SCENE: Avery LIBRELLE is waiting at the light rail station on University Avenue.
Seeing Mitch Berg driving past, LIBRELLE leaps and, incredibly, sails through BERG’s passenger side window and lands sitting upright in BERG’s passenger seat.
BERG: What the…
LIBRELLE: Hahahahahahahahaha, Merg! You and your conservative teabagger friends “won” the South! Now, you can keep it?
BERG: Um, right. Mary Landrieu lost, leaving not a single Democratic Senator, Governor or Democrat-controlled Legislative chamber in the entire old Confederacy.
LIBRELLE: Yeah! You got all the racists! The journey you started in 1968, when you inherited all the racists with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, is complete! You guys got the KKK vote!
BERG: You’re still babbling about the so-called “Southern Strategy?”
LIBRELLE: Yes! The racists, upset about the Civil Rights Act, all voted GOP!
BERG: OK – let’s accept for a moment purely for sake of argument that the South is more “racist” than the rest of the country – which is deeply debatable, but again, it’s for argument’s sake – and that people vote first and foremost over racial issues.
LIBRELLE: Yep. Absolutely!
BERG: OK. So the South voted for Nixon – but then, so did Vermont and California and, in 1972, Michigan, New York State, and even ultraliberal Minnesota. So they’re all racists, too, right?
LIBRELLE: The South were voting their consciences, though!
BERG: Were they indeed?
LIBRELLE: Even though these rhetorical questions of your always end up with me falling into a trap that makes me look stupid and uninformed, I’ll say “hell yeah!”
BERG: OK – so the Democrats controlled every single southern Congressional delegation until 1994. And the GOP didn’t win a majority of southern Governor’s offices, to say nothing of state legislatures, until well into the 2000s.
By the way – the Klan hasn’t been a factor in Southern Politics since the sixties, maybe the seventies at the very latest. So it would be more realistic to say that Republicans oversaw the extinction of mainstream racism in the Deep South.
(BERG’s car pulls up to stoplight. LIBRELLE steps out, walks between traffic to nearest train station).
BERG: Avery? Avery?
You’ve got the Lena Dunham fake rape accusation, ditto UVA frat house antics, ‘gentle giant’ Mike Brown who was shot while attacking a cop, and the stupid ‘southern strategy’ hoax. The ‘southern strategy’ thing is an article of faith with these guys. It pits the two most hated people against the American Boomer Left — Nixon and Southern white males, with the Left on the side of the angels.
You don’t have to be a genius to see that the truth is the the Left abandoned the white working class over issues of social class. The guys in the New Left that emerged in the 1960s were not about to take orders from a bunch of hillbillies. Blacks and Hispanics are much more pliable.
People on the Left like to say bizarre things about the modern GOP is radical. You know what? Nixon could never get the Republican nomination these days. He could run as a Democrat, though, no problem.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” C. S. Lewis
I received this today from by friend Bill … he’s quite well read so I assume the attribution is correct …
Mitch:
How do you define “Old Confederacy” Virginia was a member of the confederacy, but only after Fort Sumpter was attacked. Technically Virginia a member of the confederacy has a democrat governor and two democrat Senators.
Walter Hanson
Minneapolis, MN
This Tomasky screed has been making the rounds:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/08/dems-it-s-time-to-dump-dixie.html
The Left is all about hate these days, isn’t it? Tomasky is considered a partisan, but mainstream journo. I don’t believe that any conservatives fit into that category.
It is difficult to imagine any conservative pundit attacking their fellow Americans with undisguised contempt.
Tomasky and his friends want very, very much to tell you what to do. What to spend your money on, what programming you should watch on television, how many and what type of vehicles should be in your garage, what kind of school your kids go to, and what your church should teach you.
This isn’t about a tyranny exercised for your own good, this is about creeps like Tomasky wanting to look at the world and see nothing that does not meet their approval. If Orwell taught us anything, it is that the goal of the totalitarian is only power. Any limitation to that power, any guiding principle, diminishes that power. By it’s nature totalitarianism is arbitrary. In 2008 the Democrats elected a man whose public position was that marriage can only be between one man and one woman. In 2014 the Democrats insist that believing that marriage can only be between one man and one woman makes you unfit to hold public office.
Walter is correct. The Old Dominion was a prominent member of the CSA, but with it’s proximity to DC the Northeast tip around Alexandria, Arlington, Annandale has become a fetid, and highly populated reservoir of Yankee leftists…to the eternal shame of the rest of the state.
That’s why the “Solid South” includes Southern states from the Carolinas to Texas.
PW, the Tomasky screed is the transcript of the tear stains he left on his pillow. It is one of the most satisfying sources of schadenfreude your gonna find anywhere in the interwebs.