I see CNN has done some digging and found more dirt on Mississippi Senate candidate Hyde-Smith (R):
Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith once promoted a measure that praised a Confederate soldier’s effort to “defend his homeland” and pushed a revisionist view of the Civil War.
Hyde-Smith, a Republican, faces Mike Espy, a Democratic former congressman and agriculture secretary, in Tuesday’s runoff in Mississippi — the final Senate race to be decided in 2018. The measure, which was unearthed by CNN’s KFile during a review of Hyde-Smith’s legislative history, is the latest in a series of issues that have surfaced during her campaign, many of which have evoked Mississippi’s dark history of racism and slavery.
As a state senator in 2007, Hyde-Smith cosponsored a resolution that honored then-92-year-old Effie Lucille Nicholson Pharr, calling her “the last known living ‘Real Daughter’ of the Confederacy living in Mississippi.” Pharr’s father had been a Confederate soldier in Robert E. Lee’s army in the Civil War.
The resolution refers to the Civil War as “The War Between the States.” It says her father “fought to defend his homeland and contributed to the rebuilding of the country.” It says that with “great pride,” Mississippi lawmakers “join the Sons of Confederate Veterans” to honor Pharr.
The measure “rests on an odd combination of perpetuating both the Confederate legacy and the idea that this was not really in conflict with being a good citizen of the nation,” said Nina Silber, the president of the Society of Civil War Historians and a Boston University history professor.
“I also think it’s curious that this resolution — which ostensibly is about honoring the ‘daughter’ — really seems to be an excuse to glorify the Confederate cause,” Silber said.
I have no idea how this is going to play in Mississippi (I do have a relative in Ham Lake, MS, but he’s not responding to e-mails). But my initial real question is this: Are they applying the same zeal to investigations of Hyde-Smith’s opponent, Mr. Espy (D)? That’s sort of the problem for news sources that wish to be seen as neutral – how do you prove a negative? Or, to borrow the conundrum for atheists, Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. How to look busy when there’s nothing to find, but the boss is watching?
