THREE MARTINI LUNCH: DECEMBER 8, 2014

National Review's Jim Geraghty joins host Greg Corombos. Today's topics: Bill Cassidy crushes Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, a failed attempt to rescue an American hostage in Yemen, and Van Jones offers to kiss Rich Lowry on national television.



Michael Tomasky has a meltdown over South's rejection of Democrats

Much has been made of the fact that when losing Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) leaves office in January, Louisiana will not have a Democratic statewide elected official in office for the first time since the 1870s. The Republicans who occupy all of the Pelican State's high offices are in good company; Republicans now control every U.S. Senate seat, legislative chamber, and governor's mansion across the Deep South – from Texas to the Carolinas.

This condition is giving some Democrats, loyal to the party for whom the term "Solid South" was coined, indigestion. The best example of this phenomenon is an ill-considered paroxysm in the form of a think piece recently published by liberal columnist Michael Tomasky. In that post, the columnist compared the "reactionary, prejudice-infested" South to a vindictive veterinarian just dying to put down a sick and pitiable dog.

"And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become," he wrote.

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.

Tomasky proceeded to talk himself into the notion that Democrats can't write off the South entirely. He observed that they need Florida, and the "New Southern" states of Virginia (and occasionally North Carolina) to win the White House. Moreover, the rapidly growing state of Texas might at some point provide Democrats with a tantalizing target. "But that's presidential politics," Tomasky conceded. "At the congressional level, and from there on down, the Democrats should just forget about the place."

"It's lost. It's gone. A different country," he concluded. "And maybe someday it really should be."

Someone should have stopped Tomasky from penning this embarrassment, much less submitting it to his editor. The liberal columnist might have spared himself the mortifying scrutiny this screed is receiving today if he had simply committed to screaming into a pillow for an hour...

Also read:

With Landrieu's Loss, the End of an Epoch

Obama Sets Record as Two-Term President with Most Midterm Losses for Party