THIS MODERN WORLD

The New York Times has an editorial this morning about voting irregularities. This line jumped out at me:

The wild rumors about Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where the official results appeared to include an extra 90,000 votes, were a result of its bizarrely complicated method of posting election results, which is different in even- and odd-numbered years.

I’m sorry — the rules are different in even- and odd-numbered years? Jesus Christ. This isn’t a coherent electoral system. It’s that card game that Captain Kirk makes up on the gangster planet in order to distract his captors.

…Quick Google search later: Fizzbin! Here are the “rules”:

Each player gets 6 cards except the player on the dealer’s right, who gets 7.
* The second card is turned up, except on Tuesday.
* Two Jacks is 1/2 a Fizzbin.
* Three Jacks equal a Slark, which means you’re disqualified.
* Another Jack is good, otherwise you’d need a King and a duce except at night when you’d need a Queen & a 4.
* If you didn’t get 3 Jacks, if you got a King, you would get another card except when it’s dark when you’d have to give it back.

…whoops! A reader who has apparently had more coffee this morning than your humble host points out: “When did we last have a presidential election in an odd-numbered year? Seems to me the answer is ‘Never.’ That would make the different rules irrelevant…”

…though given our electoral system’s complete lack of standardization nationally — different rules, different machines, etc., all at the whim of local officials — I still think there’s something to the “Fizzbin” analogy…

* * *

Meanwhile, they’re still coming up with inventive approaches to the process of democracy in Florida:

Florida, the state that decided the 2000 presidential race with hanging chads and botched ballot designs, added a page to its history of electoral quirkiness this week: a city council race that was decided by a coin toss.

G. P. Sloan, 77, and Richard Flynn, 75, each received 689 votes on Nov. 2. Two recounts did not determine a winner, so the candidates and three dozen supporters gathered on Friday in the community center of this town of 4,400 residents, 25 miles west of Orlando.
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“This is a very unusual occurrence in this day and age when we have such sophisticated mechanisms to vote on, such as a touch-screen computerized voter system,” Mayor Connie Fleetwood said. “We’ve come down to a coin toss.”

Later, Ms. Fleetwood said she would have preferred a special election over the flip. “I think it’s so primitive,” she said.

Bob Jones congratulates the President:

The media tells us that you have received the largest number of popular votes of any president in America’s history. Congratulations!

In your re-election, God has graciously granted America — though she doesn’t deserve it — a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet. Because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of voice eagerly.

Don’t equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ. Honor the Lord, and He will honor you.

Full letter here.

…Maureen Dowd has some related thoughts:

You’d think the one good thing about merging church and state would be that politics would be suffused with glistening Christian sentiments like “love thy neighbor,” “turn the other cheek,” “good will toward men,” “blessed be the peacemakers” and “judge not lest you be judged.”

Yet somehow I’m not getting a peace, charity, tolerance and forgiveness vibe from the conservatives and evangelicals who claim to have put their prodigal son back in office.

I’m getting more the feel of a vengeful mob – revved up by rectitude – running around with torches and hatchets after heathens and pagans and infidels…

— snip —

Mr. Stephanopoulos asked Dr. Dobson about his comment to The Daily Oklahoman that “Patrick Leahy is a ‘God’s people-hater.’ I don’t know if he hates God, but he hates God’s people,” noting that it was not a particularly Christian thing to say about the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. (Especially after that vulgar un-Christian thing Dick Cheney spat at Mr. Leahy last summer.)

“George,” Dr. Dobson haughtily snapped back, “do you think you ought to lecture me on what a Christian is all about?” Why not? The TV host is the son of a Greek Orthodox priest.

…here’s a good profile of Dobson.

Okay, every time I mention the Great Divide, I get email from liberals who live in Iowa or Arkansas or Texas, insisting that their very existence refutes the whole red America/blue America thing. And I’ll concede up front that it’s an oversimplification. Look, not only did I grow up in Iowa and Arkansas (with some time in Georgia and Florida as well), but my very livelihood as an adult has depended for many years on the fact that my work runs in newspapers all over the damn place, probably in more red states than blue.

(And just glancing at my Cafe Press stats, in the last few weeks, I see I’ve received orders from Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Colorado, Louisiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Utah, Alabama…I could go on, but you probably get the point.)

However.

Because I did grow up in Iowa and Arkansas, I also know that being a liberal in those places — even when you are sequestered in a college town — is a substantively different experience from being a liberal in San Francisco or New York. And anyone who writes me and tries to pretend otherwise, tries to pretend that there is absolutely no difference, that rural Arkansas is every bit as enlightened and tolerant as San Francisco or New York, and only an out-of-touch East Coast elitist would think otherwise — well, you may be kidding yourself, but you’re not kidding me.

In short, I think it’s foolish to deny that there are regional cultural differences — but I also think they’re not always as clear cut as the easy media stereotype would suggest. Which may be why Frank Rich chooses to emphasize the difference in red and blue culture:

The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose “moral values” are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O’Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett’s name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats’ Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans’ Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.

If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox’s very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson’s “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” and the Vivid Girls’ “How to Have a XXX Sex Life,” which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O’Reilly. There are “real fun parts and exciting parts,” said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News’s “Big Story Weekend,” an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.

The Stranger, on the other hand, argues that the Great Divide is ultimately between city mice and country mice:

It’s time to state something that we’ve felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion — New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too — a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland “values” like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country.

There’s more, and I don’t agree with all of it, and I’m sure it will annoy a lot of you, especially if you happen to be a liberal living in a rural setting. But, sorry — your existence does not negate the larger point they are making, the thing that a lot of people trying to grapple with right now: there are two sets of values in America. And to be blunt, ours are better. So how do we win this fight next time around? Figuring out who “we” are seems like a better place to start than wasting time wondering how to appeal to knuckle-draggers who worry that gay marriage will lead inevitably to matrimony between men and animals, if not kitchen appliances.

Or so it seems to me. But what the hell do I know? I’m just an out-of-touch Northeastern elitist.

If I believed anyone actually made decisions based upon what David Brooks has to say, this would be infuriating.

Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.

Here.

…a number of readers seem to have a problem with this one. All I can say is, “lighten up.” And remember that Swift wasn’t really suggesting that we eat Irish babies, either. Sure, this piece is hyperbolic, but the fundamental point is important: how exactly is it that liberals, especially Northeastern liberals, have come to be defined as somehow less than “real” Americans? I’ve been getting bashed over the head with that crap since 9/11, and I can assure you, it gets old real quick.