“…The Confederate flag and this clownish array of gutless
presidential candidates are not the important issues here. What matters
is the cost our nation continues to pay for its failure to regulate guns
and to achieve racial justice. If it took the slaughter of nine people
in a church to get a single state to remove a flag that is, after all,
only a historic symbol of racism, you have to wonder how many people
will have to die to end the implementation of racism, including the
homicidal police practices and restrictive new voting laws that have
proliferated in the Obama era. The notion that pulling down a flag in
South Carolina somehow amounts to a major breakthrough in American
racial progress is absurd. That flag never should have been flown at the
Capitol in the first place. It was first installed there in 1961 as an
implicit act of resistance to the growing civil-rights movement. It
should have been trashed long before a mass murder belatedly sealed its
demise.”
—Frank Rich