Senator-Elect Webb Spins Catholic-Hating Heritage Into Electoral Success

From The Belfast Telegraph:

There have been many US presidents with Ulster-Scots roots, but for Virginia Democrat, Jim Webb, being Ulster-Scots or Irish Scots has become a rallying point for his supporters and a focus of his astonishingly popular campaign for a Senate seat.

As last week's New Yorker magazine put it, Webb has presented Ulster-Scots heritage as "the DNA of red-state America".

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Mr Webb's "love your inner Ulster Scot" message also won some big-name supporters - most noticeably [Catholic-hating] commentator Christopher Hitchens in the Wall Street Journal, who wrote that Mr Webb "is right to stress the huge rage felt by those of Scots-Irish provenance who feel that they have borne the heat and burden of the day in America's wars, and been rewarded with disdain".

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His basic Scots-Irish message pulls these contradictory strands together with a new message: "The Scots-Irish were pushed out of Scotland, battled Catholics in Ireland, came to the US where they fought everyone from native Americans to the French and were packed overseas to fight the Germans, the Viet Cong and the Iraqis and what do you have to show for it? You're treated as Bible-thumping rednecks by cultural elitists in Hollywood, New York and Washington."

It's a message that has proved to be political dynamite in the Republican heartland, leaving many Republicans and moderate Democrats to ask why they didn't tap into this resentment a long time ago.

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My Comments:
My mother comes from Scots-Irish stock. It wasn't for nothing that she took my conversion to Catholicism so hard.