We all have values.

Adam Felber concedes.

Healing? We, the people at risk from terrorists, the people who subsidize you, the people who speak in glowing and respectful terms about the heartland of America while that heartland insults and excoriates us... we wanted some healing. We spoke loud and clear. And you refused to give it to us, largely because of your high moral values. You knew better: America doesn't need its allies, doesn't need to share the burden, doesn't need to unite the world, doesn't need to provide for its future. Hell no. Not when it's got a human shield of pointy-headed, atheistic, unconfrontational breadwinners who are willing to pay the bills and play nice in the vain hope of winning a vote that we can never have. Because we're "morally inferior," I suppose, we are supposed to respect your values while you insult ours. And the big joke here is that for 20 years, we've done just that. It's not a "ha-ha" funny joke, I realize, but it's a joke all the same. (via The Poor Man)

The post is funny and worth your time, but there's a serious issue at work here. We are getting endless advice from the right (and some on the left) that we need to show some respect to "Middle American values," whatever those may be. But you know what? We always have, and meanwhile the rhetoric emanating from the red states has consistently been sneering derision toward the "pointy-headed liberal godless elites" (disclaimer: I live in a red state, but in a region of it that broke better than 2-1 for Kerry). John Kerry wasn't called a liberal; he was called a Massachusetts liberal, which somehow was meant to convey an even greater sense of moral turpitude.

What is being called for is not "respect" for neo-GOP values, but capitulation to them. Well, screw you. Your morality is not superior (or, for that matter, inferior), it is merely different. We aren't the ones pressing the culture wars, but we aren't unilaterally disarming either. Don't like gay marriage? Nobody has ever threatened to make you marry within your gender. Don't like abortion? Nobody has ever proposed forcing you to get one. Despite your campaign scare literature to the contrary, nobody over here is proposing banning the Bible. Almost all of us own one, you know. Activist judges? Please. You guys own the judiciary.

Bush didn't take a single west coast state, no northeastern states, and only one Great Lakes state - and that one just barely. He does not have a national mandate with 51% of the vote, a percentage that is likely to drop closer to 50 as the remaining absentee ballots get tabulated. He won, but it was still very close. Let's call it like it is: red America (which is not bound by state borders) doesn't like blue America (similarly unbounded) and vice versa. You guys have controlled all three branches of government and a majority of the governships for years now. You are the elites, despite your cherished, illusory feelings of victimization. For every gram of liberal condescension, there is at least an equal amount of conservative condescension. At least we don't use "conservative" as an epithet.

This is a deeply, angrily divided country and I can't see that division lessening any time soon. I'd love for us all not to sneer and flip the bird at one another, but that reality ain't materializing. Gird yourself for the culture wars. They have begun.