In case you haven't noticed, a fundamental axiom of modern American politics has been altered in recent weeks.
Cool! So now what?
For four decades, it's been the Democrats who've had a Southern problem. Couldn't get any votes for their presidential candidates there; couldn't elect any senators, then any House members, then any dogcatchers. They still can't, but the Southern problem, it turns out, is really the Republicans'. They've become too Southern -- too suffused with the knee-jerk militaristic, anti-scientific, dogmatically religious, and culturally, sexually and racially phobic attitudes of Dixie -- to win friends and influence elections outside the South. Worse yet, they became more Southern still on Election Day last month, when the Democrats decimated the GOP in the North and West. Twenty-seven of the Democrats' 30 House pickups came outside the South.
But he doesn't stop.
The Democrats won control of five state legislatures, all outside the South, and took more than 300 state legislative seats away from Republicans, 93 percent of them outside the South. As for the new Senate Republican caucus that chose Mississippi's Lott over Tennessee's Lamar Alexander to be deputy to Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, 17 of its 49 members come from the Confederacy proper, with another three from the old border states of Kentucky and Missouri, and two more from Oklahoma, which is Southern but with more dust. In all, 45 percent of Republican senators come from the Greater South.
The Confederacy proper. Now who's reliving the war? And who's manning the brigades?
Harold is a very smart guy. I haven't followed the ongoing Schaller thread all that closely because it just makes me want to run up the Confederate flag, slow roast a pig, wipe my mouth on my sleeve and belch real loud.
I did read somewhere that it's supposed to be a strategic statement, not a moral statement. But I don't take peace-loving, intellectual, atheist, multi-culti, promiscuous, affirmative action loving attitude as a strategic statement either.