Have You Seen the Ridiculous
"Bush Country" T-Shirt?
August 13, 2001
There is a widespread notion
in the country that the Bush presidency is somewhat less than legitimate,
since he lost the popular vote, and gained an Electoral College victory only
through a Supreme Court diktat.
Rabid right-wingers,
apparently desperate, have enlisted a ridiculous T-Shirt to counter
this belief.
The Bush
Country T-shirt shows a map of the United States coded not state by
state, but county by county -- the now-familiar red for Bush, blue for
Gore. On a county by county basis, the nation is indeed awash in
red. All this red "Bush Country" must have looked very
exciting to the T-shirt designers and their conservative backers.
But what does this map
actually mean, given that the popular vote and the electoral college were
virtually evenly divided? It merely means that a large number of the
most sparsely populated areas of the country voted for Bush. What this
bizarre fact proves to the right-wingers about the legitimacy of the Bush
presidency is anyone's guess, but it doesn't prove much to me. |
