The Ming Report

PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW

December 26, 2003 - Essie May Washington-Williams secured a place in American political history just before Christmas. With quite dignity she, and her brother and sisters, gave her children and grandchildren a most precious gift, the public acknowledgement of their genetic heritage and this time all of it. The 78 year old retired school teacher revealed and her brother confirmed what most of South Carolina already knew, that her father was South Carolina’s J. Strom Thurmond, the superannuated politician who made a career out of painting himself as an icon of the old Confederacy. Old Strom, it seems, had fathered an illegitimate Black child on a 16 year old colored maid working for his parents.

Isn’t it ironic that it was in South Carolina in the early spring of 2000 that he Bush campaign launched a push-polling campaign featuring the accusation that Senator John McCain had fathered what hey called an “illegitimate Black child”, asking whether that fictional fact would cause the voter to be more or less likely to vote for the Senator. Fictional facts were grist for the mills of the Bush Campaign that year and Carl Rove and his minions are not likely to abandon their tried and untrue technique as 2003 fades into a re-election year.

As the first three years of the Bush Campaign… (Did I say Campaign? I meant to say Administration. It is so difficult to tell the difference.) …the Bush Administration have shown us, fictional facts are a staple in Mr. Rove’s political tool kit. Nothing that the Administration does is too trivial or too important to be spun into a cocoon of silken fictional facts. From the fictional facts of the supposed vandalism of the transitioning Whitehouse in January 2001 to the fictional facts of the Nigerien Yellowcake, the Rovian tactic of making up “facts” as they go along has permeated both the politics and the policies of the non-stop Bush Campaign.

Take the non-stop campaign to discredit the Junior Senator from New York as an example. She makes a speech to a Democrat fundraiser in Iowa and people who never saw part of the speech nor heard a word of it describe her performance as “red-faced” and the content as “screaming epithets” at the President. This, of course, is from those who continuously drum out the rhythm of the Rovian line that the Senator is a lesbian whose only child was fathered by one male law partner and who had a long-term affair with yet another male law partner who she later had murdered.

Arizona’s Senator never fathered an illegitimate child. South Carolina’s human icon did. Those are facts, not fiction. But the existence of facts has never deterred the Bush Campaign’s operations in the past whether the subject was politics or policy. We can admire Essie May Washington-Williams for her quiet dignity. We can admire young Strom for his political and personal courage in acknowledging his sister and the facts of her heritage. But there is nothing admirable in the campaign that Carl Rove is ramping up for 2004.