South Carolina lawmaker Rep. Christopher Corley (R- Aiken) decided to take on the daunting challenge of topping Las Vegas Assemblywoman Michele Fiore’s entry in the “Most Tasteless Christmas Card That Proves Its Republican Politician Author Is An Idiot” competition. You saw that one, right? It  features Fiore, her husband, her adult daughters, their husbands and one of her grandchildren…

…holding guns, with a useful note in the corner denoting which models the are each planning on using to bag a reindeer and Santa too, I suppose, since there are ten Fiores.

There is a lot wrong with the card, beginning with the fact that, as the Bible says, there is a time for every season, and regardless of one’s faith or lack of it, this season is and has always been about peace and love, not shooting things. Fiore uses children as props for political grandstanding, which is ugly and an abuse of power.

The card also says “I am an idiot,” but that arguably is a good thing, since as many people should know as possible. (Either her constituents are idiots, or they like them for some reason.) Still, the silly card is relatively harmless, except that Fiore embarrasses her party and gives anti-gun hysterics another excuse to portray all those who resist the obvious progressive goal of banning guns entirely as lunatics.

Corley’s card, however, is much, much worse.

For one thing, there is nothing related to Christmas about the card; it’s a political mailing using Christmas as an excuse to darken mailboxes. ( He only sent it to his GOP colleagues.) More crucially, the prominent position of the Confederate flag on the card, flying over the South Carolina Capitol, combined with the words, “May your Christmas be filled with memories of a happier time,” could easily be taken as a nostalgic wish for those wonderful days, gone with the wind,  when happy, singing slaves picked cotton in the fields, the federal government didn’t interfere with the South’s peculiar institution, and all was right with the world.

Since Corley, like anyone who would send such a card, is an idiot (res ipsa loquitur), it is impossible to know whether this message was accidental (the rest of the message explains that the happier time was when “South Carolina’s leaders possessed morals, convictions and the principles to stand for what is right.”) or intentional. Either way, the card is at very least an insult to African-Americans, and the whole message is as idiotic as the implied one. How anyone could think that a state continuing to fly the rebel flag at this point in the nation’s history, especially with the disastrous racial divisions raging now, could be “the right thing” defies understanding or defense.

That the individual believing this is an idiot is no defense. Idiots are incompetent. Idiots should not be elected  officials. We have too many of them serving already.