Whistlin’ dixie

Rall’s right, Dean had nothing to apologize for. And The Poor Man has a good rant on Zell Miller’s response (and a bunch of other good stuff, just scroll through the whole blog):

This country puts up with a lot of crap from the South. I say this with affection, because I live in the South, but seriously. You don’t get lectures like this from California, about how not everyone really, literally, is a dot com millionaire or a surf bum. You don’t hear Olympia Snowe on TV saying that Republicans just don’t get Maine and that if the party wants to win in 2004 they can’t get thay-ah from hee-yah. It would be considered rather parochial, if anyone else did it, but we’re expected to put up with it from the South because, well, I guess we’re just used to it by now. But if Zell Miller actual wants the country to not treat the South like some weird backwater, if this is actually meant to be taken in some way seriously, and isn’t just xenophobic pandering to his toothless constiuency, he might help the situation by refraining from making outbursts like this in response someone from another part of the country implying they might want to get votes from the people you represent for the party you represent. He’s a little defensive about the racist connotations of the confederate flag, and that’s understandable. But you’ve got to control yourself. Miller couldn’t have presented a more embarrassing and retrograde view of the South if he’d showed up wearing Uncle Jesse’s filthy overalls and blowing “Dixie Land” on a jug of moonshine.