The left is crazy to insult white Southerners as a group

With the rise in grass-roots anger at DC's latest power-grabs and takeovers, whites in general and Southerners in particular have become favorite targets for lefties and their cuddlemates in the corporate media who think any liberal expansion of power is good, and one blessed by Obama is unquestionable.

Well, here's a hard-hitting counterpunch against those attacks, and the source is a bit of a surprise. Michael Lind is a fifth-generation Texan who got swept up in the Neocon madness. He now considers himself "a former Neocon," and is taking a stand in defense of his people. Lind's response to the South-bashers and their scallywag aiders and abettors is worth quoting at length:

In a recent Washington Post column, Kathleen Parker quoted Ohio Sen. George Voinovich's assertion that the Republican Party is "being taken over by Southerners" to suggest that the GOP risks becoming a permanent minority party of the old Confederacy. In itself this is a legitimate point that I and many other critics of Republican conservatism have made for years. However, at Mother Jones, the blogger Kevin Drum used Parker's political argument as an excuse for all-too-typical liberal Southern-bashing. According to Drum: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Southern whites who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Southern white culture is [redacted]. Jim Webb can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Drum did the redacting on his own blog post, explaining he'd blacked out the offending text "on the advice of my frontal lobe."

Drum's creepy bigotry becomes clear when other groups are substituted: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual blacks who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, black culture is [redacted]. Barack Obama can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Or maybe this: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Jews who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Jewish culture is [redacted]. The late Irving Howe can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]."

In her Washington Post essay, Kathleen Parker writes: "Hefty majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West believe Obama was born in the United States. But in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten" -- evidently this is intended to be a strained joke -- "only 47 percent believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren't sure. Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity." Kevin Drum thinks that Parker is too kind and that white Southerners as a group should be thought of as having "seceded from sanity."

Oh, those dumb white Southerners! No other group in American society could possibly believe in preposterous conspiracy theories. Well, maybe one other group, the most reliably Democratic demographic in the whole U.S. electorate. A 2005 study by RAND and Oregon State University showed that a majority of blacks believed that a cure for AIDS was being withheld from the poor...

Read the whole thing. It's more than a hoot, it's a battle cry.