Contributed by Philip Snead
The following is a letter to the editor of the Charleston Post and Courier.
Dear Editor,
Saturday’s lead editorial, “Press port-deepening case,” appears to assign blame to Jim Clyburn for our congressional delegation’s failure to regain the measly $400,000 Congressional earmark funding that could have directly enabled the needed deepening of our port to sustain its competitiveness. (“… Rep. Clyburn hasn’t already summoned the necessary party clout to get the study money ….”)
HELLO!! Does the Post and Courier lack political courage to remind its readership whom we truly have to thank for this brouhaha over funding the study? This flurry of activity by (paid!) state and Congressional political representatives probably has cost well above $400,000 in the time of those involved by now. And all just to try to get the port-study horses back into the barn.
Responsibility for this reckless endangerment of the Charleston port rests very squarely, and almost solely, on the shoulders of Tea Party “no-earmarks” darling Jim ”Caution-to-the-Winds” DeMint and his misguided beyond-conservativism voters. To attempt tarring Mr. Clyburn with the port-study brush smacks of the Post and Courier having become a fully fledged party organ for Mr. DeMint’s round-the-bend Republicans.
In another demonstration of blindered journalism, of all the South Carolina “public servants” working to solve this problem, Mr. DeMint now apparently gets another pass from the Post and Courier’s editorial. You observe that, with his little brush fire now immediately threatening the state’s economy, he marginalizes himself as the only South Carolina “leader” flakey enough to propose a plan that would provide relief only long after the desired shipping traffic had already abandoned Charleston for other ports. Yet your editorial seems to cluck, “Oh shucks, if only he hadn’t just forgot this one little detail,” as if he were not a US Senator, but perhaps a wayward child who could not have been expected to know better.
Your editorial staff owes Mr. Clyburn an apology for this highly unbalanced misrepresentation of the port-study issue as it currently stands. It owes its tsk-tsking to the man who truly merits it. Mr. DeMint may look, except for the black hair, like Uncle Sam, but he would be cast more accurately as a self-serving demagogue whose “concern” about his state occupies a realm of bizarre political fantasy. The “vision” of him and his ilk may be a nice utopia to some voters, but their pragmatic grasp of the political reality they are trying to change is at best tenuous. That’s a generous characterization since it assumes hacks like Mr. DeMint actually take seriously the nonsense that they spout.
