Zell No
Attentive Hotline readers today might have noticed a little item reporting that Bill Shipp of the Athens Banner-Herald had urged Georgia Democrats to make Zell Miller their next chairman.
I had to go check this out. Shipp is generally known as the "dean of Georgia political journalists," primarily because his byline has been appearing somewhere since approximately midway through the Spanish-American war. But he's no wingnut, by any measure.
Turns out Shipp was joking, though you had to get to the end of his column to figure that out:
"As chairman, Miller would help mount a Democratic-sponsored initiative for a constitutional amendment requiring the teaching of creationism in all Georgia schools. Such a measure could do for Democrats what stopping gay nuptials have done for the GOP. Besides, young people everywhere would love Miller. The creationists' dramatic story line on how we got here is much more gripping than the dull and arcane text of Charles Darwin, an elitist snob still revered by Harvard liberals."
A real knee-slapper, eh? But I'm glad no one really seems to be taking Zell up on his offer to rebuild the Democratic Party on the solid foundation of total surrender to the Republican Right. Georgia Dems have had a pretty bad century so far (though they did knock off one of the two Republican House incumbents to lose this year), but you don't recover from a knifing by hiring one of the perpetrators as your surgeon.
POSTSCRIPT: Registering on the Banner-Herald site brought back fond memories of my years in Athens, when this paper--universally called the "Banana-Herald"--vied for the honor of being the worst newspaper in Christendom. Their site today doesn't look at all bad, but they had a lot of room for improvement. Once they ran a front-page photo of newly elected Roman Pontiff John Paul II over the caption: "John Paul II--the first non-Catholic Pope."
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