So I guess there is one more election, the Mississippi runoff for US Senate, and, being Mississippi, it shouldn't be interesting, but the incumbent Republican, Cindy Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the office when her ill predecessor resigned before his term ended, is so vacant that it's attracting my attention even though I assume the outcome isn't in doubt. I wrote here about the difference between Alabama and Mississippi, making the point that Mississippi has way fewer persuadable Republicans such as reside in places like Huntsville, Alabama, where there is a thriving aerospace industry that employs people who are conservative but not crazy, and, anyway, Hyde-Smith probably isn't any dumber than Judge Roy Moore and presumably without certain distasteful tendencies. Can't see her losing.
But boy is she dumb. I thought at first that the snafu concerning her avidity for public hangings was just a slip of the tongue. I guess I still think that, sort of. There's arguably a difference between a "public hanging" and a lynching, and she should have made that point immediately, then begged forgiveness for having unintentionally given offense. Instead, she allowed herself to be filmed while repeatedly stonewalling questions about the matter, until finally she retreated and some handler took the mic to ask: What about all the African-American babies who've been aborted? (This is what people say to indicate that their opposition to abortion rights trumps even their benighted racial views.) If her goal was to keep her flubs front and center, A+ work Cindy! Then while people were beginning to wonder whether she's a bigot or just politically all thumbs, out come the pictures of her aiming a musket while dressed up in Confederate garb, with the result that her being a moron is now the charitable interpretation.
Last night she debated her Democratic opponent, Mike Espy. Uff-da. She had on the lectern in front of her a high pile of notes that looked like it might be the lost manuscript of Dostoevski's longest novel. Of course it's hard in all that mass to find what you're looking for in order to answer a particular question, but apparently she was comforted by the knowledge that what she was supposed to say was there, somewhere, if only she could put her finger on it. Her notes did not prevent her from saying, in her prepared conclusion:
Tonight, you have heard two clearly different opposite differences between me and my opponent.
Which raises the question: How were her notes supposed to help her, considering that she has trouble reading?
It's fashionable, though possibly unfair, to run down our own times and glorify an idealized past that didn't exist. Nevertheless I can't suppress the thought that around 250 years ago there were only about 2.5 million people living between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains, and they included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, &c. Nowadays, we are a transcontinental nation of well over 300 million souls and one of the 100 seats in the Senate created by the aforementioned founders is occupied by Cindy Hyde-Smith.
Well, African-Americans make about 38 percent of the voting-age population of Mississippi, and if they all turn out Hyde-Smith will probably only win by about 10 points.
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