Raging Progressive Bigotry

Public Secrets

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the worst reactionary bigots I’ve ever met have all been on the Left. 

I’d never heard of Michael Tomasky before untill my feed reader was suddenly full of commentary about his anti-South screed at The Daily Beast.  Apparently the recent disaster the Democrats suffered in the midterm elections set him to boiling, and Mary Landrieu’s defeat over the weekend in the Louisiana runoff blew the lid off:

"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."

“They’re such nice people, but I really hate their guts!”

Mikey then goes on to say there are some parts of the South the Democrats really do need, but for the rest he wishes secession had succeeded, because they just aren’t real Americans down there.

Yeesh. Look, Mike.  I know the election was hard on you. From Texas to the Atlantic, there is now only two Democratic statewide officeholder in the Old Confederacy. Landrieu lost a seat the Democrats held since I think the 1870s.

I get it.  This is tough on you. It can’t be easy being rejected when you’re so cock-sure of your own side’s intellectual and moral superiority. I only hope you didn’t smash the keyboard while writing your tirade.  I’d like to think the election results would have lead you and your fellow progressives to reflect on why you lost so badly in that part of the country. What policies lead to your rejection? What was it about what the Democrats were offering that made so many say “no, thanks?”

But, no.  You and so many like you in the progressive commentariat already know the answer, no self-reflection needed:  “They’re all a bunch of mouth-breathing Jesus-fetishists who just don’t know what’s good for them, so we should just tell them to go to Hell!”

If that’s the case, Mike, how do you explain Colorado and Iowa, where Republicans won the Senate races?  Or New Mexico and Nevada, where Latino Republicans won reelection for governor?  Or deep-Blue Maryland and Massachusetts, where Republicans also won the elections for governor?  I’ve never been to Maryland, but I know it ain’t a “Free-Market Jesus Paradise.”

You know, when Reconstruction ended and the Democrats returned to power, using Jim Crow laws and their allied terrorist groups, such as the KKK, to make sure Blacks could never vote Republican — or often not at all. There’s a good book on all that and more.

If you want to find the real bigot suffering from “choleric resentment,” Mike, try looking in the mirror.