By Edwin Cooney
Nikki Haley's response to a December 27th inquiry about the cause of the Civil War was more generally revealing about political outlook than it was revealing about Nikki Haley herself. No one other than Ms. Haley knows whether she is entirely truthful or conveniently truthful about anything depending on the circumstances as they affect her personhood.
What we say about truthfulness these days concerns comments such as whether something is "relatively true” or "partially true.” There are “equal truths” and "convenient truths” which one could use to apply a truth about another subject or circumstance to the truth currently at issue. Some expound on the exertion that on almost any topic there are many truths. Then, there are those who insist that absolute truthfulness doesn't exist. Today, I introduce the entire truth. The entire truth encompasses historical legal and social circumstance as they affect the nature of all truth about an historic event or circumstance.
One of the most constant threads running throughout American history is our discomfort with racial, ethnic, physically different people. We've practiced genocide of Native Americans, enslaved and lynched blacks (even those recently home from fighting Hitler!). We disdain minority religions. We instituted and still defend Jim Crowism while insisting that redress of social grievances are socialistic or communistic.
The entire truth is that we've always struggled politically, socially, and even legally with people we brought to America from Africa whom we eventually declared our personal property rather than as people.
The question is whether we're willing to stop applying our fears to our politics?
Nikki Haley's task that eventful day was to emphasize that today's “liberal” government must be rejected for intruding itself into our personal business. She insists as conservatives have since the days of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan that government has always been and surely always will be the enemy of the free.
Of course, slavery was the major cause of the Civil War. The South feared that the industrial North may one day soon seek to abolish that "peculiar institution." Ms. Haley wasn't interested in discussing the conditions of the poor or of anyone else. Her topic was big bad government even as once led and influenced by her political party's greatest leader Abraham Lincoln.
Finally, the entire truth is this: good government in order to be effectively powerful must be responsible to the preservation of liberty.
Never forget that…”[w]e the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America."
To minimize or deny the above purpose demonstrates plain and determined ignorance. To assert that government is our national problem amounts to an assertion of politics over patriotism.
As for the political fate of Nikki Haley, her December 27th gaff probably won't matter much. You can be sure however, that the political, legal and social fate of another candidate will matter much, much more!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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