GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD RUBBISH

I saw this yesterday:

Conservatives are outraged after a Democrat in South Carolina allegedly insulted Republican Gov. Nikki Haley's Indian heritage at a party gathering in Columbia on Friday.

The state's Democratic Party Chairman, Dick Harpootlian, is believed to have said the party will take on the Conservative in the next gubernatorial race and send 'Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from.'

Gov. Haley was born in the U.S. but her parents are from India.

Today I see that Harpootlian isn't apologizing. He's claiming he just meant that Democrats were going to send her back to her South Carolina county, a claim that suggests that he thinks the rest of us are either idiots or fellow bigots.

Harpootlian should just shut the hell up and crawl back into the hole from which he emerged. I don't care if he's a Democrat. It's obvious what he meant here.

Nikki Haley's parents are Sikh immigrants? I don't give a crap, any more than I give a crap that Michelle Malkin is Filipino. Criticize these people for what they say and do. Don't attack them on these grounds. It's as hateful coming from a Democrat as it is from a Republican.

(In Haley's case, there's plenty of substance to attack her on -- just this week, for instance, she signed an old-school nullification bill that effectively makes Obamacare illegal in her state. She does this and you have to attack her on ancestry? Seriously?)

I don't know much about Dick Harpootlian, but this 2011 post from a Daily Kos diarist, at a time when Harpootlian was trying to regain the party chairmanship, makes clear that the racist remark about Haley is just par for the course for him:

In 1998, Harpootlian assumed the office of Party Chair.... over the course of the next five years, Harpootlian presided over the systematic disintegration of the Democratic Party in South Carolina. Along the way, Harpootlian did make quite a name for himself.

When he issued a formal press release from Party headquarters criticizing Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Harpootlian coined the homophobic slur, "light in the loafers."

In another awkward and insensitive quote, Harpootlian responded to a question about the minority vote with the breathtaking comment, "I don't want to buy the black vote, just rent it for one day." ...

Over the intervening years, the Democratic Party apparatus in South Carolina has visibly deteriorated.

The diarist also pointed out that Harpootlian had made contributions to several less-than-admirable Republicans:

1. Jake Knotts ("Obama is a raghead!")
2. Henry McMaster (radical extremist on the Republican right-wing) and
3. Walt Wilkins (staffer for the segregationist, Strom Thurmond).

Alas, Harpootlian did regain the chairmanship. A year later, he was comparing Nikki Haley to Hitler's mistress:

Haley had appeared at a Republican press conference which was held in the basement of a Charlotte office building. On Wednesday morning, Harpootlian told South Carolina Democrats that Haley "was down in the bunker a la Eva Braun."

... Reached by phone Wednesday, Harpootlian told CNN he isn't backing down.

"Hell no. What am I apologizing for?," he said....

Harpootlian, thankfully, is out the door -- his term as chairman ended yesterday, and he's been replaced by Jaime Harrison, who's now the first African-American party chair in the state's history.

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. Dick.