The Newest Senator Is a Loon

So Nikki Haley has named Tim Scott as the senator-designate to take over Jim DeMint's seat. The man is a loon.

Think Progress has this on his gun-related beliefs: He wants to prevent law enforcement from tracking multiple gun purchases; he wants a nationwide concealed-carry law; he wants to lift existing prohibitions on sales across state lines; and so on.

Elsewhere he has said America has "the best health-care system in the world" and he mouths the usual garbage that we have a spending problem not a revenue problem. And so on and so on.

So the Republicans have a black guy now. We'll be seeing a lot of him, I'm sure; they'll be grooming him for Meet the Press and so on, and some of the media will write about how he shows "a new GOP face" or some euphemism. All he shows is that black people, while on the whole not nearly as irresponsible as white people, can have loony, extremist, uninformed, irresponsible views too.

UDATE AFTER READING 24 COMMENTS: I think a lot of you need to get a sense of humor or at least be able to recognize a little light irony when you see it. Was my last sentence above a 100 percent serious sentence? Obviously not. I was making two jokes there simultaneously. First, I was mocking all the talk we hear and have been hearing for many, many years in our political discourse about how irresponsible black people supposedly are. Many white people, nearly always conservatives, use such language with impugnity. I was mocking it--intentionally showing how silly it sounds by reversing it, reversing the stereotypes.

Second, I was poking a little fun at Scott and the GOP because, well, do you reckon if Tim Scott were white he'd be a senator-designate today? He might be. But as I wrote the day DeMint quit, he was the obvious choice, and he was the obvious choice precisely because of his skin color, because the GOP desperately needs to have a couple of people of color within its ranks. Let's not kid ourselves.

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Michael TomaskySpecial Correspondent

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