THEY GET YOU COMING AND GOING

Today the New York Post publishes an excerpt from a new Charlotte Hays book, published by the right-wing imprint Regnery, titled When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? A Southern Lady Asks the Impertinent Question. Hays -- the "director of cultural programs" at the Independent Women's Forum, a group mostly devoted to feminism-bashing, writes this about our culture:

Society crumbles when it takes cues from the underclass

When Snooki, whose talents include getting sloppy drunk and throwing up on camera, made Barbara Walters' "Ten Most Fascinating People" list a few years back, one could only ask: Was Octomom not available?

Last year, "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo," which features a cornucopia of social ills, was TLC's highest-rated show, attracting more cable viewers than the Republican National Convention, which had the misfortune to share the time slot with the charmers from Georgia. The show's matriarch, June Shannon, has four daughters by four men, one of whose names she can't recall.

White Trash is the new normal -- and you don't have to tune in to reality TV to rub elbows with pathologies that once stayed put in Skunk Hollow. White Trash Normal has invaded every nook and cranny of life....

Aspiration is replaced by complacency. Shame vanishes. Any criticism becomes "haters gonna hate," or the White Trash motto: "It don't make no difference."

... Obesity, the product of a lack of discipline, sloppy dressing, loud and intimate cellphone chats broadcast to a captive audience and foul language nonchalantly uttered in the ATM line are all forms of this "self-expression."

... When did we decide that elastic waist bands, convict-inspired fashion and swearing on a cellphone were authentic ways to express individuality? ...

So a conservative is telling us that it's terrible to valorize a lack of ambition. Aren't conservatives the same people who cheered Rick Santorum on when he said, "President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob"?

A conservative is expressing disgust at the slovenliness of the unsophisticated. Aren't conservatives the people who sneeringly refer to Barack Obama and all other liberals as "metrosexuals"?

In fact, haven't conservatives been telling us at least since the days of a pork-rind-eating George H.W. Bush that contempt for places like Skunk Hollow is the last acceptable bigotry?

And if a conservative thinks obesity is such a problem, shouldn't she take that up with the editors of the New York Post, and other fellow right-wingers, who think any attempt to get Americans to eat a healthy diet is nanny-state fascism?

For that matter, if obesity, public displays of anger, and general New Jersey rudeness upset this conservative writer so much, shouldn't she have a discussion about that with Post editors who adore Chris Christie?

You just can't win with right-wingers. They get you coming and going.