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How could the Cooch have lost with all those red counties?
Here's a gem which I stumbled upon by anti-choice pest and Professor of American Democracy at Wingnut University, Steve Jalsevac, via Slate:
Ken Cuccinelli Probably Won in Virginia Because Maps.
It's a map showing the results of the voting in Tuesday's Virginia election for governor. All the solid red areas voted a majority for Cuccinelli. The small Dark blue ares went Terry McAuliffe (Yes, I know those are the most densely populated areas of Virginia). The rest were mixed.
Okay, so we start off with the author conceding the fact that population is not evenly-distributed. Though it would really be more of a blurb than an article, it should have just stopped right here. Naturally, this means that we're going to redline it up the onramp onto the cognitive dissonance freeway:
Notice that the map seems to be almost solid red. And yet, Ken Cuccinelli somehow very narrowly lost to his Democrat opponent. To me, something smells about all this and I suspect Ken Cuccinelli actually won Virginia, but certain things happened to ensure that that would not be the official result.
There is a perfectly rational explanation for why the Democratic candidate won, even though the Republican won more counties, so of course we're going to ignore it and theorize a conspiracy! But wait, Steve Jalsevac is no conspiracy nut, because "I would much rather make logicial conclusions about obviously suspect circumstances."
And those logical conclusions are?
What I have observed for some time is the undeniable fact that Barack Obama and many of his key allies (like Terry McAuliffe) are very unethical political operators and chronic liars seemingly willing to do whatever has to be done to gain and to hold onto power.
Oh dear, I plum forgot that socialist marxist fascists never win elections fairly. Because America. Or something.
So, as you can read for yourself if you enjoy accidental lowbrow political comedy, Jalsevac rambles on for awhile about RINOs and eventually finishes up by reassuring everybody that the world actually does exist in easily-detectable black and white, in which the good guys and bad guys are obvious, and that you shouldn't care about how your actions affect other people because you're right and that's all that matters--a coda which would be chilling if it didn't come across as a desperate shout in an empty room.
But, going back a bit, we have yet another example of what has become a deliciously common wingnut reaction to the last couple of election cycles: celebrating the victory of not losing by a landslide. After all, that moderate RINO weaksauce Jim Gilmore didn't run on a platform demanding a return to 15th century morals, and he got clobbered by Mark Warner in their 2008 Senatorial contest (a point made by comparing the above map to the very blue map of that contest and going out of his way to ignore all of the actual reasons for the difference).
The conclusion drawn by Jalsevac is, of course, that TRUE CONSERVATIVES need to pull the party as far to the right as possible and purge all of the "traitorous social liberal Republicans". The Cooch ran on a "screw the female half of Virginia's population" platform and only lost by 2.5%! Because, obviously, the 145,000 people who voted for Libertarian Robert Sarvis were obviously all wayward conservatives who would have voted for Ken Cuccinelli if Sarvis hadn't split the conservative ticket!
The only problem with this narrative is that Sarvis doesn't really fit with the wingnut idea of Libertarian (which, as best I can tell, is a person who froths at the mouth more about the size of government more than they froth at the mouth over the gays and abortion). Robert Sarvis advocates marriage equality. Robert Sarvis firmly opposes abortion restrictions. While it is certainly conceivable that there were people who voted for Sarvis because they really do froth at the mouth more about the size of government more than they froth at the mouth over the gays and abortion, what you have is a guy who is criticizing "traitorous social liberal Republicans" out of one side of his mouth while crowing over the closeness of an election which is due almost entirely to the "traitorous social liberal" Robert Sarvis poaching the majority of his vote from young, socially-liberal Libertarians who like the idea of a neutered government but would never vote for a candidate that would mandate chastity belts for all Virginia women if he thought he could get away with it.
I guess the only way you can be a wingnut and not sink into despondency is to go this far out of your way to have your cake and eat it, too?