Well I am a Kerry supporter and will not stoop to demeaning the voting populace that reinstated that intelligent :wally brave :smack: entrepeneur who worked himself up form abject poverty to become our 43rd President.
No, I will not stoop to such tactics. I’ll just relate a relevant movie quote:
**“You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons”.
Gene Wilder from “Blazing Saddles”
**
Okay, I actually quoted that because I think we are all taking ourselves a bit too seriously. I am from Boston so that alone should give you lots of fodder for a barrage of stunning ripostes.
Heck, here in Boston we’ve got high taxes, political correctness to the nth degree, Ted Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, etc.
If that doesn’t give you ammunition for comedic replies then you were certainly absent on the day they passed out a sense of humor.
But the full clause is “the fucking ignorant rural American folk who fell for the fear mongering of George Bush”, with no comma after “folk”. So the rural Americans in question are modified as fucking ignorant and those who fell to Bush’s fear mongering.
Which, if they printed maps of the county by county results in overseas papers, is the same as calling all of them that. Believe it or not, most of them believe in the Conservative view. It wasn’t the “fear-mongering” that brought them to the polls. It was belief. Being one of those rural voters, I object rather strongly to such a characterization, especially from a furriner!
Not all of rural America are conservative republicans. Look at New England. Aside from a few areas (Boston, Providence, a few others) NE is very rural, and with the exception of NH, votes Democratic. A lot of New York is rural too, and they are often democaratic as well.
To be fair, I don’t think it was the fear mongering that did it.
After all, the people in the places that have the most to fear from terror attacks voted Kerry.
I almost think that rural Americans voted Bush in the hopes that he can create enough terrorists to go around. Why should big cities get all the fun?
Seriously though: Most Republicans don’t understand the goals or views that they are voting for. I doubt the vast majority of them even know who Chalabi is, or which secrets he gave to Iran, or how the WMD sites were looted, or who we sent after Bin Laden, or that Iraq wasn’t connected to 9-11, among other things.
And it is too easy to say “well, you should have showed them.” Really? How?
By ** Nightime**: Most Republicans don’t understand the goals or views that they are voting for.
Cite?
I think the people that voted for Bush were well informed. They knew all these things. They did not vote out of fear or ignorance. They voted the way they did because they wanted to. To them, Bush represented the type of leadership they wanted, or at least wanted more than Kerry. They got off their asses and went to vote.
The scale will not be tipped by the Dems pandering to the 20% in the center. At least not without continuing to be Pubbies lite, only more so.
Didn’t something like 40% of the registered voters fail to vote? Those 40% may well represent a group of lefties that didn’t feel like Kerry’s pubbie lite platform was worth getting off their collective asses and going to vote for. There lays the secret to future success, finding a platform that will energize that 40%.
Next time come out with a platform that clearly supports Roe v. Wade, SSM and the other things that the lefties hold so dear.
Calling Republicans ignorant and fearful won’t get it done. Assume that they are not well informed and don’t know what they are doing and you’ll be operating from a false premise, shot down before you start. As hard as it may be for some of you to grasp, most of those that voted for Bush did it with full knowledge, eyes wide open, and were not motivated by fear.
Before the next election, find out what the missing 40% is looking for and give them a reason to get off their duffs and vote!
In the event of some catastrophic loss of amenities like electrical power and urban water supplies, those “morons” are the ones who’ll survive. You’ll likely be a dead brain.
Well, yeah, there’s that. I’d have clean water, plenty to eat and would be warm in the winter. There’s even horses here for transportation when the gas gives out. I would miss the air conditioner in the summer, but that’s not life threatening.
Look: The image of the un-informed country rube is no longer valid. They even deliver daily newspapers out in the sticks now. :rolleyes: Ride through the country and look: You don’t see many rooftop TV antennas anymore. We can’t get cable TV, but note all the satellite dishes, large and small. We get the same information and choices of channels the city dwellers get via cable.
Many of the people in the Red States have different ideas than many of those in the Blue States do. But that’s not due to lack of information, ignorance or fear. If you think that, you don’t understand your opposition. In football or politics, it’s kinda’ hard to win if you underestimate your opponent.
All the more reason that urban voters had the most to fear from terror attacks, and voted Kerry.
I think the truism that rural voters think Bush is better against terror is really not true at all - they just aren’t scared of terror attacks. And why should they be afraid of terror attacks? They are extremely unlikely to be targetted, and after all they have the food and water anyway. It’s the city folks who will die.
I’m not calling them fearful, and I wouldn’t use the word “ignorant” because of its connotations (consider “you don’t know him” vs “you are ignorant of him”). But there are many things they don’t know or understand about what they voted for.
I honestly don’t think they could explain why the Bush administration made Chalabi it’s best friend, let him give vital classified information to Iran, and took his word on false intelligence about Iraq, then used that false intelligence to justify the war. Or why, if we thought there were WMD, we let WMD sites be looted before we got to them. I don’t think they know who we really sent after Bin Laden. I think a lot of them still think Iraq was connected to 9-11.
Even I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse all rural folk of being Bush supporters. Lots of hard core Democratic farm folks in Illinois, California, Wisconsin, etc.
There were also a shitload of people in states like Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia who didn’t march to Dubya’s tune. Just not enough of them, by a vast margin.
But if you look at the Red states who went overwhelmingly in favor of Dubya, well – they aren’t exactly hotbeds of open-minded intellectuals. They don’t earn spit but work their asses off and are the first to have their kids shipped off to Iraq. Yet, it is easy to get those votes. Just pander to the flag-waving, war mongering, anti-queer, good-ol-boy mentality. Economy and health care don’t mean shit. As long as you’re pissing off the rest of the world, well, dang gum it, you must be doing somethin’ right.
We sent local warlords and their men to get Bin Laden.
However, many of the men had actually worked for Al Qaeda! Also, the warlords were not friendly with each other and this made the whole operation go poorly.
One of the most influential of them said “The Americans can bomb all they want, they’ll never catch Osama.” Another said: “We are not interested in killing the Arabs. They are our Muslim brothers.”
Many of the very people we sent to get Bin Laden had ties to Al Qaeda, and made deals with them.
There was a clear path to Pakistan, and we didn’t block it. We could have. But we didn’t. We sent largely Al Qaeda friendly and US-hating warlords and their men and all evidence shows that Bin Laden literally walked to Pakistan.
who worked himself up form abject poverty to become our 43rd President.