Who Cares?
by digby
Krugman mentions Sarah Palin’s latest insult and wonders why conservatives are able to insult regions of the country cost-free? I’ve wondered the same thing, many times.
Here’s what she said, talking about her show about “Real Americans:”
“It’s not the kind of thing that’s going to excite you guys on the East Coast, but everyone else is dying to hear stories like these,” said one of her representatives who was not authorized to speak on the record but was authorized to slam the East Coast.
Krugman points out:
By East Coast, of course, she doesn’t mean the whole coast — South Carolina is clearly part of “real America”, even though it, ahem, tried to leave it way back when. Instead, she’s bashing the Northeast Corridor, aka Acelaland.
As usual, the Onion had it right, in its first post-9/11 issue:
Rest Of Country Temporarily Feels Deep Affection For New York
What I don’t quite get, however, is why it’s politically OK to insult around 50 million Americans. Back when, Barry Goldwater paid a price for his remark that
sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.
In fact, I remember seeing the Johnson ad about that. But these days, insulting large blocs of Americans, implying that the rural and small-town and (ahem) white minority is the only genuine part of the country, seems to be cost-free.
Those of us who live out here in the land of fruits and nuts don’t get it any better, I’m afraid. (Let’s not forget that “San Francisco liberal” is used as an epithet.) It’s as politically correct as can be to suggest that NY and California aren’t even legitimately part of America.
Of course, there are also plenty of people on the coasts who ridicule the south and midwest, small towns and the rest. The difference is that those who live in these godforsaken metropolitan hellholes usually laugh along in a sort of shamed agreement. It’s a different sense of regional pride (or lack thereof) I guess. Or perhaps we snobbish coastal elites don’t really care much what Sarah Palin thinks about us. In any case, it goes both ways, but only side is taken to task for it.
But the laugh’s really on Palin:
Sarah Palin’s much-hyped LL Cool J-less Fox News special last night didn’t bring in the huge ratings some (ok, we) predicted. Greta Van Susteren’s On The Record which normally airs at 10pmET beat the program the previous three nights in the A25-54 demographic and two out of three nights in total viewers. The show also lost viewers from the first quarter hour to the final quarter hour by double digits.
It turns out that Real Americans everywhere weren’t dying to hear those stories after all.
h/t to bill