One of the most heartening developments in the wake of the awful, awful event in Charleston last week is that the business community has seen the light on the whole Confederate flag thing.
Sears, eBay and Walmart shoppers looking for Stars and Bars paraphernalia will have to go elsewhere now. eBay will stop selling it, too. And it appears that the driving force behind Nikki Haley's call for the flag's dismantling in South Carolina was chamber of commerce types who — envisioning millions, maybe billions, of dollars in sales and corporate relocations slipping through the Palmetto State's fingers — frantically burned up the phone lines to both her and Lady Lindsey Graham.
It's a perfect microcosm of the Republican Party's ongoing dilemma: How to satisfy the more pragmatic, let's-just-make-a-buck businesspeople who traditionally support the GOP but at the same time not piss off the ferociously emotional right-wing ideologues who are forever looking for an excuse to leave it. All it takes is one glance at the furious comments on sites like Free Republic to know that this current incarnation of the Republican conundrum isn't going very well.
And we cats say: May it haunt them forever. After all, the racists and the bigots and the lynching defenders have found a comfortable home inside the GOP ever since Richard Nixon launched the Republicans' Southern Strategy in 1968 and '72. That's because the Democratic Party, led by Texan Lyndon Johnson, recognized that Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement were on the right side of history, and were willing to enact legislation that brutally punished Democrats at the polls for generations. (John F. Kennedy didn't live to see it happen, but that's what we cats call a profile in courage.)
Meanwhile, Republicans have coddled and courted racists, excused them, reframed their roles, and have even spoken at their events — all while trying to maintain the fiction that GOP is somehow acceptable to soccer moms and other mainstream voters. It has made us ill for years, and we cats are thrilled that perhaps at last the charade is over.
Here is the God's honest truth about the Confederacy and its silly emblems. We can't say it any better, so we'll just quote Sally Jenkins in today's Washington Post. (And maybe not drive on Jeff Davis Highway for awhile.) We cats PURR.
"The Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime. The Confederacy was treason in defense of a still deeper crime against humanity: slavery. If weaklings find racial hatred to be a romantic expression of American strength and purity, make no mistake that it begins by unwinding a red thread from that flag."
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