The big news in state politics yesterday, which seemed to break while we were enjoying a truly badass taco salad at Delaney’s, was that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is going to be coming down here to run around the state for Rep. Nikki Haley‘s gubernatorial campaign. It struck us as yet another in a long line of incredibly stupid political moves on her part, going back to the beginning of the campaign when her fundraising operation started off like an 18-year-old developed the plan. Actually, that probably happened.

Former The State editorial page editor Brad Warthen, who continues to show that he’s more intelligent than he let on when he was with the paper, opined, “Man-oh-man … like we didn’t have enough Crazy in South Carolina, we need to start importing it….” Indeed. There has been a tradition among some on the right since the early ’50s of an aggressive anti-intellectualism. As in, there was something good about being ignorant or uneducated. It came out among supporters of Dwight Eisenhower (though as the man who commanded allied forces in Europe and was a university president before he took the White House, was probably on the same level or more intelligent than Adlai Stevenson), it came out with certain statements by Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush practically raised being an ignorant beneficiary of nepotism to an art form. Thankfully, George H.W. Bush, nominees Bob Dole and John McCain, and even Gerald Ford (despite jokes about his football playing days at Michigan) showed that you can be a conservative leader, smart, and not have to apologize for it.

We’d include “not pandering to the yokels” to that, but it’s exactly what McCain did, unfortunately. He eschewed his political instincts and better ideas and let his handlers, well, handle him. Instead of sticking to his guns and picking U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman or someone else (eh, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham?), he let his people foist Palin on him. And he could have won. Bush the Elder succeeded with Dan Quayle. But, he had the benefit of running against Michael Dukakis. Bush could have had a serving of mutton as his vice presidential nominee and still taken that race handily. And a serving of mutton probably would have been able to spell potato. McCain could have won, but he had the unfortunate business of running against Barack Obama, who even gaffe-prone Joe Biden couldn’t bring down.

But elevating being unintelligent, or anti-intellectual, into some sort of virtue, doesn’t help our state, or our nation, and neither does the woman who represents the modern embodiment of that movement. Congrats to Haley’s campaign. Now she’s definitely locked down that 15 percent showing she’ll have on primary day.

And that’s not the end of it, as it also went out that former First Lady Jenny Sanford is campaigning for Haley. In a tweet, we likened Sanford to Lady Macbeth. OK, so she’s not advocating for the deaths of certain powerful state leaders, but, as Warthen again wrote, “She did more than anyone else to bring us the disaster that is GOVERNOR Mark Sanford, and she wants to do it again, which is why she’s pulling out the stops for Nikki. And South Carolina just can’t handle any more of that.”

So, are the voters of our state going to sit idly by while their state government is hijacked, again, by extremists, or are we actually going to put competent people in office this time?

Perhaps the only issue that gets under our skin is how some flaming douchebags want to make money off middle class college students. These are kids who have good enough grades to get into college, but whose parents don’t have the money to pay for school, nor the grades to have a full ride. President George W. Bush, who is one of the dumbest motherfuckers ever to achieve national elective success, managed to get into and graduate from Yale because he had the right last name. Most of us aren’t so lucky.

Hence there are reasons why there’s a portion of the electorate who have paid attention to what has happened over the past few years of Congressional misleadership who are a little pissed off at how elected leaders have sold out to banks and financial service companies. Seriously, why would you fuck over middle class students who are putting debt on their backs to get a college degree unless you were totally bought off? Some elected officials didn’t seem to give a damn.

While the Democratic majority in the Congress has been lame, for the most part, since taking over the legislative branch, it has done a decent job of helping out college students to where they can get a degree without selling their souls to the company store.

Student loan giant Sallie Mae has already spent more than a quarter million dollars (that we know of) on newspaper ads trying to stop the bill, along with at least $3 million on lobbying. Another anti-student aid group hired the PR firm Qorvis Communications that offered to pay “experts” to write op-eds and appear on TV to criticize an investigation into AIG a few years ago.

That’s fucked up. We know people who work at Qorvis, and we thought, while the company makes bank and is a major PR and public affairs firm in DC, it wouldn’t be this evil. Guess not. If you give enough money to those guys, they’ll try to make sure students who are putting tens of thousands of dollars on their back should get nailed to the wall. After all, if you’re a wealthy financial services organization, you should be allowed to prey on kids in their early 20s.

It’s beyond time for college finance to get fixed. Unfortunately, banks have more money than God to fuck over kids so that they can bring in more cash.

Politics are full of juxtapositions that would make a normal person do a double-take. Such is the issue with Sen. John McCain hosting a fundraiser for Atty. Gen. Henry McMaster.

The event, which took place in Washington at The Monocle on Tuesday, places McCain at odds with his own beliefs, or so it seems. Contributions, asked to be at least $500, were to be given to the McMaster for Attorney General account. Even the campaign’s online mouthpiece makes the joke that the checks should be signed to McMaster for Governor.

But, there’s the rub. McMaster is raising money for his gubernatorial campaign without having to announce, which is a bit of a campaign finance shell game, something one would think that McCain, the champion of campaign finance reform, would denounce. According to a conversation Wolfe Reports had with the State Ethics Commission a while back, the attorney general can transfer his current account to a gubernatorial account without a problem.

There is also the interesting fact that the unannounced McMaster campaign has been hammering Rep. Gresham Barrett on his vote on last year’s stimulus bill, when if McCain hadn’t gone back to DC to whip for President George W. Bush and his plan, the bill would have been killed by Congressional conservatives.

So, it appears that either one man or the other is compromising his beliefs to bring in some large DC dollars. And, that will not play well when the gubernatorial campaign begins in earnest, which looks like it will be soon.

As of the last disclosure report, McMaster has $778,426.43 in his campaign account.