In order to give you my take on it, I have to go through something similar that happened a little more than two years ago.
The Council of Conservative Citizens 2008 National Conference was in Northwest Alabama in June of that year. One of the guest speakers was then-State Sen. Charles Bishop, who was serving his last term in the Senate, as he was either retiring or was TLed out, don’t remember which. If my memory isn’t failing me, the election to replace him was in 2008. Anyway, most of his speech was the usual mehe that one would expect of an elected Republican in the Deep South, speaking to someone that he figured was a sympathetic audience. But then Sen. Bishop, while toward the end of his remarks, complemented John McCain on being a “good man we should all get behind” in the upcoming Presidential campaign. Almost everyone in the packed ballroom, me included, booed at the top of our lungs. This took Sen. Bishop aback, and enraged the Conference Emcee, who was one of Bishop’s constituents. He took to the microphone after Sen. Bishop left the stage and apologized to him on behalf of all of us.
While all was understood, especially considering that the person of John Sidney McCain III has made a career of telling us all to fuck off and die, I certainly came to understand the infantile nature of it all. If I had to to do over again, and if everyone else in that room did, we would have met those remarks with stone cold silence. Sen. Bishop would have gotten the point just as well, and we wouldn’t have come off as being disrespectful.
As an aside, I’m waiting for the first media lib, in reaction to this news, dragging up the fact that Fort A.P. Hill was named for Ambrose Powell Hill, a Confederate General from Virginia.
