Little Miss PC Southern Belle

August 18, 2009

Neocon Kathleen Parker has written an amazing piece of tediously conventional anti-Southern trash in the Washington Post. Parker blames the dereliction of the GOP”which has become a party with barely noticeable distinctions from its Democratic opponent”on “ignorant, right-wing, Bible-thumping rednecks.” Miss Parker, in her bigoted sketch making modern Southerners look like slaveholder wannabees, refers to a “sense of a resurgent Old South and all the attendant pathologies of festering hate and fear.”

Miss Parker hilariously hallucinates with politically correct fantasies that bring forth visuals of the glorious North still fighting the Civil War, still trying to end slavery in the South. Perhaps she is fantasizing about a contemporary version of Abraham Lincoln, a known racist, when she comments that the Republicans should collectively “drive a stake through the heart of Old Dixie.” According to Parker, her GOP”the GOP that gave us the Security State, the Patriot Act, myriad wars, a militarized police state, a corporatist Wall Street, and the worst budget snafus ever”is the good GOP. Yet it’s been co-opted by these roving bands of skeptical Southerners, fighting the mega-socialist state being put forth by Obama and his committed minions. How dare they! If only they could all just get along and play the partisan game, we could move forward swimmingly and enjoy our lives under tyranny in unity and peace.

As one who has grown up”and lives”in the land of the glorious, triumphant Union, and as one who has traveled extensively throughout the South since the early 1980s, learning about its people and its culture up close and personal, I have witnessed no greater polarization and racism than right here in the North. In fact, I invite Miss Parker (born in Florida, living in South Carolina) to come up here to Detroit if she wants to see hate, fear, and racism”of both the black and white variety.

Or perhaps, to save time, she can take the time to breeze through U.S. census data. It is well known that the most segregated cities in the U.S. are northern, and in fact, most data shows that they are midwestern industrial cities. Whether or not you use the 1990 census data or the 2000 data, the cities on the list remain consistent: Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, Buffalo, Gary, Newark, Cincinnati, etc. Yet since a few scattered Southern Republicans oppose the merging of the minds for a Republicrat-Demopublican joint force to subdue liberty once and for all, it must be that hate-racist thing rearing its reptilian head again.

I once considered Parker, who has written some wickedly fantastic social commentary, to be a constructive ally in the war against stupidity and political correctness. However, something called “9/11″ happened that united the Republican party around the neocon party line, drumming up support for total state, total war, and the suppression of individual liberty through the Bush-Cheney faction’s “war on terrorism.” The you”re-either-with-us-or-against-us religion that materialized post-9/11 caused even the tongue-in-cheek conservatives, like Parker, to go bonkers with plastic patriot disease.

The neocon Republicans like Miss Parker”I”d rank her as Neocon Lite”cherish their alliance with Washington establishment, hence the cozy relationship with left-leaning media outlets such as the Washington Post. As Salon writer Glenn Greenwald once noted:

The Washington Post does more to advance neoconservative ideology than The Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise Institute and Commentary combined. But Post columnist Charles Krauthammer”and so many like him”fantasize that they’re surrounded by a Liberal Media that oppresses, persecutes and silences them. Just ponder the levels of delusion and self-pity necessary to believe that.

Some of these writers, like Parker, occasionally get sassy toward the establishment on muted issues such as political correctness, feminism and environmentalism, but overall, adherence to bread-and-butter issues as race, war, the war on terror, the Security state, and the current White House political doctrine is self-evident. Kathleen’s bio in the Washington Post states her claim to fame:

But it was in the days and months following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that her attempts to “inject a little sanity” established her as a premier commentator. Her writings in support of American troops, first-responders and other front-line participants in the war on terror were among the reasons The Week magazine named her as one of the country’s top five columnists in 2004 and 2005.

In a catfight that I”d pay to see, Ann Coulter, who can oftentimes belt a high-and-outside knuckleball over the left field wall, paid a visit to Parker’s column in her August 13 polemic.

The latest fake insider/whistleblower is Kathleen Parker, the Barry Lynn of the South. Fresh off her mainstream media tour as a Sarah Palin-hating “conservative,” Parker is now a self-proclaimed Southerner blaming opposition to Obama’s policies on the region’s reputed racism.

… But Kathleen Parker has leapt into the fray to explain that the opposition to Obama’s agenda is pure Southern racism. And she’s from the South, so it must be true!

As she put it on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball”: “One word, Chris”one word. ‘Confederacy.’ I mean, you know, the South is very”I live there, OK? I want to make that clear, too, because I’m not bashing Southerners.”

Since Kathleen Parker, a declared Southerner, is in fact ignorant of history and can only recite modern scuttlebutt that will please her colleagues in the media and Washington D.C., I”ll remind her of the scholar Alex de Tocqueville, who said, in Democracy in America, “Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.” Some things haven”t changed in the last 150+ years, Miss Parker. Y”all come on up here and learn for yourself instead of flinging rhetoric from the establishment pulpit known as the Washington Post.