Andrew Sullivan: 'You put a map of the Civil War over this electoral map, you’ve got the Civil War...'

Andrew Sullivan's ahistoricism is simply breathtaking. Just watch his stunningly ridiculous comments on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," at Mediate, "Andrew Sullivan to ABC: If Romney Wins Florida and VA, It’s the ‘Confederacy’" (via Memeorandum):

PBS reporter Gwen Ifill said that “we can’t ignore” the possible factor racial animus may play in deciding the election, noting that the poll indicates that, on some level, people are still willing to admit “racial bias.”

Sullivan then added: “If Virginia and Florida go back to the Republicans, it’s the Confederacy. Entirely. You put a map of the Civil War over this electoral map, you’ve got the Civil War.”

Conservative panelist George Will rolled his eyes. “I don’t know,” said a skeptical Ifill.

Will then posited two possible explanations for Obama’s slippage in the white vote since 2008: “A lot of white people who voted for Obama in 2008 watched him govern for four years and said, ‘Not so good. Let’s try someone else.’ The alternative, the ‘Confederacy’ hypothesis is that those people somehow, for some reason in the last four years became racist.”

“That’s not my argument at all,” replied Sullivan. “It’s the southernization of the Republican Party. [Virginia and Florida] were the only two states in 2008 that violated the Confederacy rule.”

Sullivan's comments are perfectly representative of the left's hopelessly desperate and utterly despicable politics of racial fear-mongering. Progressives have been attacking conservative presidential politics as racist since at least 1968, when Republicans deployed the so-called "Southern strategy" in the election of Richard Nixon to the White House. The South has been in the GOP column for decades. It's just the way it is, not shocking and not a racist conspiracy. That's the 2004 map above, where George W. Bush was reelected with 286 votes in the Electoral College, winning all the states of the Old Confederacy, and some of the Border States as well. Mitt Romney could put together a similar coalition of states on election day. I mean, if the left is intent on attacking Mitt Romney's campaign as racist, it will only be in line with long-standing leftist research stressing inbred racist DNA in Southern voting constituencies, which I personally don't endorse. These kinds of attacks on Republicans aren't new. If race indeed plays a role in a Barack Obama's defeat on November 6th, it certainly won't be something that Republicans pulled out of a hat at the last minute.

But remember, it's decidedly not the current strategy of the Republican Party to run a racially divisive platform. No, that honorarium goes to the current White House, the bankrupt Obama for America campaign, and the left's pathetic race-baiting enablers in the press. We've been accosted with allegations of racist "dog whistles" for almost four years now. The progressive left is positively obsessed with race, as the nearly criminal initial reporting on the Trayvon Martin incident showed. And any reader of William Jacobson's Legal Insurrection blog is more than aware of the embarrassingly comic minstrel show the left puts on every week with race-baiting attacks on conservatives. It's utterly shameless, for example, "Saturday Night Card Game (If You Can Hear the Dog Whistle, You Might Be a Racist)."

If Obama loses it will be because Americans have had it with his administration's failures and incompetence. The progressives will cry racism until the cows come home. But the rest of us have long tuned out the race-baiting. People who're genuinely concerned about the country will simply get to work rebuilding the economy and repairing the damage of four years of atonement in foreign policy. It's not a matter of if but when. And as recent polling increasingly indicates, 2013 is looking like a big restoration year for American conservatism.

BONUS: More at NewsBusters, "Andrew Sullivan Makes a Fool of Himself on ABC's 'This Week' With George Will and Gwen Ifill's Help."

UPDATE: Michael Zak on Twitter reminds us that the Democrats were and remain the party of racial segregation, as he pointed out in his book, "Back to Basics for the Republican Party."

And Ed Driscoll links at Instapundit (thanks!), and Glenn Reynolds updates at the post:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Andrew knows even less about American history than he knows about American culture and politics, something he’s demonstrated repeatedly. He should stick to his core area of expertise, forensic obstetrics.