Dance With The One What Brung Ya

I like Tate Reeves, but I'm gonna disagree with him. As long as it doesn't give one group or one perspective any advantage, then I don't care what kind of voting laws there are so long as they are equal.

I start to twitch a little when Mississippi starts doing really anything to restrict voting. We have, by a mile, the worst record with regard to voting rights. The next worst is Louisiana, which is pretty grateful we're around to make them look better.

I mean, people have died for this. Not just a few, either. Lots. I know people get tired of hearing this, but I've had lunch with people who were nearly killed for this. I know their children. I've gotten so drunk with their children that we had to take a nap on the sofa before it was safe to go home. I'm old, but I'm not that old, and the governor's not that much younger.

Asking Mississippi to do anything about restricting voting rights is like asking your uncle, who can't get driver's insurance but has been sober for five years, to make the rum punch for the Christmas party.

It's not just voting rights, either. Shad White wants to use his enormous ears to beat the DEI out of everybody in Mississippi to please his orange god and convince people that Delbert Hosemann , who is an entire person taller than Dumbo White, that the lt. governor is somehow not Republican enough.

He's Republican enough. By the way, we used to measure Republicans; he's more Republican than White, who, to my reckoning, acts more like a very short Dixiecrat. Look it up, Dumbo.

It's like, dude, do you know anything at all about Mississippi history? People think we're the most racist place in the world, and in my lifetime, we have been.

When I was younger, the Republican Party in Mississippi worked harder than anybody to change the perception of Mississippi.

I used to hang out with Charles Evers, who would explain his perspective to me between songs at WJSU. Then I'd go to parties with my dad and have white business men who were also Republicans tell me the same thing.

There's a history Of Republicans in Mississippi working to make things more equal. When the rest of Mississippi was losing their mind about bussing and integration and tearing our public schools apart, Jack Reed risked his business and all his influence in Tupelo to say "not here."

Like the governor, Reed was a Millsaps College boy who thought Republicanism was the best path to a better Mississippi.

I know y'all think I'm this crazy liberal, but I'm a Republican trying to figure out where the hell my party went. I used to be in a crowd, but now I'm standing alone. I think restricting the lives of gay and trans people is stupid, pointles and cruel and does zero, less than zero, to advance Mississippi, does that mean I'm not conservative anymore?

I was 12 or 13 when I drove around North Jackson with my cousin to ask people if we could put Gil Carmichael signs in their yard because we thought Cliff Finch was a lunatic. I guess we were right about that one, huh?

I'll be honest with you. These maga people, they don't give two shits about Mississippi. This is his second administration and how many of us got the tap? We were barely invited to the inauguration both times. Mississippi fared better under Bill Clinton, and I can't stand that guy or his Igor, Jim Carville.

What I'm saying is, dance with the one what brung ya. Being a sycophant to somebody who can't see you just never works out. There are literally generations in Mississippi where the Republicans were the sane ones. Don't piss that away.

Jack Reed goes to Washington