Tornado Alley (PROG)

[sortagreen]

Too good.

Here's a similar post from the last time we lost and election by getting pencil whipped. I don't remember exactly when...


Reach out and sneer: Dem radicals speak to the Red States
By New Democrat Outreach Program (feedback at theregister.co.uk)
Published Sunday 7th November 2004 12:30 GMT
Comment The defeated Kerry may have called for unity last week, but already radical elements inside and outside of the Democrat party are arguing for the abandonment of the old ways of cosy consensus. One such organisation, formed even as the last queues for the ballots ebbed away, styles itself "The New Democrat Outreach Program." The Register has been contacted by one NDOP activist, styling himself Commandante Camembert, with an early draft of the organisation's first communique to the nation. "We must," says Camembert, "learn to speak to all of the people. But we mustn't be afraid to sneer when we do it."

We think they've got that right already, although the "outreach" may need some work. Anway, here it is:

An open letter to the Red-State victors:
With hard work and superb organization, you have triumphed over John Kerry and the forces of Blue-state paternalism. Congratulations. The multinational corporations that hold you in bondage remain free to profit off your sweat nearly tax free, while their overpaid senior execs continue to pay a pittance in personal income tax.

Your primary and secondary schools will continue to turn out third-rate pupils with limited opportunities, while you enjoy the satisfaction of making it on your own without health care when a catastrophic illness bankrupts your family.

Your agricultural universities will continue issuing Ph.D.s in football, and bogus Protestant Evangelical and Fundamentalist theology, and how to jerk off a bull safely. Your children will learn to borrow enough money to erect chicken houses so that they, like you, can take custody -- not possession, but custody -- of Tyson's chicks, feed them, rear them, assume losses from those that fail to thrive, and in the end earn just enough money to service their endless debt, and realize a profit of perhaps $12K a year. Your bank thanks you; Tyson thanks you; George W. Bush thanks you; and I thank you.

You can continue sending your sons to die in Iraq on a fool's errand. When you bury them, you can console yourselves with Bush's platitudes about their heroic mission to defend America from weapons of mass destruction.

You can savor the deficit spending that stimulates commerce today, but will cripple the US economy in ten or fifteen years' time when the bills come due with interest. Perhaps a Democrat will be in office at that time, who can be blamed for W's delayed economic fiasco.

You can continue believing, as Republican Party brainwashing has persuaded you, that we, your neighbors, are your enemies. You can believe that we have no morals; that we pimp out our teenage daughters for Internet porn; that we eat babies; that we are all gay; that we are cowards on the battlefield; and that we want to run your lives and give you AIDS.

Here's a clue: we are not your enemies; we are your countrymen. Your enemies are the greedy multinationals that the Republican Party bends over backwards to accommodate. Incidentally, most of them are based in Blue states, as are their Republican owners and major shareholders.

Here in the Blue States, Democrats and Republicans alike generate the lion's share of America's wealth, although it is you Reds who provide the lion's share of the stoop labor. You are our Mexicans, so to speak. We could not have accomplished the economic miracle that is America without your willing capitulation to a system that lies to you and fucks you over at every turn.

Look at economic output and educational achievement on a state-by-state basis: it's painfully evident that we Blues are immensely more productive and better educated than you Reds. We have lots more money. We live longer. We eat better. We work less. We fuck more. We do cocaine and smoke fine Canadian buds, not the homebrew crank and cheap Mexican headache reefer you guys are stuck with. We drink French wine and Stoli martinis, not Budweiser. Our children rarely bother us: we've got them on Ritalin and Prozac. Our teeth are straighter and whiter, our necks longer, and our fingernails cleaner. And many of us are the Republican elite who have just punked you.

It's good to be a Blue, regardless of which party you join.

Understandably, you resent us, so you've fabricated an imaginary measure of superiority: Christian "values." Yet you talk about values the way a pre-teen girl talks about "love" in fan letters to Ashton Kutcher. You recycle quasi-religious platitudes and received slogans. You know nothing of moral theology, a rigorous philosophical pursuit that hardly exists outside the Catholic Church and its elite universities. You make of the Bible what you will; you attend prayer meetings with other semi-literates, where you reinforce each other's sloppy understandings of the text, and combine them with half-digested bits of old-timey Hallmark-card "wisdom." And when you spout gibberish, you call it "speaking in tongues." You actually fancy that you're saints, you silly, narcissistic creatures.

Nevertheless, you are fellow Americans. The Blue Republican elite encouraged you to vote for George W Bush, because they quite simply own him, and they know that his administration will make policies that help them, even if hurt you. We Blue Democrats voted for John Kerry because we believed he would minister to your needs better than Bush. A President Kerry would have shared some of our wealth with you, assured your health care, raised the minimum wage, and checked the rapacious greed of the multinationals that hold you in thrall.

President Kerry would have helped us to help you, which is all that we ask. It pains us to see you in wage slavery. It pains us to see you so ignorant and uneducated, and so eager to place yourselves in bondage. Yes, we live better; but we wish you to live better too, even if it means sacrifice on our part.

What we wanted for you would have been far better than that which you, in your ignorant pride, demanded for yourselves. Oh, you defeated us all right, but only to your detriment.

We Blues will come out of the Bush era no worse for wear, although you Reds will come out very much diminished, deeper in debt, and less able to improve your circumstances by your own powers. But because you wish to be flattered more than helped, you will be grateful for your ass fucking from the Blue-state Republican elite that is laughing behind your backs today.

We did not wish it so. We honestly did want to help.

On 2 November, you thanked us by electing a shrewd, manipulative handmaiden to corporate America who panders to you while ruthlessly exploiting your ignorance and weakness for the benefit of his patrons in the national plutocracy. There is nothing we can do about that. You won fair and square.

We should let you rot. We should secede and leave you to fend for yourselves. Then you will see firsthand just how dependent you are. We are sick of fighting for you by fighting against you. Perhaps, when you see how dreary your lives have become without us, you will finally develop the spine to fight for your basic, human rights. And then we will gladly confront the plutocracy alongside you. We need your help to defeat the Blue Republicans, who, I assure you, are just as decadent as we are, though often richer.

But until you finally learn to respect yourselves, we can't respect you, and we therefore can't be bothered to give a rat's ass about you.

So let us secede, Blue America and Red America. We can handle the Blue state Republicans, so long as we don't have a lot of ignorant Red state lemmings frustrating our efforts and screwing themselves in the bargain. Secession will enable us both to live as we have chosen without the other's interference. We will prosper, and you will get a clue.

But do stay in touch after the borders slam shut. When you finally tire of living on the modern, corporate plantations of Cargill, Tyson, ConAgra and Smithfield; when you tire of shopping at Wal-Mart and sending your daughters to sling hash at Denny's in hopes that they'll meet the nicer sort of truck driver; when you tire of sneaking into Blue America as illegal white-trash wetbacks eager for casual work dusting our parlors; and when, like men, you finally rise up in rebellion against this immoral usury -- then, and only then, let us talk.

We'll gladly get your backs. But first you must grow the brains and the balls needed to profit from our help. ®
© Copyright 2005

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/07/blue_state_to_reds/

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Message In Reply To:
Red vs. blue? Not true.
By Robert Kuttner / August 10, 2005

TO HEAR network commentators and read innumerable press stories, you would
think the United States was divided into two bitterly opposed cultural
worlds known as red states and blue states. As widely used political
concepts, these phrases actually date back only to the 2000 presidential
elections, when all the networks used the same color-coded maps to show
which states went Republican or Democrat.
The reality is quite different. In the very close 2004 election, for
instance, the contest was decided by 10 points or less in 21 states. And a
surprising number of states voted one way for president, the other for
senator or governor.

Montana, which Bush won by better than 20 points, elected a Democratic
governor and gave Democrats control of both houses of the Legislature.
Wyoming, which gave Kerry just 29 percent, has a Democratic governor, too.
Likewise ''red state" Arizona and Oklahoma. Even Kansas, the poster child
for working people who supposedly don't vote their pocketbook interests,
has a Democratic governor, too. Maybe there's nothing the matter with
Kansas.

Ohio, which seldom supports a Democrat for president, is presumably a
diehard ''red" state. Yet a Democrat, campaigning as an Iraq veteran
against Bush's war, nearly won the state's most heavily Republican house
seat in a 52-48 special election to fill a vacancy.

Conversely, even the ''bluest" of the blue states, such as New York and
California, send dozens of Republicans to Congress, and elect GOP
governors. True blue Massachusetts also keeps electing Republican
governors (who reciprocate by leaving town, but that's another story.)

Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman, has recognized these
realities in calling for a ''50-state strategy," just as Republican
chairman Ken Mehlman is pursuing African-Americans, the Democrats' most
loyal voting bloc.

Despite my own determination to avoid this sloppy language, I caught
myself lazily describing Senator Bill Frist as hailing from a ''red
state." In fact, Tennessee sends five Democrats to the House, and four
Republicans.

The mischief is that this usage paints our country as far more bitterly
divided than it is. Yes, there are Limbaugh ditto-heads (several reliably
send me unprintable e-mails), just as there are crunchy lefties driving
old Volvos with more bumper stickers than paint.

However, only a small minority of Americans are cultural warriors.
Mercifully, most Americans hold appropriately complex views on contentious
political or moral topics that demand complex thinking. These include the
Iraq war, abortion, gay rights, religion, health care, the environment,
and other issues that supposedly divide America into warring camps.

It is possible, for example, to believe that Saddam Hussein is a monster
and still have major doubts about whether Bush's Iraq policy made sense.
Polls show that a majority of Americans want to keep abortion legal, but
have serious qualms about its widespread use. As citizens, most Americans
want a clean environment, but as consumers we are addicted to polluting
cars. A majority of heterosexual Americans think the government should
stay out of the bedrooms of gay adults, but still have trouble with gay
marriage, though not necessarily domestic partnerships. Most Americans
believe in God, but most believers are tolerant of people of diverse
faiths or no faith, and don't think the government should be in the
business of proselytizing, much less that religion should dictate science.

Americans are capable of splitting tickets, and changing their views over
time. Over the past two decades, we have become a country far more
tolerant of difference. We have also become more skeptical about large
institutions generally, whether big government or big business.

Political scientists have long celebrated the fact that Americans have
multiple, cross-cutting identities. We are not defined just by religion or
ethnic group, or region, like so much of the conflict-ridden world, but by
occupation, hobby, civic activity, and much more. Our three-dimensional
selves create multiple opportunities for empathy, and save us from being
Yugoslavia or Iraq.

The pundits have lately introduced a new color -- purple -- into the
political lexicon, but with the false implication that a state with both
''red" and ''blue" tendencies is something exotic.

The press is supposed to protect us from stereotypes, not reinforce them.
Next election, the networks should give us the complex palette we deserve.

Let's hear it for purple mountains' majesty.

Correction: Last week I mistakenly named Ohio Senator George Voinovich
''John."

Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, can be reached at
[e-mail]. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/08/10/red_vs_blue_not_true/