Sanford, some guy, Graham

South Carolina sure seems to have some very odd politicians. Not that other states don’t, mind you, but South Carolina’s have been winning awards for weirdness lately.

I’m sure you remember Gov. Mark “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” Sanford. Who could forget? And then there’s Miss Graham, John McCain’s BFF in the Senate.

Graham, perhaps you recall, is the fella who told Judge Sonia Sotomayor that she’d be confirmed to the Supreme Court unless she had “a complete meltdown.” Since we all know that it was Alabama’s Jeff Sessions who had the complete meltdown, I suppose it’s safe to say that Sotomayor will be the next Supreme Court justice.

Of course, Graham was all about the infamous wise Latina quote, noting that if he’s said anything like that, he’d be out of a job. Nobody is gonna confuse you for a wise Latina, Lindsey. Stop worrying.

Graham also spent a fair amount of time worrying about the anonymous comments of trial lawyers appearing before Sotomayor for the first time, many of whom lost their cases, that the judge didn’t have a judicial temperament. Sotomayor explained that she does, indeed, ask tough questions of the lawyers who appear before her, but that she does it evenly to both sides of the case, and that the attorneys who regularly appear before her don’t tend to leave anonymous comments. Lindsey really shoulda just come out and said she’s a bitch. That woulda been more honest.

And that’s the way a lot of men view tough, powerful, successful women. Lindsey should know, since he’s lacking in three of those four attributes. OK, all four, really.

DeMint, some blonde, Darth Cheney

But never mind Sanford and Graham. My all time favorite South Carolina whacko is Lindsey’s fellow senator, Jim Demented. When last we left Jim, he was musing “that Republicans are starting to get the message of the last two elections — that the American people don’t want a lukewarm agenda. They don’t want a liberal light agenda.”

Duh, we said at the time. Except Jim’s message was the wrong one. He seemed to have forgotten that Barack Obama, the guy his side painted as the Most Liberal Man Ever To Walk the Face of the Earth, had actually won the election.

Jim also wasn’t satisfied with Little Bobby Jindal’s “response” to Obama’s state of the nation (Who was? I mean, besides the Ayatollah Limbaugh?) and so he issued his own, a rambling YouTube submission that said something about how all we need is a little more freedom and everything will work out all right. Freedom, he said, has always worked in the past, and it will this time, if we’ll just let it.

But now, Jimbo has decided he is going to “break” Barack Obama, turning health care into the president’s “Waterloo.” He’s still on the freedom kick too, and also mixing his metaphors like a martini.

“This health care issue Is D-Day for freedom in America,” he said on a conference call with tea-baggers, adding that he could “almost guarantee you this thing won’t pass before August, and if we can hold it back until we go home for a month’s break in August.”

No cooperation from this guy, nosirree. Just following the Ayatollah’s orders, Obama must fail.

Anyway, DeMint said that during the August recess, his Republican colleagues planned to go home and scare the American people to death with as many lies and half truths as they could muster up about Obama’s plan so that they’d all be calling Congress, and the Congresscritters would be “scared to vote against the American people.”

OK, he didn’t say he was gonna lie or tell half-truths, but he is. For example, on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show — where DeMint is a regular guest — the market research firm founder with an MBA from Clemson discussed how the Obama administration is socialist, just like Hitler’s Nazis.

Think about it for a minute. The Nazis — the National Socialists — weren’t really socialists, see. They were fascists. BIGGGGGG difference. The real socialists in Germany, the Social Democrats, OPPOOOSSSEEDD Hitler and the Nazis, something that apparently failed to capture DeMint’s attention. That’s probably not very surprising, as he was on Liddy’s show — Liddy the Watergate burglar who has been urging people to resist the federal government when its agents come to take their guns by aiming for the agents’ heads, since they’ll be wearing bullet proof vests. Adolph Hitler, by the way, was a young Liddy’s political hero. He’s since repudiated Hitler’s tactics, but says he still “must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm” when he hears the national anthem.

But enough about Liddy. Mr. Market Research Firm apparently doesn’t understand the difference between Nazis and socialists, but hey, it’s really all about scaring people isn’t it? What’s scarier, Hitler fascists or social Democrats who opposed Hitler and tried to help the poor? And the people he’s talkin to, they’ll never know he’s fudging the facts. Hell, he might not even know he’s fudging the facts.

But for the record, here’s the difference, according to Matthew Iglesias:

Social Democrats stand for a generous welfare state and active labor market policies. Nazis try to conquer the world and send people to the gas chamber.

Pretty clear, I’d say.

But maybe not in South Carolina, a place where it’s illegal to keep horses in bathtubs and is a capital offense to inadvertently kill someone while committing suicide. And where Strom Thurmond was a senator for nearly 50 years.