(This column appeared in THE LONE STAR ICONOCLAST, Crawford, Texas, and at www.LoneStarIcon.com the week of July 11, 2006.)
Let's assume that you want your Country* back.
(*Just to be straight, we ain't talkin' music genres here.)
I know I want my Country back.
As do the majority of my family, friends and acquaintances.
According to the polls, the greatest number of American citizens, people I've never met, would like to have their - our - Country returned to us.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70%, at last count.
With our rights intact.
This includes a sizeable contingent of those good folks who allowed Rovian tactical maneuvering to hornswoggle them into buying the fantasy that soon-to-be King George was just another "good ol' boy."
Those hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, sweat-dripping-from-the-brow people you see every day going to their jobs, the supermarket, Little League and soccer games bought a pig in a poke in 2000, then didn't have enough sense or guts to bail the U.S.A., and the rest of the Planet, out when November, 2004 came around.
People we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with in church, synagogue, and check-out lines; folks who make "Superman Returns" a hit, "The Break-Up" a flop.
Of course, lowlife political shenanigans in Ohio and Florida, combined with voting machines of no demonstrable numeric verification -- courtesy of Diebold CEO and Bush fundraiser Walden O'Dell - rendered the 2004 count moot.
Well, the trouble isn't in the big cities. Generally speaking large metropolitan areas, with their wide diversity of ethnicities and myriad eclectic variances, vote Democratic in presidential elections. The "blue" states are the more industrialized, densely populous areas.
As Meredith Willson put it in "The Music Man," the trouble, my friends, is right here in River City, his ideal for pig-headed, stubborn, narrow-minded small town middle-America (Iowa, to be precise).
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