Wednesday Wrapup

Better late than never for a Deeth Blog update.

Today would have been Richard Nixon's 100th birthday, and in tribute, an excerpt from the obituary written by his greatest chronicler and nemesis, Hunter Thompson:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

Harsh words, even during the NFL playoffs.

But amazingly, Nixon was the last Republican presidential candidate ever to win The People's Republic of Johnson Couunty. No, not against McGovern -- by then teh 18 year olds were voting. Against JFK, despite the best efforts of the County Johnson Irish.

We slipped a bit for the Democrats this cycle, with Obama all the way down to 67 percent. But here's some places that made Iowa City look like West Jesus, Idaho by comparison:

Following are the counties or county equivalents where President Barack Obama took his largest share of the vote. Most are black-majority areas that historically are staunchly Democratic and were eager to re-elect Obama, the first black president in the nation’s history.
1. Shannon, South Dakota (93%): included within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the southwestern part of the state.
2. Bronx, New York (91%): about one in nine residents in New York City’s northernmost borough is non-Hispanic white. Bronx has been the most pro-Democratic New York City borough in five straight presidential elections.
3. Petersburg, Virginia (90%): a black-majority area about 25 miles south of Richmond.
4. Prince George’s, Maryland (90%): a black-majority area that abuts Washington, D.C.
5. Jefferson, Mississippi (89%): a sparsely populated, black-majority area by the Mississippi River south of Vicksburg.

And that last is part of an interesting tend:  Democratic gains in the deeeep Deep South,

Obama polled as well in Georgia as any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, grabbed 44 percent of the vote in deep-red South Carolina and just under that in Mississippi — despite doing no substantive campaigning in any of those states.

The results show a region cleaving apart along new electoral fault lines. In the region’s center, clustered along the Mississippi River — where Bill Clinton polled most strongly — the GOP remains largely unchallenged and the voting divide between blacks and whites is deepening. Nearly nine of 10 of white voters in Mississippi, for instance, went for Republican nominee Mitt Romney this year, according to exit polls. About 96 percent of black voters in the state supported Obama.

And if you don't think that's polarizing, Drudge on behalf of the gun lobby is playing, yes, the Hitler card. So, coming full circle from one Nazi reference to another.



And from the Department of Excuses, Excuses: If we hicks here in Iowa can figure out how to do early voting, why does New York think it's so hard?