Can someone please remind me again why didn’t we just let the South secede?

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford on Wednesday became the first governor to reject some of his state’s share of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus money, spurning $700 million that he said would harm his state’s residents in the long run.

Sanford, a Republican who served in Congress in the 1990s, made his announcement at three sites across South Carolina in a daylong flight tour that fed speculation that he’s eyeing a 2012 presidential run.

Sanford’s announcement came the same day as new unemployment data showed the state with the nation’s second-highest jobless rate, at 10.4 percent…

South Carolina has the fastest growing unemployment rate in the country, and economists do not see an end to the cycle of job losses spreading across the state.

Between January 2008 and January 2009, the state’s unemployment rate increased 4.7 percentage points, which was the largest jobless rate increase in the country, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This shameful, feckless southern ideologue is all too happy to ignore the suffering of the citizens of his state in order to burnish his conservative credentials in the eyes of Rush Limbaugh for a 2012 run for the Presidency.

I will never understand how I used to find the Republican party anything but hateful, intellectually bankrupt, fear-obsessed and nausea-inducing.

Update: Gov. Sanford compared the stimulus bill to Robert Mugabe’s insane handling of Zimbabwe:

“What you’re doing is buying into the notion that if we just print some more money that we don’t have and send it to different states, we’ll create jobs,” he said. “If that’s the case, why isn’t Zimbabwe a rich place?… Cause they’re printing money they don’t have and sending it around to their different – I don’t know the towns in Zimbabwe but that same logic is being applied there with little effect.”