Best guess on the Interwebs is that somebody at Fox News had too much eggnog and confused “Nobel Prize Winner” with “Holocaust Survivor”.

[via Young Manhattanite]

“Senate Democrats and Republicans have struck a deal to secure passage of a bill to provide health benefits and compensation to 9/11 first responders, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, said today in an exclusive interview with ABC News.”

We’re not sure when “Democrat” became pejorative for “Democratic”.

For that matter, we’re not sure how. Or why we should even care.

We do know that “Democrat” gets under the thin skins of liberals. Just try it around one, and watch how fast you’re corrected. The Ic Factor is strong — almost as strong as when you call a Progressive the L Word.

But really: Can we just drop the fuss? We suspect that “Democrat” keeps being used because it works — because it brings out the peevishness in its target. Hey, if we could annoy our enemies that easily with Sounds Like Rat, you know we’d be all over it.

Which brings us to this week’s outbreak of resentment over “Obamacare”:

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So, where’s our Good Ol’ Boy today? Ah, yes — trying on hairshirts:

“When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns’ integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn’t tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.”

Good for you, Haley. Saves us the trouble of looking into that nasty NAACP business.

But y’know, maybe you should have trotted that line out the first time…

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We woke up Monday with a curious revelation:

We no longer trust Barack Obama.

Really, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. We stopped calling him Unicorn back in summer 2008. We were deeply bummed by his symbolic decision to invite a Proud Bigot to his Inaugural. We were an early bungee jumper into the Enthusiasm Gap. We heartily assent to all the nasty things Glenn Greenwald has said about him, to the point of wondering whether Obama is creating the most oppressive national-security state in American history — which would be quite a feat, considering the competition.

So it’s not like our canoe suddenly tipped over.

And it’s not like we have a habit of trusting Our Nation’s Preznits in the first place. Hey, we grew up with Nixon, after all. We only watched the Watergate hearings because they pre-empted the Match Game.

And we’ve long said that any politician who aspires to the highest office in our land, much less achieves it, is inherently untrustworthy. Decent people don’t do that. Those who try have so severely compromised their souls, it’s a miracle they don’t burst into flames when they take the oath of office.

But with all that, with all the evidence we’ve been noting ourself, somehow we hadn’t quite yet cut the cord. Hadn’t given up. Hadn’t completely lost faith.

Hadn’t yet reverted to our default position.

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Let’s start with this bulky excerpt from a Weekly Standard profile of Haley Barbour, discussing his beloved childhood home of Yazoo City, Mississippi:

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

If you missed the reference, the White Citizens Councils (until 1956) didn’t enjoy the best press, back in the day. Back in this day, mentioning them set off a few red flags:

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In the spirit of the season, we are offering the rest of America this exclusive! one-time-only opportunity to mock Sandy Eggo weather. You’ll note that the street is empty because nobody in Southern California knows how to drive in the rain.