Barbecue is the third rail of North Carolina politics.

Every time I look at Atlanta I see what a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers died to prevent.

No one would stand for it [being the fool in the media] in a minute if you took any other group -Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, women - but somehow it's okay to do that with hillbillies.

The South is like my favorite pair of blue jeans. It's shrunk some, faded a bit, got a few holes in it. it just might split at the seams. It doesn't look much like it used to, but it's more comfortable, and there's probably a lot of wear left in it.

I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors.

Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don't have labels for middle-class Southerners.

Any Southern nationalist movement, especially one that wraps itself in the Confederate flag, is going to be viewed with suspicion, given the historical record.