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Southern Republicans are coming to their Pogo moment.

Back when they were a persecuted minority in states across the South, Republicans used to wail about the corruption and arrogance of the Democrats, at their blatant abuses of power and craven self-aggrandizement.

Now the Republicans are riding high, and looking forward to riding higher with the new legislative and congressional maps aimed at cementing their control. Republican presidential candidates swear their affection for grits, and Southern Republican legislators feel secure enough in their seats to quarrel with Southern Republican governors.

Yet all does not rest well within the region’s now solidly majority party. They have met the enemy, and to paraphrase Walt Kelly’s Okefenokee critter, they are them.

If you’ve seen Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed give a speech over the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard his pitch about how important the deepening of the Savannah River is to Atlanta’s future.

For Reed, deepening the Port of Savannah’s channel to accommodate the larger ships soon to be coming through the Panama Canal is key to the development of the region, and thereby to the future health of our city.

If the mayor is correct, events took a fateful turn last week. Reed and other supporters of the Savannah harbor-deepening project now find themselves hostage to something with which they are ill-prepared to cope, namely, politics in South Carolina.

This is really the story of a sort of three-legged sack race, prompted by the Panama Canal expansion to be completed in 2014, and the lure of the riches to be gained by accommodating the larger container ships coming in its wake.

Last week’s story of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure cancer charity’s hasty retreat from its new policy excluding Planned Parenthood from funding followed what in the past few months has become a familiar arc.

Like Bank of America’s abandonment of its announced debit card fee, the Netflix retreat from its bivalved pricing system, and the reversal of fortunes for the SOPA/PIPA anti-piracy bills in Congress, that arc was a very short one. An aroused universe of customers/contributors/online users emerged quickly and a blast of media exposure forced the organizations involved to reverse themselves.

Certainly, these examples speak to the already well-understood power of the internet to focus a firestorm of negative attention, sometimes on subjects as passing as a singer’s performance on Saturday Night Live. But they may point to something deeper, a new wrinkle in a culture already molded by the requirements of rapid response.