So who is this Alvin Greene character, and why is he an actual nominee for a U.A. Senate seat from South Carolina?
It's still a mystery. But he will run against Jim DeMint this year. That noise you hear is the sound of Democrats circling the wagons.
Understand, Demint is probably near the top of the Dems' take-em-out list. DeMint shows strong conservative chops, and he's become a favorite of red-state folks everywhere. He was considered vulnerable until last week's primary.
Greene won the primary with slightly less than 60 percent of the vote, beating out former judge and legislator Vic Rawl in the process. No one is real sure why; Greene has no money. He has no name recognition. He has no job. He's a former military guy who was "involuntarily discharged" from the service six months before his hitch was to end. He faces obscenity charges; something about allegedly showing pornographic pictures to a college girl. None of this stuff came out until after the primaries.
And if you listen to this guy talk, well, you know he's out of his league. He can barely string a coherent thought together. First few sound clips I heard of him, I thought, man, that's some pretty strong medication he's on.
In the days following the primary election, Rob Groce of The Examiner visited Greene at his Manning home in an attempt to get a handle on this guy. Groce, a rock-solid Democrat who was chosen as national delegate from his home district in 2008, came away with an uneasy feeling:
That eerie feeling of being stuck in a still shot from “The Last Picture Show” came upon me once again as I turned my head to look around.When I later saw the photos, I noticed that Greene’s appearance and expression seems unchanged in each one. Frozen. Blank. Distant.Lost.Before I walked into Greene’s home, I was still incensed from the dreadful results of the primary election.When I walked out, though, I felt despondent, and not because of the election results that somehow got him the nomination. I felt so sad because it was obvious that Greene … well … isn’t quite all there. In my layman’s opinion, and which might not mean much to some, I think there may be some medical reason.And I don’t think he was always like this, either. After all, media confirmed that he majored in political science at the Univ. of South Carolina, graduating in 2000. In the military, he worked in intelligence. But he wound being involuntarily discharged from service six months early, and while in a much lower role than his first field of military intelligence.That could indicate that something happened to Greene. An injury, maybe? A medical problem that’s affected his behavior and response? PTSD? I’ll never know the cause, I guess. And don’t really care to know, since it’s none of my business to begin with.As a voting citizen of South Carolina, though, the elections here are my business. And Alvin Greene is clearly unable to hold office ...
I don't think this Greene drama is over yet. Rawl is challenging the results, and filed a formal protest earlier this week. The national media is laughing -- again -- at South Carolina, and voters in the Palmetto State are just plain bumfuddled.
Although he is the party's nominee, Greene's probably not going to count on getting a lot of support from there. According to House Majority Whip James Clyburn:
No, I don't see myself getting behind Mr. Greene. The fact of the matter is, of course, I never said he was a Republican plant. I said he was someone's plant. And it turned up after the elections, we found out, as I said earlier, something untoward was going on ... now all of a sudden, we see that Congressman Joe Wilson -- his campaign manager, was, in fact, managing the campaign of my primary opponent. I saw the patterns in this. I know a Democratic pattern, I know a Republican pattern, and I saw in the Democratic primary elephant dung all over the place ... and so I knew something was wrong in that primary. And this result tells us that. People intentionally circumvented the law, the rules and regulations, did not file any disclosures, did not file any of their campaign finances, yet they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars running this campaign and broke every law.
Don't you just love politics? Isn't it better than daytime TV?
###
