This is perhaps the most evil tempered, mean spirited column I've read in a while. It's written by liberal commentator Michael Tomasky - former US editor for England's radical Guardian newspaper - so it's not surprising because the last time I read such a rancid screed was also probably penned by Tomasky.

I would recommend a high colonic for Tomasky, except he's gutless so it wouldn't do any good.

In this Daily Beast column, Tomasky manages to smear the entire South while recommending that Democrats write off the region because "they don't need it." He begins by giving the back of his hand to Mary Landrieu who he compares to a "blind and toothless dog" that a vet is eager to euthanize:

I know that sounds mean about her, but I don’t intend it that way. She did what she could and had, as far as I know, an honorable career. I do, however, intend it to sound mean about the reactionary, prejudice-infested place she comes from. A toothless dog is a figure of sympathy. A vet who takes pleasure in gassing it is not.

And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)

With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.

Actually, that’s not quite true. They need Florida, arguably, at least in Electoral College terms. Although they don’t even really quite need it—what happened in 2012 was representative: Barack Obama didn’t need Florida, but its 29 electoral votes provided a nice layer of icing on the cake, bumping him up to a gaudy 332 EVs, and besides, it’s nice to be able to say you won such a big state. But Florida is kind of an outlier, because culturally, only the northern half of Florida is Dixie. Ditto Virginia, but in reverse; culturally, northern Virginia is Yankee land (but with gun shops).

So Democrats still need to care about those two states, at least in presidential terms. And maybe you can throw in North Carolina under the right circumstances. And at some point in the near future, you’ll be able to talk about Georgia as a state a Democrat can capture. And eventually, Texas, too.

You can almost taste the bile bubbling up into his throat. This piece of dreck has everything; nauseating elitism, a chauvinistic attitude toward a part of the country he clearly doesn't understand, an ignorance of religion, and an overgeneralization of what truly matters to Southern white voters.

Racism is no more prevelant in the South than it is in the North. It has been a conceit in the North since the end of the Jim Crow era that racist attitudes prevail only south of Mason Dixon, and that it is the exclusive province of  conservatives. In reality, it's a laughable political talking point having nothing to do with reality. Liberals photoshopping Joe Lieberman in blackface, making the most naueating racist comments about Michelle Malkin, - these and other transgressions against decency are absolved on the left because, after all, their heart is in the right place on race. Instead, these and other examples of liberal racism only prove that being a racist does not depend on party or ideology. And for Tomasky to deny this fact is absurd.

If Democrats want to write off the South, let them. As the GOP electoral advantage in the 1980's - a similar advantage liberals believe they have today - faded away, so too the Democrat's edge in the electoral college will flip. Tomasky evidently fell asleep before the mid term elections and has yet to wake up. Republicans are competitive again in states the Democrats believe belong to them, especially Iowa, Colorado, and New Hampshire. Republican governors sit in the state houses of Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The Democrats are becoming less and less competitive in border states like West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri. Even deep blue states like Maryland and Massachusetts elected GOP governors.

They can't write them all off and say they don't need them. But if Tomasky and his friends want to flip the bird to tens of millions of voters who live a different kind of life than the coastal elites, believing that some things are more important than "diversity," "multiculturalism, and racialism, then it will be their loss and the GOP's gain.