And if this poll is any indication, Virginians have the shortest fucking memory in the country. 31% of Virginians would definitely vote for Allen again, and apparently 40% of blacks would either consider voting or definitely vote for him again, even though he is a comical rich old entitled racist asshole from a long line of same.

So you go ahead and do that, Virginia. Go ahead and vote for Senator Macaca again, while you all pretend the President was born in Atlantis or wherever.

Mad Men, the famous and brilliant television show about how it was weird and bad but also secretly really fucking awesome when dudes smoked and drank at work while treating women like shit (and everyone dressed better but there were no black people), was incessantly hyped by every wing of the East Coast Liberal Media Elite for weeks before its new season started, and the premiere drew 2.8 million viewers.

This will all change of course once Sarah Palin tells her fans to watch Mad Men. Someone send her some DVDs!

After the 2004 elections, a website called "Fuck the South" became popular among us liberal godless coastal elite types. It is a long rant about how the fat idiots who voted for Bush are stupid fat idiots, with some "facts" about how America is basically a giant welfare system whereby New York's money is redistributed to Mississippi for some reason. It was a nice bit of angry post-election catharsis, even if it is indefensibly classist, because, you know, these states we're ranting against are often full of terribly impoverished people and no one has done anything at all to help them since LBJ, basically, and look how well that worked out for him. But! Four years later, the Democrats won the presidency! The electoral map was totally different this time, too!

So the Times declares the end of Democrats having to be Southern, or having to hate Welfare. The end of The Southern Strategy too! The Southern Strategy was Richard Nixon's cunning plan to convince racists to support him, helped along by LBJ's cunning plan to be less racist, which lost the South for Democrats for a generation. Now it doesn't matter! The Republicans are finished, forever! Right?

The Republicans, meanwhile, have “become a Southernized party,” said Mr. Schaller, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “They have completely marginalized themselves to a mostly regional party,” he said, pointing out that nearly half of the current Republican House delegation is now Southern.

The GOP no longer has a single Congressman from New England, which is amazing. Their moderate New England Senators barely belong in the party too! So hooray, we vanquished the evil Republicans forever! Just like they did to us with their Permanent Republican Majority in 2004, remember?

It is not at all completely too soon to declare the end of The South, and the GOP, because this election is now the official new American Electoral Map, forever, and it's not simply the result of having a charismatic industrial Midwestern candidate running after eight disastrous years of the other guys, and The South will never again provide the electoral votes necessary for victory to a more appealing conservative candidate who need only peel away a couple of those industrial Midwestern states.

"Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years," the Times explains, and it doesn't at all behoove liberals to investigate why well-educated well-off suburbanites are more likely to support Democrats than poor people and the blue-collar. And hey they shouldn't bother either to try to come up with a reason that isn't "they hate fags" or "they hate blacks." No, let's just ignore the backwards morons and let them rot, because they're old poor racist losers and WE WON FUCK THEM FOREVER.

Jane Mayer wrote a very informative piece for this week's New Yorker about how all the chattering classes and cocktail circuit insiders created and sold the Myth of Sarah Palin.

While Brickley and others were spreading the word about Palin on the Internet, Palin was wooing a number of well-connected Washington conservative thinkers. In a stroke of luck, Palin did not have to go to the capital to meet these members of “the permanent political establishment”; they came to Alaska. Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau. Writers and editors from these publications had been enlisted to deliver lectures to politically minded vacationers. “The Governor was more than happy to meet these guys,” Joe Balash, a special staff assistant to Palin, recalled.

The Standard brought William Kristol, Fred Barnes, and Michael Gerson to meet Palin. They all fell in love when she said grace really well and her daughter said something cute and then they took a helicopter ride and talked about how great it was to dump waste into lakes. Barnes went home and wrote a story about how she was so great. Kristol basically fell in love and began talking about her incessantly, all the time, until Chris Wallace told him to shut up.

A few weeks after that cruise, the National Review boys came around! This time Palin met Rich Lowry, Robert Bork, John Bolton, Victor Davis Hanson, and Dick Morris—we will hand it to the NR, their parties are somehow creepier than the Standard's. Dick Morris apparently talked ot Palin for an hour or two, and he was probably salivating. This is the saddest part of this story:

Clearly, Palin has taken this advice to heart. Still, when the moment came for Morris and other guests to depart, Palin was sad to see the Washington insiders go. Hanson recalled, “She said, ‘Hey—does anyone want to stay for dinner? We’re going to eat right now.’ She also invited everyone to come back the next day. ‘If any of you are in the area, all you have to do is knock. Yell upstairs, I’ll be right down.’ ”

And so, yes, as you can see, the media elite created this monster, and the monster is desperate for their approval as well. Hell, she'll even do the requisite Saturday Night Live appearance. And yes, the GOP will happily take the stage with sad pseudo-celebs like Hank Williams Jr, but in capitulating to the elite conservative media opinion-makers, Palin is probably going down a slightly safer path than McCain did himself when he enlisted the love and support of the regular mainstream media in 2000.

As we all remember, the media was once McCain's base, with heavy breathing moderates like Rich Cohen and Joe Klein swooning over their unprecedented access to the potential GOP nominee for president.

McCain loved the adoration and the attention, and made an effort to keep it up through 2008, but the eventual fall-out, while precipitated by McCain's shitty campaigning, was probably inevitable. Because once he's the actual nominee for President on the Republican ticket, he needs to be a Republican. His appeal, before, was that he was basically a noble loser. This year, he wanted to win. And winning, he was informed, involved being a douchebag.

But as much as McCain's politics and strategy are all dictated by his personal animosities and perceived slights (his visceral distaste for Obama comes from Obama snubbing him years ago over some bullshit legislation followed by a couple other slights McCain took a bit too personally), his new distaste for the Media Establishment rings hallow to those who remember the barbecue party of just a few months ago, but it's probably sincere. He's fucking furious that the jackals abandoned him and call him a liar just for lying all the time. Listen to McCain's chief hagiographer, Mark Salter:

We also talked about Salter's current view of the press: "I think the media is driven by a need to see this history happen," he said. "And I think they've rationalized it, they think they're on the level with McCain, that he's not the old McCain. But he is the old McCain. He just doesn't know what happened to the old press corps."

They're in the bubble. They know it's the "same McCain" and it's not fair that the elitists don't like the old McCain anymore. We've also argued that the "he's not the man I used to love" line is pathetic and basically means they just loved him back when he made them feel special and loved.

And now, trying to play to the Beltway Elites of National Review has made McCain seem intolerable and erratic to Beltway Elites like Peggy Noonan and David Brooks and only Jonah Goldberg still likes him.

"Does anyone besides me see the hypocrisy of some on the left who go nuts about Michael Vick and the whole dog fighting thing and yet are the same people who don't care about the loss of human life caused by illegal aliens or are the same people who fight for the right to kill unborn babies?" asks Campfield. He quotes a friend who notes that, "If Terry [sic] Schiavo was a dolphin or a dog (or a wale) [sic] she would still be alive today." Then it gets better!

Dog fighting is cruel and inhumane. But if Vick could have figured out a way to pit two unborn babies against each other in a fight to the death, maybe we'd outlaw killing children as quickly as we rushed to enhance penalties for crimes involving our pets.

Love dogs, Hate people. [Camp4U, via]

The Vision Forum: Patriarchy Weirdness Exposed [The Ministry Watchmen]