Hey Bob, stop whistling Dixie.

C'mon Bob.

I'm really getting tired of explaining to my out-of-state friends that we aren't all neo-Confederate cesessionists who hate gay people and the unemployed.

You ran for office as "Bob for Jobs." Remember that? You haven't created any yet. In fact, the state budget you helped craft will cost thousands of teachers and other local government employees their jobs.

But, look, that's okay. It's a tough economy. Everybody understands that.

You've been trying to stick to your message.  You went on cable news shows and claimed that you'd filled a $4 billion hole in the state budget without raising taxes. That's a good message for you. Of course, it isn't quite true. There are taxes in the budget, although some of them are called "fees," and you filled a large part of the hole by borrowing from the Virginia Retirement System. That's money that will have to be paid back, with interest. The difference between that and the "deficit spending" your pals in the GOP are all over the President for seems largely a matter of semantics to me.

But the fixed-the-budget-without-raising taxes claim is close enough for politics. Particularly on televsion news.

So if that's why people were  talking about Virginia today, you'd be in clover. You'd have to start listening to all those people are who are lining up to tell you, "Yes, you can" in 2012's national elections.

But Bob, that's not why people are talking about Virginia.

They're talking abuot the damned Civil War again.

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Commemorating our Crazy Aunt

Recently I was working on a story about what Williamsburg was doing for the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Civil War, a project to which the state will devote considerable resources in hopes of driving tourism.

The answer to that question was, “Not much.” As far as Civil War history goes, Williamsburg doesn’t have all that much, certainly when compared to Richmond or Northern Virginia or the Shenandoah Valley.

But, while working on the piece, I began to wonder why we’re commemorating the War Between the States, as it was called when I learned Virginia history in junior high school, at all.

After all, short of conquest and occupation by a foreign power, isn’t a civil war pretty much the worst, most tragic thing that a nation can experience?

Does Spain celebrate its civil war? Does England?

And I expect that the area that will celebrate the most will the South. Which lost. And deserved to lose because it was on the wrong side of history, morality and the law. Thank goodness it lost. What a horrible place to live this would be had it not.

So to Germany and Japan, which like the Confederacy, deserved to lose and did, celebrate their role in World War II?

I expect the 150th festivities to be confined to the South because, in my experience, people in the rest of the country couldn’t care less about the Civil War. They’re over it.

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