I wondered what would happen to Left Blogs after they no longer had a Republican president and Congress to frothe against…this post is probably a preview: it’s going to die a slow death. Content starved, much?

Hey Acer, Did Rush Limbaugh’s show die when Bush was appointed to office? Didn’t think so.

Acer, you guys are the shit fountain that keeps on spewing. No liberal bloggers will be starved for material in the near future, I assure you.

Acer also doesn’t want to dwell on the fact that if every wingnut ran away from the internets and TV to form their own society, then the left and all the left blogs would just talk about the general struggles for equality and so on and so forth. It has to be all about hating him personally, because if we aren’t evil gnomes trying to steal his precious bodily fluids, then he is the crazy whackjob preventing genuine progress because of an overly inflated idea of his own importance.

Oh Amanda. I’m a nice fellow, so I’ll give you all some advice on what to focus on now that the easy targets of Delay, Cheney, and Bush are gone or going and content may be harder to come by: corruption and religious fundamentalism.

Corruption really has no political home because it infects every political party. The bankruptcy bill is a perfect example of how business buys representatives, in this case leading to millions of Americans having their lives fucked over for the next 15-20 years. It’s too bad the guy who was bought (Biden) is now in the White House, and the guy who signed the bill (Bush) is now talking on my teevee about how they sternly lectured the banks about personal responsibility before they gave them $1 trillion and counting. Disgusting.

And religious fundamentalism, because if you go http://www.rr-bb.com you see how batshit insane the hardcore religious fundamentalists are going over Obama and the new political order. It’s the most amazing and frightening story I can find right now.

I want to believe this publisher that “He agrees the Presidential election is a big news event, but with a circulation of 5,000, readers don’t turn to the Herald for big news.” But he doesn’t apologize. It seems the sensible thing would at least be to say “we didn’t realize this was the sort of content our readers expected, and we’ll try to learn from this mistake.”

I guess we could go back to 2004 and see what the paper reported then. If he didn’t report Bush’s win and didn’t get any complaints for it, then this coverage is understandable.

This rural northeast Oklahoma, which is deep hillbilly country.  These people, at least the white ones, are in large part simply grossly undereducated, batshit crazy, and racist as hell.  I know because I grew up and spent 35 years there.  I got out about 20 years ago and have no regrets.  Luckily I got out just ahead of the Republican takeover.  Corbin and Inhoffe are not aberrations.  In fact they represent the saner wing of the Oklahoma Republican Party which starts somewhere to the right of Dr. Mengele and moves right from there.

For once, a story that speaks for me, about my me-ness!!

But seriously, and I am not making this up, I grew up in Sapulpa. My mom still lives there. Let me assure you that this is, ahem, a unique instance of election coverage.

My sister was homecoming queen her senior year. At the homecoming game, the entire student body (who attended the game) plus many adult attendees defiantly stepped out onto the field in this clumsily coordinated praying-in-public in protest of the (at the time recent) SCOTUS decision declaring school sporting events prayers to be unconstitutional. The Sapulpa Herald’s headline the next day was the most awesomely unintentional revelation of conservative values ever:

“Sapulpa Prays, Queen Named”

I wondered what would happen to Left Blogs after they no longer had a Republican president and Congress to frothe against…this post is probably a preview: it’s going to die a slow death. Content starved, much?

Acer, which party is talking about making “lepers” out of lifelong Republicans like Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter Peggy Noonan?

That crunching sound you hear isn’t jackboots—it’s popcorn.  You guys are more entertaining than “General Hospital.”

Ross, what did/does your sister think of that episode?  Must have been pretty surreal.

Oh Amanda. I’m a nice fellow, so I’ll give you all some advice on what to focus on now that the easy targets of Delay, Cheney, and Bush are gone or going and content may be harder to come by: corruption and religious fundamentalism.

Because Amanda et al. totally don’t talk about religious fundamentalism all the time.

Ross, I’m from Bartlesville and my son still lives there.  My sister is in Ponca City.  Your story sounds just about right.  One of the typical displays of stupid, futile insanity which I remmber so well.

I enjoy reading Amanda. I am probably more conservative than she is, but it’s like a guilty pleasure that I wouldn’t talk about with my friends.

Wingtrolls pulled this same shit in 2006: “LOL WHAT U LIBZ GUN RITE BOUT NOW?!”

Hey, prole, what have your kind been doing these past eight years?  Oh, right, complaining because they didn’t have enough power.  And if you exhaust-sucking mouth-breathers can make anything out of that, then we can certainly get along fine talking about all the injustice that still exists in the world.

Shitbag.

Wait….......Obama was elected?  I thought we were still counting the votes!!  You Commies can’t just overthrow a democratic government with your so called “election”!!

Living in rural northern Oklahoma our small town paper published one, maybe 2 sentances about Obama winning. The rest of the front page was all about how the country voted McCain, and the town voted McCain, and even the mock election at the high school had McCain winning by a huge lead and isn’t McCain just great, and Palin is so smart, and by golly we just love them so much. Oh, and that black guy won.

Sigh. Oh Amanda stop clutching your pearls so hard.

I picked your post to write what I wrote not because you are a woman, but because it was the latest post on pandagon. If Jesse had written the latest post, it would have been on his. I enjoy reading the leftist blogs even though I do not share all of its politics because the quality of writing and creativity is high. I thought that after the election a negative consequence would be that there would be slimmer pickings in terms of content for you people to work with. Since the election Atrios, Kevin Drum, and TPM have been noticably slower. I wrote what I wrote just to get some counter-argument on what I may have missed. Some people here indeed have given me a good rebuttal.

Nothing above has anything to do with you being a woman. However, you taking it the way you did (by accusing me of being sexist or condescending) shows what may be some unfortunate self-esteem issues. My apologies.

Loneoak - My sister and I differ sharply when it comes to politics and religion. (though we have a good relationship, it’s just that politics is discussed on the margins or as commentary since we tend to argue when it gets specific.) She was also homecoming queen so there was considerable pressure on her to join in the hilars. Let’s say her participation was voluntary but looking back, viewed as a silly event.

As it happens, I lived in Sapulpa back in the 1990s, and my wife grew up there. We are both longtime Dems who proudly voted for Obama, as did some of our relatives still living in Sapulpa and elsewhere in Oklahoma.

Anyway, it doesn’t surprise me at all that the Sapulpa Herald didn’t mention Obama, because nobody looks to the Herald for anything important. That the Herald hasn’t folded yet is in itself amazing. It hasn’t bothered to report on much of the rampant corruption and good-ole-boy bullshit that passes itself off as governance (and law enforcement) in Creek County; if it did, it’d probably win a Pulitzer.

The Herald is nothing more than the local go-to source for crap like what happened at town council meetings, the occasional Muscogee/Creek or Sac and Fox tribal hearing, official police activity reports, and human interest stories like how so-and-so just enlisted in the military, got married, etc. No one with a high school education or better would be reading the Herald, at least not to learn about anything happening beyond the borders of Creek County. They would be reading the Tulsa World instead.

As for the more Troglodyte elements living in Creek County who are too often busy drinking, snorting crystal meth or gambling at the local Indian casino to be bothered with something as complicated as reading, I’m sure the Faux News Channel enlightened them as to who won - at least those in the audience capable of counting to 270 or more. Even FNC managed to report that much correctly.

I think Acer has potential. Although MikeEss is correct about the obviousness of the pre-election coverage causing a sharp uptick in posts that would naturally drop after the campaign’s over.

Newspaper in Terrell, Texas, doesn’t think Obama’s win was any big deal:

At least that’s the impression many readers got when they opened their copies of Wednesday morning’s Terrell Tribune to see an inch-high headline saying, “Jackson defeats Schoen”.

Seems the paper’s editors decided the local county commissioner’s race was a bigger deal for their readers than the election of the first black president in American hsitory.

Not only did the Tribune not put Barack Obama’s election on Page One—there was, according to Byron Harris of WFAA-TV (Channel 8), “no story devoted to the presidential victory” anywhere in the paper.

Publisher Bill Jordan had this to say to readers who complained that the paper should have preserved this historic moment:

“We run a newspaper, not a memory book service. We covered the local commissioner’s race. We thought that was more important.”

Terrell, population 13,606, is labout 30 miles east of Dallas.

http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/11/newspaper-in-terrell-texas-doe.html

Acer:

I picked your post to write what I wrote not because you are a woman, but because it was the latest post on pandagon.

Claiming that you’re not sexist because you treat everyone with the same pomposity, narcissism and disdain that you’ve expressed here isn’t really the best argument you could have made here.

I thought that after the election a negative consequence would be that there would be slimmer pickings in terms of content for you people to work with.

::shrug::

By now, you should probably be pretty well used to having most of the things you think turn out to be blatantly untrue. That’s a negative consequence to talking out of your ass all the time.

Dan -
In all fairness, he really does have to talk out of his ass all the time.  After all, that is where his head is.

I just can’t help looking at the name of the town and thinking of either the Phantom Menace or the Music Man. Can’t quite decide. Maybe both. I can see Buddy Hackett as Jar Jar Binks.

I wish the reporter in the linked article had looked up the newspaper’s archives to see if the paper had run articles about Bush’s 2000 (s)election…

Mary Kay -
Both of my parents had college degrees (my father had a masters) and I got my PhD at the University of Oklahoma, so not everyone in eastern Oklahoma is a hillbilly (though there is a lot of bleed over in the attitudes).  That said the bulk of the white population there are.  The educational system in Oklahoma, like the rest of the rural South, is generally poor (rated substandard on most national evaluations), with a few exceptions such as Bartlesville (where I grew up), some of the schools in Tulsa, and Norman.  This is the basis for that “low information” and “lack of curiosity.”

One paragraph on the front page did report the majority of Creek County voted for McCain.

I remember the story of the chess player Gennady Sosonko, who shortly after defecting from the Soviet Union placed in a three-way tie for first (with Enklaar and Zuidema) in the championship of Holland, his new country. The Soviet papers reported that the Dutch championship had ended in a three-way tie for first between Enklaar and Zuidema.

MKK - Perhaps we do not define hillbillies quite the same way.  Historically, however, most people in eastern Oklahoma (outside of Tulsa and Bartlesville) are descended from hillbillies and carry on the cultural traditions.  The whites in that part of the state come primarily out of southern Missouri and western Arkansas - the Ozarks, as well as from east Texas.  All three of these areas were settled primarily settled by immigrants from the Southern Appalachians.  These are the hill country Scots-Irish and Borderers who came to be known as hillbillies (also rednecks). 

For what it is worth, my mother’s family were the real thing.  My grandfather dropped out of the sixth grade and was still farming 60 acres of flint rock and post oak in southwest Missouri with a horse team in the late 60s.  All of his children went to college and both of his sons got graduate degrees.  These people are not necessarily stupid, just ignorant and undereducated.  It is possible to overcome this, but too many have not.