Friday, October 29, 2004
(10:32 PM) | Anonymous:
BIZZARO WORLD
I live here in OKlahoma, a state of considerable conservative consonant. Everything was chugging along great - I hadn't seen a single Bush or Kerry ad, because there was absolutely no one campaigning around here.And then the Republican candidate for senate, Tom Coburn, called OKC Residents "Crap heads". OKC being the largest city in the state, that wasn't smart. And then it came out that while he was a doctor, Dr. Coburn had infertilized (if that's correct usage, I don't know, he made it so she couldn't have babies) a lady without her permission during what should have been a simple operation, and lost much money in medical fraud charges.
Suddenly, the democratic party arose, and saw unto them a seat worth the taking. Normally, there'd be no way in heck a democrat could get elected, but, Governor Brad Henry just 2 years ago beat out a former football hero and massive republican somehow, and perhaps things have changed.
Now VP Cheney has visited the state to tell us we need to vote for Coburn. A virtual line of Republican stars appear in his ads. And the thing is..those same Republican stars appear in Carson ads. This is because the debate, the entire senatorial debate here in Oklahoma, is about who is more conservative.
Liberal is a dirty word around here. Heck, during the local debate held at my school, Carson was tripped up by the mere question of "How on earth can you support John Kerry?" He paused, and mumbled for minutes, and never really answered, like he was ashamed someone from his party was running for the presidency. 50% of Coburn's ads don't feature Carson at all. They tell us what "Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry" have done in the congress already, and then mention that voting for Carson is really a vote for those 3.
Carson, for his part, runs ads about how many times he went against his party - voting to be tough on illegal aliens, voting against taxes, voting with the family marriage amendment, voting against abortion, voting with privatizing retirement funds, heck, he probably voted with the Freedom Fries act. And the thing is, after 2-3 months of ads, and 5-7 pieces of mail a day for the last 2 weeks, I have no clue what makes Carson a democrat, and that's exactly how he wants it.
I guess to some extent this is expedient means, the democrats needs this seat and are, I think, very likely to get it at this point. Coburn has ran the worst campaign EVER in the history of the leisure suit. And maybe it's good..when the house is burning, you tell the kids you have candy for them if they get out, even if there is no candy, right Buddah? Well, maybe the massive conservative delegation of Oklahoma doesn't realize how terrible our conservative-lead government has done - maybe they don't realize that there's literally 0 categories of any worth where our state is a leader, and many where we're in the bottom third. Our education system is destroyed and terrible, our health car is porous, our jobless rate is embarassing. Maybe anything the democrats can do to get office is justified.
At the same time, this is one of the more brutal campaigns I've ever seen, and every barb thrown is some variation of that dirty word, "liberal". Each is trying to point out the liberal tendencies of the other, and the one who gets the to stick wins apparently. there's no discourse over which ideas are best, because that's far beyond dumb old Oklahoma, instead, we just fight over who has best mimicked the Republican line, the Republican - or the Republican wannabe.
EDIT:
MY GRAMMAR WERE ATROCIOUS. as was the spelling. As was the strange tendency I have to insert random words at times, because I can't continue to think about the sentence I was on long enough. This is fixed to some extent. At the time I wrote this, I'd worked an 18 hour shift the night before and been up 33.5 hours. I've now slept for 4, and am back in style. My own style.
