Message to Llewlladdwr & all other Southerners: Perspective on the South bashing.

[Fawke Em]

39. That apparently took nearly 30 years to work.

I keep reading about this "Southern Strategy" bullshit, but didn't see any evidence of it happening until 20-some-odd years later, coincidentally, when Rush Limbaugh took over the airwaves in 1994.

Before that, the South still voted largely Democratic. Hell, even after 1994, most of the South voted for Clinton/Gore, both times, and many had Democratic senators for years.

Therefore, if there was a Southern Strategy, it didn't work very well or it was so slow-acting, it could be patented for time-released capsules.

I still believe, having grown up in the South, that the propaganda machine is the culprit. I didn't grow up with flags of the Northern Virgina Army (confused as the Confederate flag) all over the place. There were more rednecks in the neighborhood in our Indiana neighborhood (where we lived for one year before moving back to Tennessee) than there were in my home state. Country music was popular in pockets and the culture was NOT as backward here as I started noticing in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Whatever Nixon cooked up in the late 1960s was NOTHING compared to the right-wing purchase of rural and AM radio stations and the abject HATE heaped upon any and all liberals who dared voice concerns at these disturbing patterns in free speech.