Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Mother Jones: Cochran's Tea Party challenger pals around with neo-Confederates

All of y'all flipping out over me pointing out that Mr. Chris "Restore the Constitution" McDaniel has the Three-Fifths Compromise emblazoned on the side of his RV as he drives it through Mississippi should have a field day with this.  (Paul Gallo, I'm looking at you.)

Mother Jones has a story up about McDaniel spending the last few months hanging out with neo-Confederates.  From the article:
In August, McDaniel addressed a neo-Confederate conference in Laurel, Miss., near his hometown of Ellisville. A local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), the Jones County Rosin Heels, hosted the two-day event, which the group described in invitations as a "Southern Heritage Conference" for "politically incorrect folks." Attendees were advised to dress in "Confederate uniforms and antebellum ball gowns or wee kilties." McDaniel's appearance at the Rosin Heels heritage conference was not a one-off occurrence; weeks earlier he was the keynote speaker at a separate event in Jackson. 
The Rosin Heels does more than regret the outcome of the Civil War. Its monthly newsletter routinely features articles and essays advocating for present-day secession. Its August newsletter highlighted the seven-year-old "Burlington Declaration" from the First North American Secession Convention, which stated that the right of secession was a "[truth] of natural law and the human experience." (While it did not advcoate for specific secession movement, the proclamation affirmed the right of the conference's various attendees to do so.) In September, the newsletter included an essay on secession from the League of the South, lamenting the loss of southern independence at the hands of the "plutocracy and proletariat of the world." A note from the editor stated that "we are living in the times that Jefferson Davis predicted would one day come," in which the conflicts that presaged the Civil War would flare up again. The June issue compared Obama's policies to the ravages of Reconstruction: "Our people have had to put up with for the last FIFTEEN DECADES!!!" 
... 
The group also purchases billboards, with messages such as "Happy birthday, President Jefferson Davis," and "Fort Sumter was fired on when Lincoln tried to reinforce his customs house for tax collection."
So, how do y'all feel about poor ol' Chris "Three-Fifths" McDaniel now? Was I too harsh?

3 comments:

Sam American said...

The three-fifths clause of the constitution was a compromise designed to reduce the influence of slave-holding states. Since congressional seats are awarded to states based on population, the slave states would have held more seats had slaves been counted (politically) as a "full person". This clause not only slowed the spread of slavery, but probably brought it to an end quicker had it not been included in the constitution.

Anonymous said...

I do not like this McDaniel guy. I think he's a schmuck. However, if you stretch this Three-Fifths Compromise bit anymore, you're going to look like Stretch Armstrong.

I imagine the intention was to place the most recognizable portion of the Constitution on the bus. The most recognizable portion, of course, is the top one-thirds of the document.

What did you expect him to do, put the back side of the Constitution on there? I hear you need Nicholas Cage and a Little Orphan Annie decoder pin to decipher what the back side says, anyway.

If his intention was to make a subtle political statement, we all know he would have emphasized Article II, Section 1, Clause 5.

Matt Eichelberger said...

Sam, the compromise was there to get the Constitution passed; it wasn't going to be adopted otherwise. Northern states and some Southerners wanted slavery gone, but knew the Constitution wouldn't be ratified with abolition in it. See my response to CRS here (which is where I think you meant for your comment to go).

Carr, the point is, and always has been, that McDaniel's campaign is a half-baked attempt at a senatorial bid. (Witness him taking down his announcement video in shame.) McDaniel is running for election to the U.S. Senate in Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of African Americans, and he's touring the state in a bus with the most notorious part of our Constitution on the side. It shows that he's probably not ready for big boy politics. The full text of the first page of the Constitution isn't visible on his bus as it is; the Three-Fifths Compromise could have been left out if he'd been paying attention.

If I were making a point about the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) racism rampant in the "conservative" ranks in Mississippi, I'd probably point to the revelation that McDaniel's been hanging out with the SCV, and that he co-hosted a radio show with a guy who runs around lamenting the Confederacy's loss at Gettysburg. Which reminds me....