The Curious Case of Alvin Greene

[useful idiot]

I'd vote for him

[useful idiot]

I hadn't realized or heard before that he was "the first major-party African-American U.S. Senate candidate in South Carolina since Reconstruction". I went on the wikipedia page for the election and nearly died laughing when I saw that.

[useful idiot]

And to think that the state was Black majority for much of that period...

It's actually quite tragic obviously, but (and this is a question to anyone) why hasn't there been a black Democrat on the ballot for senate or governor? You'd think since the 70's that it would have happened since so many of the Democratic voters there are black. I mean, sure the good old boy network was probably still in place in the 70s and 80s, but if blacks were voting in primaries then why hasn't this happened in the last 20 years?

Virginia elected a black governor in 1990. Harvey Gantt was the Dem nominee for senate twice in North Carolina in 90 and 96. Andrew Young was almost the senate candidate in Georgia in 1990, and Denise Majette was in 2004. There was a black nominee for gov in Mississippi in 2000, Troy Brown. We all know about Harold Ford. The senate nominee in Alabama in 08 was a black woman. There were two black gubernatorial nominees in Louisiana in the 90s. Am I missing any?

[useful idiot]

I think we're really missing something here when we call him crazy or slow. He did graduate from the University of South Carolina, which stereotypes aside, is a really good school. After that he was an intelligence officer in the military. I don't know for a fact he was an officer, he might have been enlisted, but every site is saying he was in the Air Force and Army for 13 years, and if he graduated college in 2000 I assume he did ROTC. Plus the circumstances would lead me to believe that he was an officer; usually the Army doesn't just give involuntarily honorable discharges to slow people that are enlisted.

So how did this guy accomplish those two things? The mystery to me is squaring the two facts that we have: a) he graduated from college and was intel in the Air Force and Army, and b) he's obviously got something wrong with him.

If he was in the Army for the entire last decade he had to have been to Iraq, he just had to. If not then he would have been in Afghanistan at least. Why have we only heard about him serving in Korea? Is this a case of PTSD that the Army just sort of washed it's hands of? Hopefully we here more about this because the media has been a failure in reporting on it so far.

[useful idiot]

I'm more bothered by the fact that you can be denied a public defender if you aren't poor enough.

I've never heard of a law like that in any other state before.....is South Carolina unique?

It's like that in a lot of states, including Virginia.

[useful idiot]

I meant senate. It was Troy Brown, he ran against Lott in 2000, and got something like 31% of the vote.