{"id":848,"date":"2004-11-04T10:45:34","date_gmt":"2004-11-04T17:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=848"},"modified":"2004-11-04T10:45:34","modified_gmt":"2004-11-04T17:45:34","slug":"to-the-heartland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2004\/11\/04\/to-the-heartland\/","title":{"rendered":"To The Heartland"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Dear “Flyover Country”:<\/p>\n

You are always very annoying in your defensive posture. “Those Coastal Elites just don’t understand<\/i> us and are always running their mouths about you” and “never even think about us”.<\/p>\n

I’m arguably come from “Flyover Country.”, though from a Coastal “Blue” state. I’m quite hickish, really. I can’t say I disliked the place. I know that 2000 county-by-county map, showing that the large rural areas voted for Bush, and the small densely populated urban areas (and smatterings of Indian Reservations) voted for Gore.<\/p>\n

Actually, no… I really don’t<\/i> understand you… as per the Salon article excerpt you’ll see a little later on.<\/p>\n

Do “we” (whatever “we” is) think about you? You’re weighing heavily on us right now. The Senate is an area that flummoxes me… it’s structure of 2 seats per state heavily favours you guys… sparsely populated states end up with more representation per person than heavily populated states. The result is… Oklahoma just elected an Alan Keyes clone.<\/p>\n

Actually, you want to know something that’s going to depress you? Osama Bin Laden doesn’t even know you exist. The parts of the nation that Bin Laden does<\/i> know exist voted for Kerry. New York — and neighboring New Jeersey, DC… I’m pretty sure he has California on his map. He doesn’t know about you guys, with your “America … Fuck Yeah!” attitude.<\/p>\n

Maybe he’s learning about you now. And laughing at the news reports.<\/p>\n

Insane, ain’t it?<\/p>\n

Well, gotta run and tivo “Will and Grace”, “Queer as Folk”, and various other sundry tv programming.<\/p>\n

………<\/p>\n


\nBy the time I had gone to bed, the chorus of pundits had fixed on a single tune, as they always do, and remarkably quickly, too. (Do they watch one another’s feeds in the green room?) They had dusted off the old theme that the Democrats need to “reach out” more to the “heartland.” Reach out? How, exactly? Forget that these folks blindly ignored all objective reality — and their own best economic and national-security interests — and voted for Bush. Look what they did at the Senate level. In Kentucky, they refused to use even basic sanity as a litmus test, and reelected a guy with apparent late-stage dementia; in Oklahoma, they tapped a fellow who wants to execute doctors who perform abortions, who was sued for sterilizing a woman against her will, who pled guilty to Medicaid fraud, and who largely opposes federal subsidies, even for his own state; in Louisiana, they embraced a man who has made back-door deals with David Duke and who was revealed to have had a long-running affair with a prostitute; in South Carolina, they went with a guy who thinks all gay teachers should be fired; and in Alaska, they reelected a woman who was appointed by her father to the job after a spectacularly undistinguished career as an obscure state senator. And compared with the rest of the GOP Class of ’04, she’s the freaking prom queen. These are the stellar elected officials that the “heartland” has foisted on the rest of us.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear “Flyover Country”: You are always very annoying in your defensive posture. “Those Coastal Elites just don’t understand us and are always running their mouths about you” and “never even think about us”. I’m arguably come from “Flyover Country.”, though from a Coastal “Blue” state. I’m quite hickish, really. I can’t say I disliked the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}