If there is any reason why Molly Ivors and I should not be joined in Internet matrimony …

Look, people who left the Dems between Kennedy and Reagan did so for
one reason: civil fucking rights. Blather on all you want about
traditional values and welfare queens and entitlement programs, but it
boils down, like a bunny, to one thing: black people should have
remembered their place. The Southern Strategy worked, and not just in
the South. Northern racists bought it too. I challenge Louisiana to
produce as thoroughgoing a bigot as Thers’s late Uncle Dave, a man who
hoarded rusty canned goods and moldering reel-to-reel tapes from the
John Birch Society in his basement in Queens, guarding against the day
when hordes of black people were going to come marching up Northern
Boulevard in Flushing and target electrician’s shops full of broken
equipment. And don’t get me started on cops like Father Dowd, who
mistake their contact with criminals for some bizarre kind of
anthropological evidence. It’s a load of crap.

Word with word sauce and a side of word. And I can’t agree with that without parsing out the brilliance of the Republican party operatives who figured out that yeah, on the other side of the aisle are people telling you how you can hang in and fight and be good people and not oppress anybody, but over here, it’s so much cheaper to tell you to retreat into your little mental hole and just hate the people we tell you are at fault for the gnawing fear in your gut. Won’t make you less afraid, but it will make you more likely to vote for us, so everybody wins.

Which gives us the past 30 years of this bullshit whereby it’s always somebody else’s fault, somebody’s always coming to get you, and anybody telling you different is just someone else for you to hate. Which gives us Bush, and this election, and everything in between, and it’s gonna keep happening until there’s nothing left in our mouths but ashes.

A.