Dear Southerners: We Hate You. We Really Hate You

Boo hoo

I realize life is too short to read everything the Crazy Left disgorges from its white-hot core of resentful hatred, but Michael Tomasky’s latest rant at the Daily Beast is just too good to miss, especially if you are a) sane, b) an American and c) live in the Deep South. Reacting to Mary Landrieu’s crushing defeat in the Louisiana senate runoff on Saturday, Tomasky rushed to his computer and penned this instant classic:

I don’t remember a much sadder sight in domestic politics in my lifetime than that of Mary Landrieu schlumpfing around these last few weeks trying to save a Senate seat that was obviously lost. It was like witnessing the last two weeks of the life of a blind and toothless dog you knew the vet was just itching to destroy. I know that sounds mean about her, but I don’t intend it that way. She did what she could and had, as far as I know, an honorable career. I do, however, intend it to sound mean about the reactionary, prejudice-infested place she comes from. A toothless dog is a figure of sympathy. A vet who takes pleasure in gassing it is not.

And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)

With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.

And there you have it, the Narrative in full cry. Southerners — white Southerners — are crazed racists (for voting against a white candidate), nutcase Christians (for following their faith) and stump-toothed hillbillies who shop at Wal-Mart (for following their economic self-interest). In other words, they’re not a bit like Northeastern or West Coast liberals, and whose idea was it to give them the vote, anyway? Tomasky concludes his crying jag like this:

It’s lost. It’s gone. A different country. And maybe someday it really should be. I’ll save that for another column. Until that day comes, the Democratic Party shouldn’t bother trying. If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own, which is what Southerners always say they want anyway.

It may be worth pointing out to Tomasky that there is not a single Republican senator from the West Coast at the moment, and only two from New England . So what? Regional divisions are nothing new in these United States.

For a rational antidote to this lunacy, please see Kevin Williamson’s splendid analysis of the politics (both racial and non-racial) of the once-again Solid South’s turn from the Democrats to the GOP, which has nothing to do with race and everything to do with, well, patriotism for the country as founded, not for the socialist paradise — excuse me, a collective of “advanced and innovative states” — Leftists wish it to be. A sample:

The Democrats, being intellectually dishonest, cling to the myth that the two parties “switched places” on racial issues in the 1960s, that Senator Landrieu’s troubles are a consequence of that reversal, and that the general Southern realignment is evidence that the Republican party is a comfortable home for bigots, Confederate revanchists, and others with dodgy racial politics.

Read the whole thing and compare. The Left is losing its mind, and it is a wonderful thing to behold.

[Cross-posted from the PJ Tatler]