Among the many things for which I am thankful

is the fact that people like Paul Krugman are still up on the barricades, doing battle with all the right demons. As in this column ("Republicans and Race") where he smites the few slivers of Bobo’s career/foundational-ideology that still have a little wiggle in ‘em with a vengeance.

So good on him.

And now that the Shield Wall has been lowered, you certainly don’t need me to smuggle any fragments packed in coffee past the NYT trustees.

I read this piece as I usually do, and delighted that there are still thinking, compassionate humans plying their sturdy craft through wrecks and hulls that litter the Sargasso Sea of modern American journalism.

And then we came to a small parting of the ways.

Krugman was piloting the vessel harmoniously along with passages like this:

…
The centrality of race — and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans — is obvious from voting data.

For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as “humiliating to the South.” Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year’s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.
…

and this

…
Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman’s race, but he didn’t have to.

while we passengers partied snugly below decks, dancing singing lively Liberals Sea Chanties. Until we hit a little white water with this:

…
Why does this history matter now? Because it tells why the vision of a permanent conservative majority, so widely accepted a few years ago, is wrong.

The point is that we have become a more diverse and less racist country over time. The “macaca” incident, in which Senator George Allen’s use of a racial insult led to his election defeat, epitomized the way in which America has changed for the better.
…

Mind you, we were in no danger of us going tits up, Poseidon-fashion, but it was enough for me to slop my excellent Liberal Chardonnay all over the “I Hate America” ball gown batik project I had been working on for the annual George Soros War On Christmas Auction and Bake Sale, so I went topside to inquire.

Now one might fairly ask what in the world is world is wrong with that statement. And I would tell you, flat out, that I think Krugman, being a hopeful man, has drawn a hopeful lesson from the Virginia Senate race of 2006.

But it's the wrong lesson.

Because, for starters, I'd bet real, folding money that George Allen will rise again.

He’ll go into wingnut rehab, hire himself a better publicist, and poop his "reformed" self out the other side; just another recycled, extruded fascist meat product ala Newt Gingrich. And his “transformation” will work because of the nature of the Neo-Confederate South.

Because it was never comprehensively fixed or finished, but like a tail snapped off a gecko lizard, after every defeat is was always left to limp along and regenerate its degeneracy into new, mutant forms.

It was allowed to keep its traitor flag – our very own American Swastika – and fly it without fear of reprisal. It was permitted to warp and rewrite its despicable history into a hazy, grandfatherly tale of glory and honor instead of what it truly was: the toppling of a league of totalitarian regimes each grimly hanging on to its privileges, its murderous ideology and its perverse debasement of genuine Christianity.

Now of course, sometimes sinner does change his ways.

Once in a great while, after, say, being torn apart by bullets and left to live out his life in wheelchaired irrelevance, a George Wallace will find redemption.

Or, on certain rare occasions, after finding out his brain was being eaten by cancer, a Lee Atwater will disavow the malevolent tactics of a filthy lifetime to make a hurried peace with a Creator whose Way and Word Atwater had spend his political lifetime relentlessly sabotaging.

But so long as they have their healthy and an appetite for power, by and large the polluted Spawn of Jefferson Davis will lay down the blood-soaked but extremely effective tools and traditions of racism only when those tools are clubbed out of their grubby little hands and they are flogged back into the Great Doublewide Bog from whence they came.

Kicking and spitting and shrieking “Traitor!” every inch of the way.

Because it wasn’t just “Macaca”.

It was the collective weight of the series of revelations that preceded and followed that moment.

It was learning that Allen had helped terrorize a black family when he was younger.

It was finding out about his incessant, almost obsessive use of the word “n*gger” during his college years.

It was the noose he kept on display in his office.

The Giant!Confederate!Flag this privileged child of California fetishized.

It was his panicked and hysterical reaction to the revelation that his mother was Jewish.

And then it was “Macaca” – on camera -- followed by Allen’s weasely and blatantly absurd explanations of what he said and why he said it.

Followed by the jackbooted behavior of his staff and supporters once things began to spiral out of control.

What Krugman sees is “The point is that we have become a more diverse and less racist country over time.”

And over the long run I don’t disagree with that assessment.

However in the here and now, what I saw was a candidate whose racist dog whistle was slapped right out of his mouth. and who would nonetheless still be sitting in the Senate today -- eyeballing the White House -- if a mere 3,616 votes had gone the other way.

I’m incredibly glad that Jim Webb is now in the Senate, but I have no illusions about what I saw on election night 2006.

I saw a candidate who, by accident and hubris, had been stripped of the traditional Good ‘Ol Boy, “Just kiddin’ around, folks!” Limbaugh-figleaf like no other candidate before him.

And knowing for an absolute fact that George Allen was a clear-eyed, pig-fucking, racist-by-choice, I saw 1,165,440 Virginians march proudly to the polls and tell the whole world that, yes, this Asshole is Our Boy!

So sign me up for your better tomorrow, Paul, but know going in that as long as any political party feels it can slip that Ring Of Bigot Power onto its finger and not pay a fatal political price, the scum of this nation will never lack for legions of greasy opportunists feeding off of Big Media, Big Politics and Big Jebus who will be more than happy to cater their cross burnings.