At Random: A Man Walked into a Convenience Store

A dispatch from 

the land of :

“Hell yeah! 

We know how 

to do stupid!”

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

Over the years I’ve been called out by various Moristotle readers and writers because the stories I claim as factual accounts sometimes seem so far-fetched, people assume I must be embellishing, à la Hunter Thompson…or Fox “News.” When I try to explain that these stories are simply examples of the idiocy that swirled around me as I grew up in Southwest Virginia, and that I rediscovered when I moved back from the Northern Virginia/Washington DC area to SWVA, few seem to believe me.
    “How could such stupidity and absurdity possibly be real?” people ask.

"McCain will have no trouble in Missouri"

A news article this morning on NPR ("Joplin May Be Reddest Corner in Missouri," by Linda Wertheimer) investigates how likely it is that the bellweather state of Missouri will again "pick the president." Only once in a century have Missouri's electoral votes not gone to the candidate who became president. (Missouri went for Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kevaufer in 1956.)

Polls currently show the Democratic and Republican tickets running neck and neck over Missouri as a whole, but apparently not in Jasper County. At about four minutes into Ms. Wertheimer's article, we're treated to this frank admission by a shop owner in Joplin, who says that "McCain will have no trouble in Missouri":

He's against abortion, anytime, and he's also, he's against same-sex marriages. Those are very important things to me. The country can go broke, and those things, those morals still stand. If you've got a moral country, God will be with you.

I don't need to parse this for people who can actually think, but if I needed to I might mention, for starters, that "belief in God" confers no moral advantage. In fact, it could weigh against God (if God existed), that the Bible allows itself to be interpreted the way this benighted Missourian interprets it. Also (if I were to mention one more thing), haven't we had enough of people who decide their vote on single issues? "The country can go broke, but..."

..."under God" MUST be mandated for our pledge of allegiance.
...homosexuals MUST not be permitted to marry.
...Roe v. Wade MUST be overturned.
...taxes MUST be lowered.
...the Ten Commandments MUST NOT be removed from our courthouses.

By the way, in my list of labels at the bottom of this post, I didn't choose the labels for how they would sort with respect to which labels would follow "Democrats" and "Republicans." Just turned out that way.