Asshole of the Month: Tim Scott
The GOP clown car of Presidential candidates will have to stretch into a limo soon to accommodate all of the long-shot hopefuls crowding the race, including Tim Scott, one of only three current Black U.S. senators (there have been only 11 total in history) and the only Black person to serve in both chambers of Congress. He joins Alan Keyes, Herman Cain and Ben Carson in the fraternity of African American conservatives aspiring to the White House. Republicans love to showcase their few Black candidates—look how inclusive we are! Given the realities of the GOP national base, Scott has little hope of winning the nomination and becoming the Republicans’ Obama. But like the others, he soldiers on nevertheless, with the VP position a definite possibility. And as Trump’s or DeSantis’s running mate, he could draw a certain percentage of votes from the Democratic ticket.
Scott does have an appealing story to tell, although some of the details have proven a little fuzzy. He was born in North Charleston, South Carolina, to parents who divorced when he was seven, leaving his mother to provide for the poor family by working 16-hour days as a nursing assistant. “We lived in a two-bedroom house with my grandparents… me, my mom and my brother sharing a room and a bed,” he says. His grandfather had to leave school in the third grade to pick cotton for 50 cents per day and never learned to read and write, he claims. But Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler dug up public records going back many decades and discovered documents indicating that both Scott’s great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather could read and write. Scott did acknowledge that the latter owned 900 acres of land in South Carolina, although Kessler could find records for only 170 acres; whatever the case, that’s still a lot of land, much more than the average American’s ancestors owned, and it undercuts Scott’s portrayal of his family as mired in unbroken illiteracy and poverty ever since slavery.
Young Tim floundered for a while, flunking most of the courses in his first year of high school, but then he “found Jesus” while on a partial football scholarship to Presbyterian College. He graduated from Baptist College at Charleston in 1988, started an Allstate Insurance franchise and was elected to the Charleston County Council in 1994—the first Black Republican elected to any office in the state since 1902. As council chairman, he sponsored posting a display of the Ten Commandments outside the chambers, a clear Constitutional violation of church-state separation that was deemed unconstitutional by the courts and is perhaps indicative of Scott’s political vision. “My life is worthless without Jesus Christ,” he once said. Well, Tim, the separation of church and state protects us all, and religion should never be forced upon Americans via public institutions!
