Sunday Morning Comin' Down

There were all the usual kinds of depressingly indefatigable madness on display at the Mouse Circus today, but from "The Blaze" to "News Busters" to "The Daily Caller" to the zombie remnants of the Brietbart slug farm, nothing caused more intertoob inflammation than Andrew Sullivan's suggestion that -- OMG!OMG!OMG! -- there is nearly a 100% overlap between the Confederacy and the Red States:

SULLIVAN: If Virginia and Florida go back to the Republicans, it's the confederacy, entirely. You put the map of the Civil War over this electoral map, you've got the Civil War. 

IFILL: I don't know. 

STEPHANOPOULOS: You're rolling your eyes, George [Will]. 

SULLIVAN: Am I wrong?

Which would have been much more impressive if the Liberal blogosphere hadn't already been all over this fact eight years ago.  

From "Sensory Overload",  November 4, 2004:

Free States vs. Slave States ~

Oh How Far We've Come...

My friend Q-T sent this to me ~ sadly, these two maps need no explanation, yet they raise more questions than they answer  (scroll down to see both maps):

In case it's hard to read, on the Pre-Civil War Map, the red areas were slave states and the brown areas were territories open to slavery, while the green areas were free states and territories.  These distinctions eerily correspond to the red states vs. blue states on the 2004 Election Map ~~ i.e., the blue (Kerry) states correspond to the pre-civil-war free states and territories, while the red (Bush) states correspond to what were the slave states and territories.  As one of my co-workers said to me, this might be the most "devastatingly accurate explanation I've seen for what happened on Tuesday."  There's a little more discussion about all this, here. 

... 

So why is this a big deal today, when exactly the same observation was roundly ignored eight years ago when it was common currency in the Liberal world?

Because eight years ago it was Liberals saying it, and Liberals are not merely right most of the time, but are inconveniently right about all the things our corporate owners very much do not want to talk about.  So instead of being invited to share our insights with the wider world via the teevee machine, Liberals instead look forward to lives of pauperized pariah-hood spent pouring words like these into the cold abyss --

The Big Lie

...

And for twenty years – while the mass purveyors of carefully calibrated hate and rage and xenophobia on the Right gathered more and more power and got more and more vulgar and vicious in their rhetoric – what did the Left try to do?

We tried to find common ground. To meet our opponents half-way.

To compromise…with people who sneered at the very idea of working together and said quite openly that compromise was “political date rape”.

While the Emperor of Weaponized Bile, Newt Gingrich, took over the House with a campaign explicitly based on calling Democrats “traitors” at every opportunity, and Limbaugh was being honored as the “Majority Maker” by those House Republicans, we on the Left were still trying to do and be all the nicey-nicey things that Alan Simpson is now all weepy and wistful for.

And it didn’t work. And while we played by Marquis of Queensbury, the orcs laughed in our faces, overran the joint, and bequeathed to us as its apotheosis the worst, most despicable, most incompetent, most Constitution-loathing Administration in American history.

Al Franken and Air America did not arise in a vacuum. The came into being as a desperate, eleventh-hour attempt to fight back against a twenty year multimedia blitz of unremitting, unrebutted Conservative lies and bigotry.

They arose because no one in the Mainstream Media had the guts to take on the GOP Propaganda Machine head-on. Instead, the MSM collaborated, because collaborating in the Big Lie was a much better, safer career move.

Progressive Radio arose because politicians like Alan Simpson were, for twenty years, perfectly content with looking the other way and harvesting the electoral fruits of the poison tree that their Conservative/Christopath/Racist Hate Radio, Hate TeeVee, Hate Satellite, Hate Cable and Hate Publishing so lavishly watered and fertilized.

Because the GOP was never concerned with the destruction of political comity…as long as it was working to their advantage.

As long as all of the screeching Orwellian hellfire was coming from the Right, they never said a fucking word.

But now, finally, after twenty years of unilateral disarmament, now that the Left has at last decided to fight back hard, suddenly old Republican loons like Simpson get all gooey for the glory days of cellulose collars, nickel candy bars, whale-bone corsets, heroic cavalry charges and a politics of gentle, ruffled fisticuffs followed by brandy, cigars and top-shelf hookers.

Suddenly it is “zealots on both sides” that have torn his beloved Temple down.

Well fuck you, Alan Simpson. Fuck you sideways for your bogus hand-wringing and crocodile tears.

And fuck you, George Mitchell, for sitting there with your thumb up your ass and allowing your good, Republican friend to spread this Big Lie unchallenged right under your nose.

-- for having the have the inexcusably bad taste to be right about all the wrong things.

And watching the same guy who was making a living 10 years ago calling Liberals "Fifth Columnists" now burnishing his Serious Pundit resume by going on the teevee machine and reciting recycled Liberal ideas?

Well that's just icing on the fucking cake.