Please Stop Chalking Up Your Raging Idiocy To Being From Georgia

First it was Nancy Grace getting "flamenco" wrong on Celebrity Jeopardy. Now it's Allen West defending his nonsensical hypothesis on chocolate chip ice cream and converting one's own sexuality. Both said silly or otherwise inflammatory things in public and chalked it up to being from Georgia, and I for one would like to put an end to that whole business.

Here is Nancy Grace on Jeopardy:

Of course there's an accent issue for people from the South, but it's about i's and e's, not g's and c's. "Flaminco" would probably have been judged correct. But instead, Nancy Grace's answer is totally wrong, and then she gets belligerent and passes the blame, like it's not her genius brain's fault she said something wrong. Like everyone from Georgia should be expected to replace vocabulary words with pink bird names basically every other sentence. I think what bothers me here is that Nancy's "I'm from Georgia!" comment doesn't seem to be about pronunciation - it seems to be about her opinion that Georgians can't be expected to care about the difference between "flamingo" and "flamenco." WHEN SO CLEARLY, NANCY, THEY CAN.

Then there's this whole Allen West thing. Here is a video of it. I don't think it includes all the ice cream and scooter stuff, so here's the original quotation I first read on The Hairpin:

I like chocolate chip ice cream, and I will continue to like chocolate chip ice cream. So there's no worry about me changing to vanilla. I like to, you know, ride my motorcycle. What do you want me to do? You want me to change my behavior and ride a scooter? I'm not into that. People can change their sexual behavior. And I've seen people do that. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, so I've seen a very different perspective on human behaviors. So that's where I'm coming from on that.

Is Atlanta the go-to place for Stop Being Gay camps? While I'm sure there are a few in Georgia, I'm sure there are a few in most states, and we'd rather keep them all quiet. And while I'm familiar with Atlanta's relationship to conservatism, I'm also familiar with Atlanta's huge, growing number of gay night clubs. Not personally, but Kit Kat told me about it so it must be true. I'm not saying that anything else Allen West says makes sense - of course it doesn't - but by the time he gets to being from Atlanta, it's hard to understand what his childhood taught him. Perhaps that the gay Atlantans he was acquainted with were more rigid with their ice cream preferences, not like these weak willed, I'll-even-eat-Neapolitan gays.

To excuse my mistakes with "I'm from Georgia!" would be a clear indication that I'm out of touch with my stomping grounds. When I was growing up, most of the adults I knew were at least interested in literacy. They discussed novels with obvious enjoyment and told jokes that required a reasonably broad knowledge base. Their opinions might have been different from mine, but not because they were incapable of forming logical thoughts. Please, Nancy Grace and Allen West, stop. Please stop chalking up your raging idiocy to being from Georgia.