"If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row," Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said of a supporter who praised her. Hyde-Smith is facing a run-off election; her opponent is a black man.
“Hyde-Smith’s decision to joke about ‘hanging,’ when the history of African-Americans is marred by countless incidents of this barbarous act, is sick,” said NAACP president Derrick Johnson in a statement Sunday. “Any politician seeking to serve as a national voice of the people of Mississippi should know better.”
Democrat Mike Espy, whom she’ll face in a Nov. 27 runoff election, said the comment had “no place in our political discourse.”
There's something trés Kevin Williamson about this, right down to the ridiculous-to-suggest-I-mean-what-I-say denials about hangings. Dark thoughts on the conservative right are nothing new, but the rope has a special significance to its history.
