"Reach out to the Heartland? Don't make me laugh!"

This is an article in Salon today with which I for the moment find myself in strong agreement. Here's the graf that really spoke to me:

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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.

"Reach out" to these voters? Yeah. Then boil your hand till it's sterilized.
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Here's the url for the rest:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/11/04/heartland/index.html

I lived in The Heartland (Omaha) for 11 years before moving to LA, and among other things fought the bigotry of DOMA and had my daughter scolded in the local Borders Books because an elderly woman overheard her talking to a friend about her mixed ethnic heritage. The woman informed her that among other things she was an abomination who polluted the purity of the white race. It was not long after that when a job in LA came through. There are good people in The Heartland, there are even DUers in The Heartland, but there are also millions and millions of racial and religious bigots, and they won the election.

Red Americans like fascism.