Infreakingcredible

Just when you think you've seen the nadir of liberal idiocy, they manage to surprise you:

Over the past century, of course, the conflict between North and South has been between union and non-union labor. . . .
But, just as Lincoln predicted, the United States was bound to have one labor system prevail, and the debate over the General Motors and Chrysler bailout was really a debate over which system -- the United Auto Workers' or the foreign transplant factories' -- that would be. Where the parallel between periods breaks down, of course, is in partisan alignment. Today's congressional Republicans are hardly Lincoln's heirs. If anything, they are descendants of Jefferson Davis's Confederates.

(H/T: Irons in the Fire.) Where to begin? How about this: During the Civil War, the nascent labor movement in the North was vehemently anti-war. Among other things, the coal miners of Schuykill County rioted against the draft. Indeed, the deadliest race riots in American history -- the New York Draft Riots of 1863 -- were chiefly motivated by Irish immigrant laborers' opposition to economic competition from free blacks.

Harold Meyerson's ugly appeal to sectional prejudice is tolerated only because he chooses as the object of his bigotry the South, a convenient scapegoat, ignoring altogether that opposition to the UAW bailout is just as widespread in Western states with the same right-to-work laws as the South. Never mind the fact that the South and the West have prospered by their pro-business policies and opposition to union goonery, while the industrial Rust Belt has declined by clinging to obsolete economic policies. And never mind that free labor -- which is, after all, what Lincoln advocated -- is incompatible with the closed-shop slavery that Meyerson endorses.