Inexplicable

A majority of the French want to move to the US (see seventh bullet point). About half of New Jersey residents would like to leave. I myself left upstate New York, its ridiculous taxation, and the corruption of Albany to find a haven in red state Tennessee.

What gets me, though, is that others who have made the move from the northeast to this slice of heaven often bring with them the kind of voting patterns that will introduce to my state the very policies that are destroying the states from which they fled. This echoes a piece written by John Derbyshire (see the entry The Typhoid Marys of socialism), who noticed something quite similar in immigrant friends. After trying unsuccessfully to locate that piece, I wrote Derb, who was kind enough to write back. He offered this attempt at explaining this behavior:

No, I still can't figure it out. A kind of "locust" behavior, I guess. After you've chomped this field into desert, you go chomp the next one.

I can't offer a more rational explanation myself. But then I think I have passed through the looking glass and reality is now is so distorted I can barely recognize it. Let's see: Mark Foley sends text messages to pages and it's a national scandal. His successor, who campaigned on cleaning up the morals of that office, is up to his eyeballs in scandal. But this year, that doesn't matter. What's different? Foley is a Republican; his successor, Tim Mahoney, is a Democrat.

Thank God the Phils are winning, so I have something of a happy distraction to keep my sane...