Reach Out To The Red States? Sorry, Not A Chance
By W. David Jenkins III
Okay, look here. Enough is enough. If I hear one more pundit, left or right, say that the Democrats need to start
recognizing how the country is becoming more conservative or how we’re only hurting ourselves if we don’t stop hurting
the red states’ feelings, I swear I’m simply going to explode. You people are kidding, right?
Sorry, but the day I take Tucker the you-know-what Carlson’s advice will be the day that Karl Rove admits they rigged
the last election. Be nice to the red states indeed!
Give me one good reason not to be disgusted with the new American Red Menace. Nah, I didn’t think there were any either.
There is, however, one thing we do need to remember despite our anger. Not every person in those red states deserves
contempt because there are many “blues” in Texas and other Edens of Ignorance who are feeling pretty crappy about things
right now. In fact, most of my mail comes from people who feel awful about being stuck in one of those red states with
all the downsides that come with it.
Red State does not necessarily mean a geographical area in my book. What I’m talking about is more the Red State of Mind
or RSM as I call it.
RSM is the new plague afflicting America and it seems to be spreading. However, I don’t believe it’s as widespread as
some would have us believe – not with voting machines counting backwards and Bush getting over 4,000 votes in precincts
where there are only 800 voters. But with all of the mainstream media ignoring that little voting “glitch” (with the
grateful exception of Keith Olbermann) we're asked to believe that we who are to the left of Benito Mussolini or Dick
Cheney must somehow cater to those who are afflicted with RSM. We’re told that the future of the Democratic Party is
dependent on this new attitude we all need to adhere to. Unity in America demands it!
Uh-huh, sure. That makes about as much sense as a milk bucket under a bull.
Yet, we keep hearing about how the Democrats want to “get religion” or how it is necessary to try to identify with and
draw these RSMers into our fold. We keep hearing about how we need to find a way to appeal somehow to these people– how
they’re the wave of the future and they need to be understood. Well, I don’t know about you but it seems like a fairly
simple solution to me if Democrats want to cater to these folks. It’s no big mystery really. All we need to do is turn
our backs on just about everybody and just start hating about ninety percent of our base. That would pretty much do it.
Why on earth would the Democratic leadership even consider selling out our core principles just to gain votes that
they’re never going to get? My greatest grievance regarding the Kerry campaign is that, once again, the left was afraid
to appeal to its base for fear of alienating the undecideds and the right-wing base who couldn’t stand them in the first
place and wouldn’t vote for ‘em if you put a gun to their head.
And then there were those awful appeals to the undecideds which found our guy out there goose hunting and engaging in
other ridiculous photo-ops. Oh, knock it off already! Anybody who was “undecided” in this election cycle after the
disaster of Bush’s first four screwed up years was beyond help. Forget ‘em. Anybody that uninformed has no right to be
voting in the first place. Okay, well maybe they have the right, but they’re surely not doing the country any favors by
exercising it so irresponsibly.
This brings me back to the RSMs. Let’s try to remember just who these people are and why we should just write them off.
These folks are the same people who feel that blowing up Iraqi babies is better, morally speaking, than Tom and Brad
getting married and moving in next door. These are people who would rather throw away infertile embryonic stem cells
after they go bad rather than use them to find cures for diseases – even though they’ll be the first to stand in line
with the rest of us when those cures are found – no thanks to them.
These are people who can find a way to rationalize the actions of the Republicans in Congress using their first day back
on the job to insure that Tom DeLay gets to keep his job even if he’s indicted for corruption. They see nothing wrong
with Republicans changing a rule that they implemented in 1993 when they were blasting Dan Rostenkowski and trying to
show how much more ethical they were. But now that it’s one of their own, well it’s just a partisan witch hunt and they
need to change the rule.
These are people who are obviously willing to slit their own throats economically because the guy who scared the crap
out of them has “moral values.” These people are gloating over how much stronger we are with Bush in the White House
even though all he did was play on their fears which were grown and nourished by their own willful ignorance –
compliments of Darth Cheney and a chicken-livered media.
The people who the Democratic pundits want us to appeal to are nothing more than ill-informed scaredy-cats and I want to
know why we should give them any credence whatsoever? They are a flipping lost cause and the last thing we need is them
thinking they matter and pardon me, but if it wasn’t for Wally O’Dell making good on his promise, I don’t think we’d
even be having this discussion. C’mon, gang; let’s get things in perspective here.
Based upon stories coming out of Ohio, Florida and other battleground states regarding hostile and anti-democratic
practices of certain precincts, this conservative takeover – this swing to the right we keep hearing about – is based on
the same kind of sloppy logic as the WMDs in Iraq. In short, the new conservative America is a myth. But the media will
continue to perpetuate this malarkey much as they did the empty intelligence which led this country into the biggest
mistake since Viet Nam. Makes you wonder how long it will take them to realize, as they did with Iraq, that they screwed
up again and issue another string of meaningless mea culpa?
Real Time’s Bill Mahar made a statement a few weeks back regarding the plight of the Left. He said, basically, that we
don’t need to sell out to the Red State of Mind, as many Democratic leaders would have us believe. What we need to do,
and what we should have done long ago, is create more Democrats. We as a party have the real moral values that most
Americans share. We just seem to have a totally ineffective way of getting those values across. We constantly seem to
pander to folks who have no intention of supporting anything we stand for simply because they’ve bought the lie that
“liberal” is an obscenity. Yet the programs that have helped these Coulter-loving yahoos in a time of trouble have been
the results of liberalism. The laws and programs protecting their privacy, their civil rights, and their security in old
age, their safety in the workplace and many other areas have been the result of those whom they regard as “God-haters.”
The Left doesn’t need to adopt the views of people such as these in order to be inclusive. What these RSMers need is a
good smack upside the head with a heavy dose of reality.
Maybe four more years of Bush is just what they need, but something tells me they’ll just find a way to blame the mess
we’ll be in four years from now on Clinton. The absolutely last thing the Left needs to do is pander to such idiocy.
ENDS