S.C. Democratic Party Chairman Joe Erwin is a very reasonable person under normal circumstances, but obliged by virtue of his office to say absurd things. He said one such thing in a press release Thursday. In the release, he celebrated the fact that the House was overriding most of Gov. Mark Sanford‘s vetoes. Which is fine. Reasonable people can disagree. Our editorial position was that most of the vetoes should have been sustained, even though Mr. Sanford’s reasoning for the cuts was unsound.
Here’s the overboard bit: "Sanford’s bizarre vetoes threatened to turn South Carolina into a third-world country. Thankfully, Democrats and Republicans in the legislature worked together to avoid the Sanford catastrophe.”
OK, Mr. Erwin, I don’t like Mr. Sanford’s philosophy about taxing and spending and the proper proportions of government any more than you do. But come on: None of the cuts the governor proposed in order to restore trust funds (something that needed doing), were going to lay waste to the land.
Now if you wanted to argue that South Carolina by some objective measurements already is a third-world country, and has been so under both Democratic and Republican regimes, I’d be with you. I’ve sort of made the same argument myself in the past. And if you’d then said that Mr. Sanford seems clueless about the need to pull us out of that condition, you’d have something of a point on your side.
But these budget cuts would not have laid waste to the land.
Of course, we can be proud that the absurdities of factional thinking in South Carolina seldom reach the outer limits that are routine on the national level. How far out there do you have to be to actually imply that it is a deliberate policy of the Bush White House, rather than a bureaucratic oversight that would have happened under any administration (like in 1998, for instance), for sex offenders to get Viagra through Medicaid? I mean, Republicans don’t even like Medicaid. And here I was thinking a South Carolina Republican was going out of his way to find something to worry about (or something to discredit Medicaid with) earlier this week when he brought up the subject. He must have been reading The Nation, and it boggled his mind. But no more than it has addled the folks at Democrats for America’s Future.
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