{"id":1491,"date":"2007-02-17T13:05:35","date_gmt":"2007-02-17T13:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1491"},"modified":"2007-02-17T13:05:35","modified_gmt":"2007-02-17T13:05:35","slug":"a_confederacy_o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1491","title":{"rendered":"A Confederacy Of Dunces"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m beginning to agree with Democratic strategists who argue that the party should simply cede the Deep South to the Republicans and concentrate on building a winning coalition that spans the other three-fourths of nation. It seems that I come across a few news items every week that make me wonder if the Union really did gain anything by winning the Civil War. Case in point: the Georgia legislator who distributed a memo to his colleagues claiming that the science behind evolution and the Big Bang theory is actually part of a millenia-old plot authored by Jewish Pharisees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How perfect. Here you have anti-Semitism, scientific illiteracy, and plain ol’ buffoonery wrapped up in a pretty box with a Confederate-flag bow perched on top. Is it possible for a Southerner to behave in a more cartoonish manner? Now, I realize one shouldn’t make generalizations. Without a doubt, there are many progressive-minded, rational people residing in the South. But they seem to be outnumbered by a populace that jubilantly glorifies ignorance and fear. Perhaps if we let the region languish as a political backwater for a decade or two, its citizens might eventually come to their senses and decide that they really do want to be participants in a twenty-first century society. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m beginning to agree with Democratic strategists who argue that the party should simply cede the Deep South to the Republicans and concentrate on building a winning coalition that spans the other three-fourths of nation. It seems that I come across a few news items every week that make me wonder if the Union really […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-o3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}