A large amount of fakery, led by the Right-Wing blog "The Daily Caller:, and followers of the woefully ignorant, refuse to believe the facts, and now suddenly claim that thousands of people (mostly all Southerners, including Tennessee) seem to think the best protest against our recently re-elected president is to secede from the United States.
First, all these 'petitions' are bogus and have no meaning at all - other than as expressions of the deeply disturbed.
" ... we’re discovering that at least one segment of the GOP’s conservative
“base” has found something to do in reaction to the election results
other than engaging in a “struggle for the soul of the party” or
discussing what its congressional representatives should do about tax
and spending deadlines: petition to secede from the Union!
"Given the southern inflection of the secession campaign, you’d have to
figure nearly all these petitioners are aware (it is impossible to grow
up in the South without being marinated in the memory of the Lost Cause
and its consequences virtually from birth) that we had a civil war over
this subject a while back, which the secessionists did not win. So it’s
an unusually dumb gesture, aimed less at Barack Obama than at their
fellow-citizens."
"Brandon Puttbrese, spokesman for the Tennessee Democratic Party,
called the secession petition "radical nonsense" that is "a direct
result of the tea party extremism and intolerance we have seen from
elected Republicans in Tennessee."
"Sadly," Puttbrese said, "this kind of extremism only breeds more of
the division and rancor that is prohibiting our leaders from making
progress on putting Tennesseans back to work and protecting middle class
families."
But Chris Devaney, chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, noted
that nearly 50 percent of Americans voted against Obama.
"We can argue whether the petition is proper," Devaney said, "but it
is certainly a signal that it's time for the president to show some
leadership and work to unite America rather than divide us."
The petition drive is just a way for angry voters to let off steam
after a highly emotional and divisive campaign, said John Scheb, head of
the political science department at the University of Tennessee.
Not only is secession unlikely, it's not even legally possible, Scheb said.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1869 that states cannot unilaterally
secede from the union. "The position the court took was once in (the
union), always in," Scheb said."
It's called the 14th Amendment, people.
And it's pretty much the same as the fable of the Fox who sought in vain to jump up and grab some grapes the Fox viewed as most tasty, only to miss them and fail and fail again:
This Fox has a longing for grapes:
He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.
So he goes away sour;
And, 'tis said, to this hour
Declares that he's no taste for grapes
