley, South Carolina's first minority governor, dismissed calls to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse lawn as a divisive issue far from her agenda.
In her 2010 campaign, she said the two-thirds legislative approval required to move the flag from its thirty-foot perch was too high a hurdle to allow for real debate. When her re-election opponent called last fall for it to be removed, she branded it a desperate stunt.
Right, right, and right. And all three of her spot-on assertions are still correct today, Dylann Roof or no Dylann Roof. Something a true conviction politician would steadfastly maintain and acknowledge.
Evidently, Nikki Haley is no longer a conviction politician:
None of that mattered, she said, after nine people were killed last month at a black church in Charleston, including its pastor, State Senator Clementa Pinckney, in a crime she called "pure hate."
Yes, it was. But that had precisely nothing to do with the Confederate battle flag, as any historically literate leader would remember. And that does matter.
Or at least, it ought to.
When Haley arrived at the church, she found strangers hugging and weeping, and the grief was overwhelming.
And manipulative.
At the June 19th bond hearing for suspected shooter Dylann Roof, the victims' families offered him forgiveness. That night, Haley said, she made a decision.
"That flag needed to come down," she told The Associated Press in an emotional interview Wednesday. "I could not look my kids in the face and justify that flag anymore."
First, what did her kids have to do with it? Second, who asked her to justify anything? From this narrative, she had never justified it, but simply and reasonably pointed out that it was a tiresome trigger for leftwingnut demagoguery and thus an irrelevant distraction from serious policymaking. Which it was and still is, as 57% of Americans still understand.
The surfacing of a website showing Roof holding Confederate flags alongside a racist manifesto deepened her resolve, she said.
"I could not have been more disgusted," she said. "The flag didn't kill those families, but let's honor every person in South Carolina so no one drives by this Statehouse and feels pain."
Nothing killed those families because they're still alive. A combined nine of their loved ones were murdered, and the Confederate battle flag didn't kill them either. Dylann Roof did, and he's in custody, and he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, convicted to the fullest extent an avenging jury can muster, and put to death in the most horrifying way possible. Nikki Haley's mistake is in allowing herself to be bulldozed into being used to taint Confederate/Civil War imagery with Mr. Roof's heinous crime in such a way as to contribute to the Left's maniacal drive to expunge its lessons from the historical record, making it more likely that it will be repeated, as George Santayana once wrote. Which would be entirely consistent for the party of slavery. There's no reason that Governor Haley should make herself an accessory to such destructive, totalitarian revisionism.
Again, I have no preference for "that flag's" disposition. Take it down, keep it up, it would make no difference to me. But taking it down and sending it to a museum isn't enough for the Left, because that would still be within the realm of reason. Completely memory-holing it is part of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America" into something that would, ironically (for the historically impaired), not be all that dissimilar from the antebellum South the Left loves to demonize.
As the old saying goes, "Give 'em an inch, and they'll take a parsec". Which is why defending the Confederate battle flag isn't about the flag itself, but about the underlying principle that is truly under such ferocious assault. Something a true leader would also understand.
And something of which Nikki Haley is falling disappointingly short.
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