After giving his company a free plug and touting some bogus insider scoops, inbred hillbilly Matt Towery uses Hurricane Katrina to whine about the Yankees hatin' on his beloved Dixie.

They assume we are dumb and poorly educated. That ignores the massive improvements that have been made since the Civil War ended. That's when a dual set of second-class citizens was created overnight -- destitute whites, including many in the former planter class, and uneducated former slaves.

You are dumb and poorly educated, Matt. Before the Civil War, the South had a rather large set of second-class non-citizens. It was the basis of the Southern economy. And those destitute "planters" you whine about were slaveholders, whose only valuable capital was the humans they owned. They were lucky to be living after the Civil War, let alone granted citizenship.

There wasn't a Southern utopia, intellectual or otherwise, before "the end of the Civil War," no matter how much you imagine yourself in the role of slave owner.

By the way, Matt, when you identify casino gambling as an economic foundation of the South, you aren't making a convincing case for either the economic significance of the South or its role in the growth of America.

I'm not here to bash the South (or any other region). I'm only here to bash those whose vision of Southern greatness excludes -- beyond lip service -- a significant portion of the South's population. Those whose version of Southern heritage is nothing more than a whitewashed fantasy land.