WashPost's Meyerson Pounds South, Still Soft on Slavery...with Wal-Mart

NewsBusters.org ^ | 12/07/06 | Warner Todd Huston

[Mobile Vulgus]

It is amusing to me that the South was always considered by Democrats as "the people", the salt of the Earth, and the so-called rank and file in the "solid South" when the they had a lock on their votes from 1820 all the way until 1980. The South was the all-American region and the Democrats loved them dearly. Yes, for over 160 years the Democrats counted the Southern states as stalwarts and they loved them like brothers. But, now that the Southern states more often vote GOP they are a "problem" and are filled with Bible- brainwashed racists who pine for a return to slavery as far as the left is concerned.

At least, so says Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post today in a screed titled "The GOP's Southern Exposure".

First he begins with a ham-handed attempt to intimate that the GOP sounding "tolerant" is obviously just a ploy and is really a lie at heart.

You've seen the numbers and understand that America is growing steadily less white. You try to push your party, the Grand Old Party, ahead of this curve by taking a tolerant stance on immigration and making common cause with some black churches.

Of course, the GOP "blew" it all by running "racist ads against Harold Ford", as far as Meyerson is concerned... even though neither he nor anyone else can REALLY say exactly what was racist about the ad to which he refers.

After that little jab, Meyerson helpfully explains to us what the "southern problem" is and goes on from there with a laundry list of harangues and slanders against every voter south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Here is a nice compilation of the name calling...

Southerners are:
-knee-jerk militaristic
-anti-scientific
-dogmatically religious
-culturally, sexually and racially phobic

That they are so stupid as to have:
-blocked stem cell research
-disparaged nonmilitary statecraft
-exalted executive wartime power over constitutional niceties
-campaigned repeatedly against gay rights
-thrown public money at conservative churches and investigated the tax status of liberal ones

No, this is not my paraphrasing of what Meyerson wrote. These are DIRECT quotes.

Naturally, Meyerson imagines his leftist policies are but facts of a civilized life and these Southerners are just too much the knuckle-draggaing, troglodyte to "get it".

And, just as naturally for this more civilized and tolerant Washington Post polemicist, it's all Wal-Mart's fault!

Wal-Mart's practice, for instance, of offering low wages and no benefits to its employees begins in the rural South, where it's no deviation from the norm. Only when Wal-Mart expands this practice to the metropolises of the North and West, threatening the living standards of unionized retail workers, does it encounter roadblocks, usually statutory, to its entry into new markets.

Meyerson is against free enterprise, obviously.

And now the capper... Southerners (because of Wal-Mart) want slavery back.

So: A Southern low-wage labor system is cruising along until it seeks to expand outside its region and meets fierce opposition from higher-paid workers in the North. Does that suggest any earlier episode in American history?

What a creep this guy is! And a complete IDIOT where it concerns reading history, too. The South did not seek to "expand" slavery outside its region -- except to expect to take what they considered their Constitutionally legal property into the western territories. The South did not try to push slavery on Northern states the way Meyerson imagines Wal-Mart is doing now. Perhaps Meyerson would pick up a book or two he'd come to find that Northern business interests had little problem with profiting from Southern slavery even while it was going away in THEIR backyards. Nor did they have a problem with child labor, slum tenements, and sweat shops filled with workers who were chained to their machines for 16 hour days in their OWN areas of the country?

These poor, Northern wage-slaves -- as they came to be known -- was one of the things that Southerners pointed to insisting that Northerners were hypocrites over. At least Southern slave owners, as their argument went, clothed, fed, gave medical attention to and housed their slaves whereas the Northern manufactories worked their "slaves" to death and kicked them out the door of the work-shop to feebly fend for themselves.

Did the South somehow force wage-slavery upon the North in the 1840s and later?

Hardly. The North was perfectly capable of handling their own region, thank you very much.

Apparently John Kerry's "nuance" never made it to the Washington Post where cheap shot polemics is all that is required to rank as high-minded political commentary, eh?

Still, I'd accept his proclamations of how the South wanted slavery back if he could but substantiate this claim with a quote or two from any Republican Southern politician -- either state OR Federal -- or any conservative thinker or writer in the South?

He might, though, want to check in with his new Senator from Virginia on this subject. Senator Jim "backturner" Webb is all about re-empowering his "cracker" culture and has written extensively about how the Southern white should take his country back.

In fact, Webb is about the only high profile guy that stands for the purportedly "racist" things that Meyerson seems to hate so much and Webb claims to be a Democrat!

Ah, but there is that "southern problem", again, I suppose.

Chalk Myerson up as a provincial with a penchant for wild-eyed theorizing and a complete lack of historical education. Of course, THAT is what makes him a good leftist.

[Mobile Vulgus]

Bet they won't hate the south if it starts voting Democrat again!!

[L98Fiero]

I saw that on another thread. I emailed him this morning before I had caffiene. Not good. :)

[oblomov]

Meyerson is the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

[USS Alaska]

I'd like to comment on this piece of crap, but my wife and I are going shopping and WalMart will be one of the stops. I must support slavery.

PS: One of the guys at our golf club works at WalMart as a greeter part-time during the holiday seasons, he doesn't need the money, he must like being a slave. I'll ask him if he is slaving away today.

[ansel12]

"It is amusing to me that the South was always considered by Democrats as "the people", the salt of the Earth, and the so-called rank and file in the "solid South" when the they had a lock on their votes from 1820 all the way until 1980. The South was the all-American region and the Democrats loved them dearly. Yes, for over 160 years the Democrats counted the Southern states as stalwarts and they loved them like brothers."






The stigma attached to tobacco political money didn't start until that money started going to republican politicians.

[Emmett McCarthy]

Race relations in areas of the country controlled by leftist Democrats are far, far behind what we know in the South.

[Volunteer]

"Meyerson is the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America."

Why am I not shocked by that fact?

Attention bitter old socialist: You have lost it. It is time for you to be put into a home with all the other old leftists where you can listen to recordings of Country Joe and the Fish while taking LSD with fiber as the nursing staff changes your tie-dyed diapers and listens to how cool you were and your classist diatribes.

Back here in the real world, we are going to work on forgetting you and your sad, sad legacy.

[PogySailor]

Does Meyerson realize it was DEMOCRATS running things in the South during the Jim Crow era?

[padre35]

I don't shop at Wally World, I don't care for the experience. but that is just me.

However this guy is a effite snob, I can only imagine that he wrote this piece because that is the dominant opinion of his little clique of fellow pointy headed liberals who "know best".

I find his ilk to be very typical of what the divide int his country really is, a pseudointellectualism wrapped up in the nice comfortable blanket of bigotry.

[Chewie84]

What a crude, bigoted, narrow- minded jerk.

"Nor did they have a problem with child labor, slum tenements, and sweat shops filled with workers who were chained to their machines for 16 hour days in their OWN areas of the country?"

Exactly, excellent point. The South may have had plantation slavery, which was indeed a horrible and inhuman practice, but the North had huge, extremely unsafe factories and canneries where dirt- poor citizens and immigrants would work hours and hours under unspeakably dangerous and unsanitary working conditions for starvation wages while their bosses grew richer every day.

[dangerbird]

Yes but, Nixon's southern strategy changed all those Democrats into Republicans. Doncha know. Poof. Almost magically, the historically racist Democrat, (you know, the ones who started the civil war over slavery, and when they lost started the Klan, then instsituted sharecropping and Jim Crow along with intermittent lynchings), became a Republican.
Nice trick. And the sad thing is, it has worked like magic. But still, to this day. The southern Democrats who hate Republicans, the Yellow Dogs, will cite the Republican invasion of the South in the civil war, and carpetbaggers as a reason for their hatred. They'd vote for Stalin or Hitler if they ran as a Democrat, before they would vote for Jesus if he ran as a Republican.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Once again Black churches are granted an honorary exemption from the classification of Bible-brainwashed, anti-scientific, dogmatically relgious, knuckle-dragging dorks. I wonder how leftist Blacks would be if they weren't allowed to live in a 1950's style "funditopia" while their political allies pound the white fundamentalists into the ground with new age "tolerance" and "pluralism?"

Let's face it: Blacks are today's Democrat party's "Solid South" and should they ever stop voting Democrat they would very quickly be viewed as a problem.

PS: I disagree that the South wasn't trying to spread slavery throughout the United States in antebellum days. The whole point of the Dred Scott decision was that a slave was a slave wherever he lived.

[Zionist Conspirator]

But still, to this day. The southern Democrats who hate Republicans, the Yellow Dogs, will cite the Republican invasion of the South in the civil war, and carpetbaggers as a reason for their hatred. They'd vote for Stalin or Hitler if they ran as a Democrat, before they would vote for Jesus if he ran as a Republican.

You've nailed it!!!

I'm an old (pre-Goldwater, Civil War Unionist) Southern Republican, and I can't stand these "yellow dog" idiots! You simply forgot to mention Herbert Hoover. He's their other excuse.

[dangerbird]

Yeah Zionist Conspirator.
You're right, of course. But the raw hate pre-dates that era. It was however, vastly re-inforced then. Also the racism was further institutionalized.
A Civil war unionist huh. Good for you. You wouldn't happen to be from East Tennessee? That was a stronghold of pro-Union sentiments. Its considered a solidly Republican area to this day. There was also something of an abolitionist movement out there. Does the name Elihu Embree ring a bell?

[Zionist Conspirator]

Yeah Zionist Conspirator.
You're right, of course. But the raw hate pre-dates that era. It was however, vastly re-inforced then. Also the racism was further institutionalized.
A Civil war unionist huh. Good for you. You wouldn't happen to be from East Tennessee? That was a stronghold of pro-Union sentiments. Its considered a solidly Republican area to this day. There was also something of an abolitionist movement out there. Does the name Elihu Embree ring a bell?

Nope, sorry. East Tennessee wasn't the only Unionist stronghold in the Confederacy. It's often forgotten that every state in the Confederacy had its Union sympathizers.

While I am proud of my Federalist/Anti-Mason/Whig/Republican political heritage, the fact is indeed that slavery is not only allowed, but regulated by the Torah (though I doubt very seriously that the slavery that existed in the United States was Halakhic). Oh well. My instinctive prohibitionism suffers a similar fate!