This week with Congressman J. Gresham Barrett.

So it's been Gitmo week for Congressman J. Gresham Barrett, who is running for SC governor. The Third District congressman has little but press releases and recapitulations of press releases about his brainwave that all the candidates for SC governor should join him in signing a letter calling on the President not to transfer any Gitmo terror suspects to the Charleston Navy Yard Brig in anticipation of trial.


Ina  simple-minded way, it's a sensible political move: invite all your opponents to either proclaim you their leader, or to cut their heads off themselves as liberal, socialist, communist, nazi, islamist, muslim symps.


So far it hasn't played well. Nikki Haley, Governor Sanford's successor-babe wannabe, tried to have it both ways. She said she'd sign it but that Barrett was grandstanding.





Actor Aaron Eckhart, who, between movies, is running for governor as Democrat Mullins McLeod, wrote Barrett to tell him to show the letter up his capacious anal cavity.





Attorney General Henry McMaster, in a reverse double-axel Haley, said he wouldn't sign it but agreed they should be kept at Gitmo and that Congress should do something.


So yesterday Barrett released his letter, signed by the state's new Coastal Terrorism Caucus: Barrett; First District Congressman Henry ("It'll be bad for shellfish") Brown; Second District Congressman Joe ("I'm easy, but I'm not cheap") Wilson; and Senator Jim ("Bury me in a Y-shaped coffin") DeMint.


Warthen opines that Barrett is a lot like General Grant, who, William McFeely argued in his bio, ran for president because he had nothing better to do:

As I mentioned before in one of my last columns for the paper, Rep. Barrett didn’t seem to have a reason for running for governor. He could clearly state what he wanted to do, or anything special that he brought to the job (which is probably why he dodged talking to me for a couple of weeks, until I got really insufferable with one of his staffers — avoiding free media is just bizarre behavior in a gubernatorial candidate, and it really stood out), which was not good.

Now, he’s apparently decided he wants to grab attention and break out of the pack in the worst way — which is exactly what he’s done.

In the playbook of the kind of politician who has a very low opinion of the electorate, he’s doing everything right: He’s appealing to xenophobia, to the Not In My Backyard mentality, to insecurity, and sticking it to the administration that happens to be of the other party. He accomplishes all that by griping loudly and obnoxiously about the idea of the Obama administration bringing “detainees” from Guantanamo to the Navy Brig in Charleston.