On the old SNL Weekend Update, Chevy Chase used to announce at the end of every broadcast that Generalissimo Franco was still dead. My version: Republican National Committee member Tamara Scott is still incredibly clueless. Just listen to this nonsense from her radio show:
The Charleston shooting, Scott said, is “being hijacked to a racial issue.” Her interviewee, South Carolina pastor Brad Atkins — the state head of the American Family Association’s American Renewal Project who led the planning of Gov. Nikki Haley’s “The Response” prayer rally last month — agreed, saying the victims “lost their lives primarily not because they were black and the killer was white, but because they were gathered together at the church.”
“There really was no debate” about the flag, Atkins said, up until the “secular media” used it as a distraction from the fact that the shooting actually “happened because of a lack of Christian influence in society.” …
She repeated her point that the shooting in a black church by a gunman with white supremacist views who specifically stated his desire to start a race war wasn’t as much a “racial issue” as an attack on religion. The Charleston shooting, she said, is “being made into more of a racial issue than it was,” when the shooter “could have gone anywhere – mall, sporting event, anywhere — and shot a race of people, but this was in a house of worship.”
How is it possible for someone to make that claim with a straight face? The murderer said quite plainly that he targeted the victims in that church because he hates black people and was trying to start a race war. There is not one word in his manifesto explaining why he did it that even mentions Christianity. And yet people like Scott and Atkins can, with a completely straight face, pretend otherwise. It’s kind of mind-boggling that someone could be that disconnected with reality.
Scott then accused the Confederate flag’s critics of turning a symbol of “fun” into something divisive.
“Creating this stir about the flag now forces dialogue that I think had died out decades ago,” she said. “It starts the divide all over again in younger generations that otherwise would have had absolutely no ill feelings on this flag. For this generation that I know, it was a symbol of Dukes of Hazzard and fun and a culture of the South. So I hate this dialogue that has started that has created a new generation of divisiveness.”
*headdesk* This woman is on the Republican National Committee, for crying out loud. And that’s where she belongs, really.
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