Our newly minted little julep of a governor once more mistakes proof for percentages.

Apparently playing the odds that no one would really notice his appallingly researched and ill-conceived proclamation of April as "Confederate History Month", Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell managed to alienate more people in and out of his party than Ken Cuccinelli serving up a different sort of case before a different (and presumably more discriminating) bar. Case in point: Sheila Johnson, a strong supporter of Barack Obama, who made a difficult, highly controversial, and singularly unpopular decision among her own fans, to support McDonnell on principle.

What must it have cost her to " .. condemn Governor McDonnell's Proclamation honoring 'Confederate History Month,' and its insensitive disregard of Virginia's complicated and painful history . . . . ." As she wrote to the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart, "The complete omission of slavery from an official government document, which purports to be a call for Virginians to 'understand' and 'study' their history, is both academically flawed and personally offensive. If Virginians are to celebrate their 'shared history,' as this proclamation suggests, then the whole truth of this history must be recognized and not evaded."

Then there are the poor "Sons of Confederate Veterans," blood relatives (like me) of long-dead rebel soldiers, who themselves still make an ironic and telling distinction between members who are "sons" of "officers" and those who are "sons" of mere "enlisted men".

McDonnell's proclamation supposedly fulfilled a campaign promise to the boys whose great grandfathers really did the killing and dying in a war a disproportionate number of them still believe had little or nothing to do with slavery. How pleased they must be to find themselves recast, one more time, in the roles of "Forget, Hell, Dixiecrats" in a world that can, for the most part, read.

Even worse, especially among a group that may be wrong about the forest, but knows the inscriptions on each and every button on each and every tree, little Cucinelli's Captain blew the date.

April's cruel, but it's not the month the American Civil War ended (and, btw, Appomattox ain't the place, either.)

Bob's constituents down in Danville (the self-proclaimed "last capital" of the Confederacy) would no doubt beg to differ, as would those who have heard or, perhaps, read about, the surrenders of: John Mosby's Rangers on April 21, more than a week after Appomattox. Joe Johnston's army in North Carolina didn't hang it up until April 26. Alabama and Mississippi surrendered in early May. Jefferson Davis himself didn't give up until Union cavalry caught him, on May 10. And some diehards (including a native American who held a commission as a Confederate General) held out in the "Indian Territories" until June.

As for "Virginians" seceding, a good part of the state absolutely rebelled at secession: hence "West Virginia."

Others, "left behind" so to speak, not only opposed secession, but fought on the side of the United States.

Indeed, the vast majority of "Virginians" in 1861 (the more-than-51-percent comprising women, people of color, and those whose property holdings were too small to earn suffrage rights) . . . had no vote at all in the matter of secession . . . either before or after Lincoln's call for troops.

Rebel Yell. Eighty proof. Forty Percent. Total failure on any scale. Often accompanied by hangover.