Cindy Hyde-Smith and the Left’s Linguistic Quicksand [posted at Real Clear Politics]

Here’s the start of my column this morning at Real Clear Politics. It concerns the Mississippi Senate election tomorrow, but considers it as a symptom of the abasement of our politics overall. Let me know what you think:

Cindy Hyde-Smith and the Left’s Linguistic Quicksand

By Frank Miele

If you want to know how decadent our electoral system has become, a good measure can be obtained by examining the Mississippi Senate runoff election being held Tuesday.

At a time when the country is at a crossroads that may well determine our future for years to come, the issue at the fulcrum of this vote isn’t border security; it isn’t tax policy or the national debt; it isn’t health care or the economy. Nope, the driving issue (at least according to our beloved national media) is an off-the-cuff joke made by one of the candidates that had absolutely nothing to do with the election.

If you follow the news, you already know the joke made by Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith about her host at a campaign event: “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”

You could certainly understand if opponents of capital punishment took offense at Hyde-Smith’s light-hearted remark — she said it laughingly — about a “public hanging,” but that’s not who was offended. Rather the entire Democratic Party provided its own private interpretation of the term and determined with zero evidence that she was referring not to a lawful public execution but to a lynching — and not just any lynching but the lynching of a black man. Again, I emphasize, with no evidence. If there were any evidence in her history that Cindy Hyde-Smith is a racist, she would have been disowned long ago.

But Mike Espy, her Democratic opponent in the runoff, is a black man, and for whatever reason in our aspirationally color-blind society, that has invited the worst possible interpretation of Hyde-Smith’s remarks.

Read the rest of my column here:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/11/26/cindy_hyde-smith_and_the_lefts_linguistic_quicksand__138737.html