“A handful of southern Democrats joined Republicans … to defeat President Obama’s choice to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.” That was NPR’s morning edition attempting to play the defeat has some sort of racist old South alliance. The problem with that tired narrative is that only one of the Democrats who voted against Obama’s nominee, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, is from the South. As noted by Jonah Goldberg, that’s “not exactly sons of the Confederacy.”