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Q: What's a "hillbilly marriage counselor"?

A: A 2 x 4

Hoo hoo! That shore is funny, Zeke! Pass me the jug!

Used to be, if you had embarrassing relatives, you kept 'em out of town until the race for county commissioner was over.

If you had an Italian last name and you were running for office in Connecticut in 1960, and your Uncle Joey the Nose was big in unions and waste management, you kept The Nose away from your campaign events. Same thing today if you're an African American candidate and your cousin "Li'l Cheddah" only wears red clothes and sells the kind of rocks you don't use to gravel your driveway.

Yeah. During election season, the candidate fills his or her closet with the family's drunks, drug addicts, spouse beaters, criminals and other disgraces. Let' em out after you win.

Not J.D. Vance. He is, by God, proud to come from a long line of drunken, drug-addicted, illiterate, violent hillbillies.

Why is he so proud?

Because he got the hell away from them is why. Joined the military, went to Yale, made a big pile of money, and reached back for his family only when he needed a book topic or a dark mirror for his own success.

But he's proud, by God. He's proud of where he came from, and he's proud that he got away.

Which he should be. Working your way out of poverty is a hell of a lot better than staying poor.

Americans love a success story. In particular, we love a story about the wealthy and successful man or woman who "got out."

"She got out of the ghetto," they say when they introduce you. "He battled his way out of poverty," the talk show host says.

Vance can't quite get out. Chosen as the VP candidate to neutralize Donald Trump's petulant, rich boy, draft dodger persona, Vance has to keep reaching back, holding up the relatives as an example of how he can relate to you. Donald Trump gets a pass on the embarrassing family members thing because, in his family, he's the embarrassment

"This is my mother the drug addict," Vance says, proudly holding Mama up by the scruff of the neck, the way you pick up a cat. "Mama was a drug addict my whole childhood, and I was a hillbilly, and we is all on drugs."

I wonder how you feel about Vance of the Appalachians if you live in Kentucky and you drive a truck and your wife works at the nursing home and you've got two kids and you take the Pentecostal Church pretty seriously so you don't drink or do drugs?

I'll tell you how you feel. If you're a loyal Appalachian, you and your wife each take an OxyContin and start beating the kids, just to show everybody that Vance ain't lyin'.

It's poverty snobbery, is what it is.

"You were so poor, you only had three teeth by the time you were 16? Hell, buddy. We were so poor my whole family only had three teeth between us and there were nine of us."

If Vance keeps this up, and if people keep questioning his hillbilly bona fides, he's gonna have to show up at rallies in overalls, carrying a jug of Mountain Dew and totin' a shotgun.

"Is they any revenooers in the audience tonight?" he'll bellow at the crowd. "I hates revenooers!"

Makes Vance sound like a pro wrestling star, doesn't it? Don't worry about it. Hillbillies love pro wrestling.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.