The Horrible Nikki Haley

Her role in the presidential race.

Atlanta, GA

January 23, 2024

For the first time since 1892, when Grover Cleveland reclaimed the presidency from Benjamin Harrison, it looks like both major party nominees will be running for re-election.

After the catastrophes of these candidates’ first terms, it’s hard to fathom anyone wanting to endure either again. And that includes the people running each party.

Which is why the cronies who run the show try to cast Nikki Haley in the lead role. But no one’s buying it. Not only isn’t she up to the task, she can’t even play the part.

This woman’s as dumb as she is despicable. And that’s saying something. Both qualities were on display in a debate last month, when Vivek Ramaswamy took a shot.

He claimed Nikki couldn’t name three Ukrainian provinces she wanted Americans to “rescue” from Russia. He was right.

But it was a bold move. Had she named them, he would’ve looked ludicrous. And why wouldn’t she have known? Even I did.

For almost two years, these provinces were all over the news. A presidential candidate would have to be an imbecile to be unable to name them.

Which is why Vivek was confident calling Haley out. He was so sure of her ineptitude that he was more than willing to roll the dice. When he did, she crapped out.

Yet she still carries the war machine’s water. Unfazed by being embarrassed, she wants to up the ante in the Ukraine. She’s also all-in on the Israeli annihilation of Gaza, and wants to wipe Iran off the map.

There’s not a village she wouldn’t invade, no foreign burg she’s unwilling to bomb.

Wrong Even When Right

A few weeks ago, she was accidentally right about another conflict. When asked about what caused the “Civil War”, she was clearly caught off guard.

Not knowing anything, she somehow stumbled into a response that wasn’t ridiculous: “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are.”

That’s basically correct. But our opinion auditors were outraged. She hadn’t provided the only approved response. All the “respectable” people know slavery was the sole reason for the war. But was it?

The South had several motives for leaving the union. Slavery was among them. But it didn’t cause the war.

Nor did secession, even if slavery were the reason for separation. Six states exited months before Abraham Lincoln assumed office.

But not a shot was fired till after he took the oath he repeatedly violated. And five states departed after Lincoln mobilized against the South. It’s as accurate to say the war caused secession as the other way around.

The reason for war was Lincoln wouldn’t let the South leave. And it wasn’t because he opposed slavery. In an effort to preserve the union, he supported a constitutional amendment that would’ve prohibited interference with slavery in any state.

To the extent slavery prompted secession, it wasn’t the cause of the war. Lincoln couldn’t have cared less if Southern states kept their slaves. He just wanted to retain their tax revenue. As Haley said, it came down to “the role of government and what the rights of the people are.”

But she’s too stupid to recognize when she’s right. So she caved to the left. Within days, she backtracked.

When asked to defend her initial response, she said slavery was “an automatic”…as if it was so obvious it went without saying. By that logic, it’d be like considering the Cold War without mentioning communism. But she probably doesn’t know about that either.

Like most modern politicians, Nikki Haley lacks a philosophical core. She’s used to providing rehearsed answers to predictable questions. When she’s steered from the script, it’s clear she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Triggering the Avalanche

Haley’s no stranger to Confederate controversy. As governor of South Carolina, she pulled the pebble that propelled the cultural avalanche by which we’re now buried.

In 2015, after the horrific shooting at a black church in Charleston, Haley deflected blame onto the battle flag atop the Capitol in Columbia. The banner obviously had nothing to do with the killings. But, sensing an opportunity, Nikki decided to score points by saying it needed to go.

Since it went, cultural vandalism has been unrelenting. Statues, emblems, monikers, and monuments have been defaced and demolished around the country. Last month at Arlington Cemetery, the Reconciliation Monument was the latest to fall.

Southern symbols were low-hanging fruit on the tree of tradition. But with revolutionary zeal, the “woke” Jacobins soon took their axes to the entire Western orchard.

As always, the barbarians assured us their destruction would be confined to troglodytic memorials of the Lost Cause.

But it wasn’t long before Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had their statues removed and names effaced. Those who pulled them down did so not for their contemporary vices, but for their timeless virtues.

And it was Nikki Haley who pulled the lever of the cultural wrecking ball.

Ridiculing Her Roots

This week, she swung it again. Like all Republicans, she was baited by the press to deny being “racist”. Naturally, she did so by playing the race card.

Haley hyped her Indian heritage, and denigrated her home state to do so. The woman who can’t wait to bomb brown people all over the Middle East said hers was

“the only Indian family in our small Southern town. I was teased every day for being brown….Anyone can go back and look at what I’ve said, at how hard it was to grow up in the Deep South, as a brown girl.”

I wasn’t there. But being in a Southern high school before Haley was, I never saw anyone teased “every day” for being any race. It’s ridiculous. The thought never crossed our mind.

Haley continued insulting our intelligence by saying she “was disqualified from a beauty pageant because I wasn’t white or black, because they didn’t know where to put me.”

As if South Carolina still held segregated beauty pageants in the late 1980s. Aside from her name being Nimarata, they wouldn’t have known she wasn’t white even if it did. Maybe there are reasons other than race that contestants might be disqualified from a beauty pageant.

Were I a resident of Bamberg, South Carolina, I’d be plenty annoyed that Nimarata cast aspersions on me to cover her inability to answer for herself. But that’s all Nikki Haley knows to do.

Unfortunately, it could be enough.

Donald Trump won the Iowa Caucuses last week, and the New Hampshire primary tonight. Unless he’s “removed”, the nomination is his. But he is mostly awful.

He has some sound instincts, but no guiding principles. Covid proved he’s bad when it matters most. He wrecked the country the last year of his term. For that alone he should be disqualified.

But he riles up the masses and ridicules the “elites”. So the people in power want to put him away. Their unrelenting lawfare is an obvious Banana Republic tactic to deny him the presidency. They’re trying to prevent the people in a “democracy” from having a chance to choose him.

Haley would be ready with Trump out of the way, leaving voters a “choice” that’s no real option. With Dr Pepper off the menu, it’d be Coke or Pepsi…with the sugar flowing right back to the bottlers.

JD