As much as we prefer the conversation of our fellow right-wing bastards, we habitually seek out the political opinions of a wide variety of people. It’s an odious chore, entailing dreary hours of hearing the most outlandish nonsense from the most uninformed folks, but it helps avoid the kind of cocooned thinking that afflicts our Democrat friends.
They have a different set of priorities, these Democrats. Not just different from us right-wing bastards, who tend to grouse about individual liberty and the national debt and the deteriorating international scene and other things the Democrats never seem the least bit concerned about, but different from those blissfully apolitical people we usually encounter in our daily lives. Most of the regular folk we run into are worried about Obamacare and getting by, more or less in that order, while the local lefties seem mostly worked up about the Koch brothers and efforts to limit voting in American elections to American citizens.
Given all that’s going on in the world these days this things strike us as rather piddling concerns, but the Democrats are clearly convinced that they will make everyone forget about paying for over-priced Obamacare while trying to find a job. Every time they get together to talk about everyone agrees that these are the greatest threats facing the nation, it seems, and except for our occasional intrusions into their conversation they don’t know anyone who isn’t going to vote accordingly. Should they ever bother to strike up a conversation with the lady in front of them in the Dillon’s check-out aisle or the guy at the next barstool in any workingman’s tavern, however, they’d probably be surprised by the perplexed looks these topics provoke.
Perhaps Wichita is an outlier, as Koch Industries is an essential local business that contributes generously to local causes ranging from the Sedgwick County Zoo to that excellent exhibit of buffalo paintings currently on exhibit at the Wichita Art Museum, and our duly-elected Secretary of State is one of the nation’s most stalwart advocates of electoral integrity, but we have reason to suspect that the nation at large has more pressing worries. We have a brother in Colorado who prefers skiing to politics, which strikes us as quite sensible, and he unabashedly admits that he’s never heard of the Koch brothers, while even our most left-leaning bartenders say they’ve checked enough drivers’ licenses that they can’t see why it shouldn’t be required voting, so that seems a representative sampling. The pollsters survey an ever wider group, and they confirm our suspicions.
Sen. Harry Reid has recently taken to bashing the Koch brothers as way to maintain his increasingly tenuous grasp on the Senate Majority Leader post, but the polls show that most Americans dislike him more than both Koch brothers combined. Offered a choice between the Koch brothers’ conspiracy to keep the government out of everyone’s business and Reid’s conspiracy to run everything, we would expect the public to make the same choice. Even here in Kansas the Democrats are likely to run a candidate against Secretary of State Kobach on a platform of making it easier for illegal immigrants to vote, but the latest poll shows that a whopping 78 percent of the country disagrees and we’re sure that the margin is evening whoppinger here.
The Republicans might well find a way to blow the mid-term elections, as they’re very adept at that, but the Democrats will need to start striking up some conversations with people outside their circles for that happen.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 