Kentucky Maps That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Drink Moonshine Until He's Blind

Check this out. It's a map of the state of Kentucky, with its counties featured.

The ones in blue voted for Democrat Jack Conway in yesterday's gubernatorial election. The ones in red voted for Republican Matt Bevin. Even though those blue counties have the cities, Bevin still won because, well, look at all that red. 106 out of 120 counties went for Bevin who campaigned, among other things, on rolling back the Affordable Care Act's state Medicaid expansion that has given 400,000 Kentuckians health care. Oh, and he doesn't want the queers to get married, among other ultra-conservative stands.

Those beliefs are what bring us to this map of the state of Kentucky, with its counties featured.

You see those counties there in the east and southeast parts of the state? The ones that are deep, dark brown? Those counties have at least 60% of their citizens on Medicaid, many of them recently signed up through the Medicaid expansion that Gov. Steve Beshear gave them through an executive order. The ones just a shade lighter have at least 50% of their citizens on Medicaid. Yet nearly everyone of those counties, save Floyd and Wolfe, voted for the man who said he would take away their medical care.

Now, you can make a case that the turnout was just 30.7% of voters, so that means only 16% of Kentucky voters actually, actively supported Bevin.  And that's a valid argument that might make you feel good (as it has the Rude Pundit in the past) but does nothing to save the lives of people who might very well be looking at life without the ability to go to the doctor.

Clay County is one of the darkest of the areas up there. It is so dirt poor that there's no one to rob to get money for meth. Yet 71% of voters yesterday went for the candidate who has said he would make their lives worse.

So people who have less than nothing would rather have their cancer go untreated than take Medicaid from a Negro or allow two people of the same sex to get married. That is about as delusional and pathetic as it gets and, frankly, so gut-level, depressingly dumb that, on his crueler days, the Rude Pundit thinks it'd be just fine for them all to get sick and die and raise the intelligence of the species just a bit. Hell, they pretty much just admitted that they're cool with that.

But here's the thing: The country will not move forward without an appeal to the gut-level stupid. Forget the fucked-in-the-brain-by-religion crowd. They're out of reach. But there is a contingent of the rural poor that can be reached and can be brought into the fold. It's just been too long without any real effort to do so, not during the Reagan or Bush or Clinton or Bush II years and not as much as needed during the Obama administration.

Sure, it'd be easy to say, "Well, let 'em freeze to death in a ditch with their single tooth." Except for shit like this very election, shit that keeps happening, that happened in 2014, too, shit that has an effect on the House of Representatives, for instance.

That has to do with the lives of you and, more importantly, the Rude Pundit. The stupid people aren't going away. We just haven't figured out how to make them less stupid.