Dear Editor,
Although I have no great interest in defending a Republican Tea Party candidate, Sean Higgins’ opinion piece in The DM on last Friday inclined me to point out that, actually, it probably could get a lot worse than Chris McDaniel.
Higgins used many superlatives (“Insane! Crazy! Intellectually bankrupt! It gets worse!”) to describe McDaniel’s positions, and that seemed a little out of place given the fact that most of McDaniel’s political interests — limiting women’s rights, stopping Obamacare, getting hot and bothered about the impending gay-ification of America and its children, etc. — are pretty standard Mississippi Republican fare. If Higgins was genuinely shocked to learn that McDaniel once said an off-color thing about Muslims, he’d be devastated to know what many Mississippians still think about black people.
My point here is that it comes off as insincere and smarmy to act shocked by normal (i.e. not outside the norm for Mississippi) Republican behavior. There are many good, sane people around us who actually do empathize with the positions that McDaniel holds, and we should recognize that. To persuade these people to see the fault in McDaniel’s positions, it would be better to scrutinize the ideas he stands for and articulate criticisms of them in a non-hysterical manner. Affecting righteous indignation and labeling opponents as “insane” does little to attract others to one’s cause.
Higgins was right about McDaniel’s polygamy comment, though. That was pretty weird.
From,
Ryan Rigney
Senior Journalism Student
