Let the South Carolina games begin

Believing it to be “God’s will,” South Carolina State Sen. Lee Bright (R) announced Tuesday that he will a 2014 primary challenge to U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R). Over four years in the State Senate, Bright has taken a number of out-of-the-mainstream positions on a wide array of issues, aligned himself with the anti-government William Wallace Caucus, and served as state campaign chair for the presidential campaign of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Bright also is on the board of a right-wing seminary that believes women should be subservient to men, both in the church and in the home.

If there is a more down and dirty political venue than South Carolina, I haven’t seen it. The state has a long tradition of negative politics. Some date this to Lee Atwater, who once famously accused an opponent who had been treated for depression as someone who had “been hooked up to jumper cables.” But actually the legacy extends at least to the ante-bellum period. After Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner had attacked a fellow senator, South Carolina’s Andrew Butler for a taking a mistress, “the harlot Slavery,” a relative, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, entered the chambers and took a cane to Sumner’s head. He beat the abolitionist so badly that he was unable to return to the Senate for three years and suffered the after-effects the rest of his life. One imagines there are some modern-day Sumners in South Carolina politics, still walking in a daze, wondering what hit them in races where anonymous fliers and phone calls destroyed their careers. This is a state where almost anything goes, even accusing John McCain’s adopted child of being illegitimate, as was done to him in 2000.