#rsrh QotD, I Had Some Excellent BBQ once in… Middlesboro? Edition.

(H/T: @jstrevino) The Wall Street Journal is having considerable fun eviscerating some goofball named Chuck Thompson, who has apparently written a book whose thesis, writing style, and indeed favorite anecdotes can be deduced from the title (“Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Case for Southern Secession”), but I’d like to note this paragraph, just for the purposes of character assassination.

You begin to sense that something is seriously awry when the author, evidently unable to find enough cranks and simpletons to fill out a whole book on the South, keeps looking beyond the Confederacy’s borders for material. First he zings House Speaker John Boehner for some offense. Isn’t Rep. Boehner from Ohio? Yes, from Cincinnati, but that’s just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, so he counts as a Southerner. We hear about a public-school teacher who urges his students to believe the Bible infallible. This takes place in Cleveland, but because the teacher had once attended a seminary in Kentucky, it’s an instance of Southern “biblical literalism” infecting the entire country. Mr. Thompson derides U.S. Rep. John Shimkus for citing Genesis as a reason not to worry about global warming. Isn’t Mr. Shimkus from Illinois? Yes, but he is from “an area of southern Illinois settled almost entirely by farmers from Kentucky.” By the book’s halfway point, it’s clear that Mr. Thompson’s problem with Southerners isn’t that they are insular, angry or prone to illusions. It’s that, with exceptions, their political views are insufficiently left-wing.

Or else Thompson’s problem may simply be that the South includes Kentucky, which is apparently the state where the girl/boy/other* that broke Thompson’s heart originally hails from… what?  I am being polite.  Why, I haven’t once suggested that the situation that soured Thompson on Kentucky forever involved an aborted financial transaction…