Lindsay Graham Takes Flak in Home Town for Turning Against the Confederate Flag

      Would you call Graham courageous on the flag?

    Maybe most liberals would say no. After all, in the aftermath of the shooting he played the tired old canard that the flag is about 'who we are' not racism. 

    However, he did come around-after SC GOP Governor Nick Haley agreed to take the flag down at the statehouse. Now that might not seem like leadership. But then you have to also factor in where Graham come from. In his own town they're cursing him for giving in. 

    So I wouldn't call him courageous, but probably something of a progressive relative to his town:

    Call it a cave-in or a flip-flop or an evolution. In Pickens and Oconee counties, where Graham was raised and remains today, the people know him — firsthand or otherwise — and like him. Some resent him for turning on the flag. Most understand it. On race and Confederate heritage, they express the same mix of stubborn defensiveness, empathy and resignation that Graham has. In that way, he represents the people here. But he certainly isn’t leading them."

    "The battle standard still has its staunch defenders in Central. At the Wal-Mart on Calhoun Memorial Highway, Confederate memorabilia had already been cleared from the shelves on Friday, but the flag shone from the front license-plate holder of a Chevy pickup in the parking lot. The truck’s owner, Rita Haney, 28, said she wasn’t bowing to the flag’s opponents. She’s planning to fly a big one in her front yard, “just to piss them the f—- off.”

    "She expressed dismay that the group now includes her state’s senior senator. “My dad loved Lindsey Graham,” Haney said. “He would roll over in his grave.”

     "There were others in the diners and under the shade trees in and around the town whose support Graham has lost in the past week. “He went from being all right to a coward,” said Stanley, a 60-year-old logger wearing a National Tractor Pullers Association hat in a booth at Paw’s Diner in nearby Seneca, where Graham now lives."

     "At Margaret’s, another diner on another highway 10 miles away, 71-year-old waitress Betty Smith sat in another booth, breaking from work to chat with friend Betty Whitmire. She said she was so disgusted with the state’s leaders that she would stop voting, and that she couldn’t abide Graham’s change of course. “I don’t care what they do with the flag, but when you stand up and lie like that …,” she said.

     "But Whitmire expressed a more common sentiment. She still liked Graham. He had known her older brother, Leon, and showed up to his funeral as a congressman 14 years ago. She said she understood Graham’s decision to change course on the flag, even if she didn’t wholeheartedly endorse it."

   Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/lindsey-graham-hometown-confederate-flag-central-south-carolina-119492.html#ixzz3eMrHxuRB

    In that same vein, Politico is right that you have to give some real credit to Niki Haley. Again, measured against the sentiment of her own voters.

   http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/nikki-haley-civil-rights-champion-119495.html?hp=l3_3#.VZAI3_lViko

   Meanwhile: trouble in the conservative paradise of the SJC?

   http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/supreme-court-justices-antonin-scalia-samuel-alito-119486.html?hp=c2_3