Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Maybe Lincoln Should Have Let The South Go When They Wanted To-- Maybe We'll Get Another Chance

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Shelby may not like unions or Europe but he LOVES K Street

Last night Daily Kos released some interesting polling that shows that every demographic in terms of gender, age, politics, race and region has favorable opinions of iconic progressive symbols San Francisco, Europe, France and New York City-- except one: Southerners. They don't have a favorable opinion of any of the categories. It's a shame Kos didn't ask Americans whether or not they have a favorable opinion of the old Confederacy.

Last November Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain's 173. Of the 173 electoral votes McCain got, 106 came from former slave-holding states still out of synch with the U.S. Take Europe, for example. 63% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Europe-- including 58% of Republicans nationwide. But in the South the approval rating for Europe is only 45%. (48% have an unfavorable opinion and 7% either have no opinion or never heard of it.) Something tells me the South's opinion of Europe is about to tumble further as the Old World takes up some unfinished business the U.S. is too chickenshit to confront: the Bush Regime's crimes against humanity. This morning Spain announced they are going to indict former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates (Jay Bybee, John Yoo, William J. Haynes II, David Addington, and Douglas Feith) over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo.

A member of Congress once told me how Southern Republican yahoos would brag to him about how they've never been outside of the U.S. and how they don't even own passports-- as though that's some kind of a redneck badge of courage. But aside from disapproving of Europe, boycotting French goods and not visiting Spain, your typical Alabaman may soon be avoiding Michigan as well. One of the Senate's most corrupt members, Richard Shelby (R-AL) has set about destroying the American auto industry-- it's really just a matter of hating labor unions and loving the big bucks he scoops up from foreign-based auto companies that love Alabama's friendliness to bidness-- low wages and low taxes and no accountability to consumers, workers or the environment. Yesterday a Michigan car dealership decided to turn the tables on Shelby a bit and his bloated ugly mug is all over that state's TV stations in a commercial demonizing him with his own words.
"We're wasting our time to try to keep them alive," Shelby says of GM and Chrysler. "We're wasting our time and taxpayers' money," he intones in another clip, adding: "It won't matter, we're postponing…the inevitable."

A mock interviewer then asks the dealership owners, "How that makes you feel?"

"Angry," Paul Sanford answers. "And I'll tell you, I'm tired of their hypocrisy. American workers built this country, and American workers built the best product in the world. And we sell them right here: Chevrolet and Cadillac."

In another ad, the interviewer sets up a stark regional conflict: "Some of these southern senators have stated that the American car companies don't even deserve to be in business anymore. What's your response to that?"

"They say our autoworkers are overpaid and under-skilled?" Paul Sanford answers. "They ought to look in the mirror."

Meanwhile this anti-America crowd of GOP dead-enders is all excited about tomorrow's teabaggery. And, Glenn Beck is calling for seccesion.

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5 Comments:

At 10:15 AM, Anonymous me said...

"Maybe Lincoln Should Have Let The South Go"Keeping the South was a bloody and expensive disaster. Perhaps it would have been different had Lincoln lived and Reconstruction continued. Or perhaps not. It's a rotten snakepit of backward, unintelligent religious yokels after all.

My question is, how did the South get to be such a retarded shithole in the first place? Does slavery rot the mind of both slaveholder and slave? Was it generations of endless agricultural drudgery that did it? Was it originally populated by a family with a genetic defect? Is there something in the water?

Whatever it is, perhaps the same thing has infected other corners of Earth, including the entire Middle East. So maybe it really is genetic.

http://www.fuckthesouth.com

 
At 12:52 PM, Blogger Will said...

me, When I saw this post I was thinking of the same site ;)

 
At 1:08 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not everyone in the South is a moron. I live in a college town that votes progressives into office and overwhelmingly went for Obama. The backward, Christian rednecks are in the outback and they are easily motivated to vote against their own interests. Why? Race. The good ole Republican white boys know that all they have to do is talk about "those people." The Republicans know a wedge issue and can milk it for all it's worth.

The Republican state legislature has cut education so much that we are graduating idiots just like them. The reason that they keep getting re-elected is that they have purposefully kept the electorate as ignorant as they are.

Bah.

 
At 3:15 PM, Blogger DownWithTyranny said...

There are pockets of solidly blue areas all over the South, like Savannah, Atlanta and Athens in Georgia and Austin, Houston and San Antonio in Texas. Even former lunatic fringe bastions like Orlando, Florida and Cabarrus County, NC and the Southside in Virginia elected progressive Democrats last year. The Solid South cracked in 2008, with Florida, North Carolina and Virginia all voting for Obama-- and with a closer call than anyone could have predicted in Georgia. And everywhere in even the worst and most backward parts of the South, there are decent, educated, progressive, open-minded people. We'll have to do a swap and let them all move up to western Pennsylvania and California's Inland Empire and let the nuts there move down south.

 
At 3:44 PM, Blogger TyrantsTallTooMuch said...

I started to think a few years ago that maybe it is time to just let the south go. If the civil war was primarily about slavery, we won. But they never have liked the real America and have been trying to drag us down to their level from the very beginnings of our history. I think we would all be better off if we just let them go. They could build as many walls as high as they can afford, create their own state religion and make what ever crazy laws they want. Only three conditions should apply. No slavery, No nukes, and leave the rest of us alone. The Union would lose some of its more radical population too migration to the new confederacy, like half of Idaho for example, but we would more then make up the loss with the good people fleeing the weirdness to come join the Union, like half of Atalanta or Charlotte for example.
I do not believe the country ever truly was unified and it never will be. Let's just ask them nicely to go away and I think that they happily would do just that.

 

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