When I saw a press release announcing that Alan Keyes was going to be in South Carolina campaigning for a woman named Christina Jeffrey who is running Congress, my first thought was “wow, she must be crazy.”
After all, no sane candidate would ever seek the assistance of someone like Keyes and expect to win, so I did a little research to try and found out a little about her on her website:
In these difficult economic times, the citizens in the Up-state of South Carolina deserve better representation in Congress. Christina Jeffrey, with a PhD. in Political Science and a college professor, is a person who has built her life based upon Conservative Principles.
Christina has worked in Germany and Turkey, and understands the international problems we are confronted with today. Christina has been a college professor for many years. She has been a tenured Associate Professor of Political Science at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, and the Congressional Historian for the 104th Congress of the United States. She currently teaches Foundations of American Government at Wofford College.
What I also found out was that her claim to have been the “Congressional Historian for the 104th Congress of the United States” leaves out a few key pieces of information … like the fact that she held the job for less than two weeks before she was fired by Newt Gingrich:
Fired by Speaker Newt Gingrich as House historian because she complained Nazi views weren’t represented in a Holocaust course, Christina Jeffrey said Tuesday that allegations against her “are slanderous and outrageous.”
In a statement the morning after her firing, Jeffrey, who was hired less than a week ago, also said she was “fired in the press.”
Reporters, who received materials from Democratic sources, began making inquiries to Gingrich’s office after learning of Jeffrey’s review of the Holocaust course in 1986.
House Democrats quickly pounced on her eight-year-old review, one saying it bordered on Holocaust revision.
…
Jeffrey, hired at $85,000 a year, headed a panel that reviewed the Holocaust course for the Republican-run U.S. Department of Education. The panel recommended against a federal grant for the course and the department — insisting the decision was its own — declined funding in 1986 and again the next two years.
Concluding her remarks on “Facing History and Ourselves” a course designed for eighth and ninth graders, Jeffrey wrote: “The program gives no evidence of balance or objectivity. The Nazi point of view, however unpopular, is still a point of view and is not presented, nor is that of the Ku Klux Klan.”
While Jeffrey insisted at the time and continues to insist that her remarks were taken wildly out of context, this does at least shed some light on just what sort of political candidate openly welcome the support of someone like Keyes.
