Mwahahahaha !

Brilliant !

November 10, 2004 @ 8:39 pm | Comment

Yes – my mother forwarded me that link.

God, I’d love to see the Democrats grow some balls and campaign with that as a platform. They’d lose, but it would be a righeous loss.

November 10, 2004 @ 11:12 pm | Comment

SO, let’s summerize:

Bush voters are stupid.

US military officers are retards.

Southerners can fuck off.

Richard, you’ve come un-hinged.

But then, as a Southern, Bush voting, former US military officer, why would you care about my stoopid opinion?

November 11, 2004 @ 1:04 am | Comment

I don’t see any humor nor any genius in that writing–especially from a yankee.

Saying fuck and making a generalization and stereotype about southerners, it ain’t right. But then again, damn yankees always have to whine in order to feel superior to us, southerners.

Like to take the lil’ yankee puke, put his ass in Angola State Prison and then have my cousin, Bubba ride that punk like a brahma bull and then beat his head in with bible. GLORY! DIXIE!

November 11, 2004 @ 1:44 am | Comment

Hank, that would be just pure meanness.

November 11, 2004 @ 2:39 am | Comment

Richard … all you’re doing is providing more ammunition to people of the opposing political view. I kill myself laughing every time I read Conrad’s 10 pieces of advice for Democrats … and it just gets funnier and funnier the more stuff I read from real Democrats.

November 11, 2004 @ 5:12 am | Comment

Hey, I thought it was funny. And the points about the blue states subsidizing the red is quite valid.

November 11, 2004 @ 6:11 am | Comment

By the way, I live in the south, and obviously this piece is not to be taken literally. Most of my friends are Southerners (like Conrad and Joseph Bosco). I’m not writing about Southerners, but about this phenomenon of creeping red state fundamentalism, at the expense of the blue states who pay their bills and finance their paleo-conservative laws.

Conrad, I didn’t write it, so I don’t think it’s fair to say I’m unhinged. Just angry and nervous about today’s America, and, I believe, for good reason.

Another blogger writing about this issue of the north and the south puts it better than I can:

Let me make one thing perfectly clear with respect to my post below. The south is not a monolith and “middle America” is not only the south. The south votes more than 40% consistently with the Democrats, many of whom are white progressives and african American.

I am talking about a cultural attitude, much of which has metastisized to other parts of the country, in which liberals are demonized as “the other” and eliminationist rhetoric is commonly cloaked in appeals to religion and “values.” This, I believe, is an outgrowth of a long standing, grievance mind-set with its roots in the south. However, it is being exploited by a bunch of rich, greedy opportunists who have spent billions creating a media infrastructire — particularly talk radio — to pound these attitudes into people’s heads. This dichotomy in our country has been with us from the beginning, but this is the first time it’s been marketed successfully by the immoral oligarchs who, in a sweet bit of irony, are making a tidy profit at it.

For those who are criticising me for not providing solutions but simply whining about the situation, I plead guilty. I wish I had the answer. What I have learned, after years of believing in the DLC experiment, is that this problem isn’t a matter of compromising on issues. The issues are weapons and each time we capitulate they pull another one out of their sleeve. I no longer believe it is really about these issues, it’s about something else.

So I’m sorry if this offended anyone. But I’ve been offended myself lately. If you want to see why, go read this, and tell me why I shouldn’t be damned worried and damned offended. If they’re free to say, in effect, fuck liberals and fuck gays and fuck free thinkers I’m free to point readers to an article that says fuck the south (the south being of course, not monolithic or all-inclusive but a metaphor). For whatever reasons, this bigotry, the kind i never expected to see become mainstream in America, is being generated from deep within the red states and is most lovingly received in the South.

And finally, bush, by sneering that Kerry was a “Massachusetts liberal,” was saying Fuck Massachusetts (and really Fuck the Northeast), and none of you raised a whimper. I’m tired of trying to make nice with thugs and bigots, and sometimes a little strong language is appropriate. I wonder how genteel all of you would be if you were being told by people who have sway over our president that you are a monster intent on “destroying marriage and destroying the earth.” Tell me how loving you would be.

Fuck ’em.

November 11, 2004 @ 9:40 am | Comment

Don’t hate me, Richard — I personally found the people of Massachusetts so intolerant, we had to move back to Arizona to escape their non-stop assholery. They don’t call them Massholes for nothing! And I was born in MA!

Both red and blue staters need to lose the moral superiority and learn to embrace this ugly American experiment, however “redheaded stepchild” we may be to each other.

November 11, 2004 @ 9:56 am | Comment

Devi, I could never hate you. 🙂

Any kind of stereotyping is bound to be dangerous. Of course there will be intolerant people in any group. As soon as Massachussetts becomes a hotbed of activity for intolerance based on race or sexuality I’ll say something about them, too. But the fact remains some of the most extreme views are coming from the South, and they seem to be on the verge of becoming mainstream. (Did you see the story about the textbook on evolution recently?) I’ll speak out about this stuff wherever it happens, irrespective of geographical boundaries.

November 11, 2004 @ 10:26 am | Comment

And one last hefy quote from another article on the same topic, more or less.

Firstly, living in the sticks doesn’t make you more American. Rural, urban or suburban–they’re irrelevant. San Francisco’s predominantly gay Castro district is every bit as red, white and blue as the Texas panhandle. But if militant Christianist Republicans from inland backwaters believe that secular liberal Democrats from the big coastal cities look upon them with disdain, there’s a reason. We do, and all the more so after this election.

I spent my childhood in fly-over country, in a decidedly Republican town in southwest Ohio. It was a decent place to grow up, with well-funded public schools and only the occasional marauding serial killer to worry about. The only ethnic restaurant sold something called “Mandarin Chinese,” Midwestese for cold noodles slathered with sugary sauce. The county had three major employers: the Air Force, Mead Paper, and National Cash Register–and NCR was constantly laying people off. Folks were nice, but depressingly closed-minded. “Well,” they’d grimace when confronted with a new musical genre or fashion trend, “that’s different.” My suburb was racially insular, culturally bland and intellectually unstimulating. Its people were knee-jerk conformists. Faced with the prospect of spending my life underemployed, bored and soused, I did what anyone with a bit of ambition would do. I went to college in a big city and stayed there.

Mine is a common story. Every day in America, hundreds of our most talented young men and women flee the suburbs and rural communities for big cities, especially those on the West and East Coasts. Their youthful vigor fuels these metropolises–the cultural capitals of the blue states. These oases of liberal thinking–New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Boston–are homes to our best-educated people, most vibrant popular culture and most innovative and productive businesses. There are exceptions–some smart people move from cities to the countryside–but the best and brightest gravitate to places where liberalism rules.

Maps showing Kerry’s blue states appended to the “United States of Canada” separated from Bush’s red “Jesusland” are circulating by email. Though there is a religious component to the election results, the biggest red-blue divide is intellectual. “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?” asked the headline of the Daily Mirror in Great Britain, and the underlying assumption is undeniable. By any objective standard, you had to be spectacularly stupid to support Bush.

72 percent who cast votes for George W. Bush, according to a University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks poll, believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or active WMD programs. 75 percent think that a Saddam-Al Qaeda link has been proven, and 20 percent say Saddam ordered 9/11. Of course, none of this was true.

Kerry voters were less than half as idiotic: 26 percent of Democrats bought into Bush-Cheney’s WMD lies, and 30 percent into Saddam-Al Qaeda.

Would Bush’s supporters have voted for him even if they had known he was a serial liar? Perhaps their hatred of homosexuals and slutty abortion vixens would have prompted them to make the same choice–an idiotic perversion of priorities. As things stand, they cast their ballots relying on assumptions that were demonstrably false.

Educational achievement doesn’t necessarily equal intelligence. After all, Bush holds a Harvard MBA. Still, it bears noting that Democrats are better educated than Republicans. You are 25 percent more likely to hold a college degree if you live in the Democratic northeast than in the red state south. Blue state voters are 25 percent more likely, therefore, to understand the historical and cultural ramifications of Bush’s brand of bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy.

Inland Americans face a bigger challenge than coastal “cultural elitists” when it comes to finding high-quality news coverage. The best newspapers, which routinely win prizes for their in-depth local and national reporting and staffers overseas, line the coasts. So do the cable TV networks with the broadest offerings and most independent radio stations. Bush Country makes do with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity syndicated on one cookie-cutter AM outlet after another. Citizens of the blue states read lackluster dailies stuffed with generic stories cut and pasted from wire services. Given their dismal access to high-quality media, it’s a minor miracle that 40 percent of Mississippians turned out for Kerry.

So our guy lost the election. Why shouldn’t those of us on the coasts feel superior? We eat better, travel more, dress better, watch cooler movies, earn better salaries, meet more interesting people, listen to better music and know more about what’s going on in the world. If you voted for Bush, we accept that we have to share the country with you. We’re adjusting to the possibility that there may be more of you than there are of us. But don’t demand our respect. You lost it on November 2.

November 11, 2004 @ 11:12 am | Comment

Here’s a thought. — let’s no one fuck anyone, unless of course, you find them sexually attractive, then by all means fuck away.

November 11, 2004 @ 10:02 pm | Comment

And with Conrad’s words of deep wisdom, we can end this fucking discussion.

November 12, 2004 @ 6:59 am | Comment