Red=Evil, Blue=Good and Media Partisanship

I thought about this topic for quite some time, never posting. Can’t say why, for sure. Perhaps it’s my ADD or quote possibly early onset Alzheimer’s (my wife says it’s the Amber Ale) but whatever the case, I hadn’t gotten around to posting until tonight… when the topic quietly resurfaced and caught my fancy.

[Another aside, the reason it surfaced was due to the sci-fi books I read. For example, in The Hidden City by David Eddings which I'm currently finished up, the final battle is fought by the primordial opposing forces—one representing good, the Bhelliom, and the other representing evil, Klael. After a brief physical match they break down to their elemental light and gas forms and... like most literary pieces I've ever read, including Star Wars light sabers, the good is blue and the evil red.]

So this reminded me of the whole Red State/Blue State topic in politics. Ask someone today which political party is Red and they’ll say Republicans, with the Democrats being blue. But it hasn’t always been that way.

So when the switch and why? This from Wikipedia:

Early on, some channels used a scheme of red for Democrats and blue for Republicans. The first television news network to use colors to depict the states won by presidential candidates was NBC. In 1976, John Chancellor, the anchorman for the NBC Nightly News, asked his network’s engineers to construct a large electronic map of the USA. The map was placed in the network’s election-night news studio. If Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate that year, won a state it would light up in red; if Gerald Ford, the Republican, carried a state it would light up in blue. The feature proved to be so popular that four years later all three major television networks would use colors to designate the states won by the presidential candidates. NBC continued to use the color scheme employed in 1976 for several years; NBC newsman David Brinkley famously referred to the 1980 election map as showing Ronald Reagan’s 44-state landslide as a “sea of blue”.[6] CBS, from 1984 on, used the opposite scheme—blue for Democrats, red for Republicans. ABC used yellow for one major party and blue for the other in 1976. However, in 1980 and 1984, ABC used red for Republicans and blue for Democrats. As late as 1996, there was still no universal association of one color with one party.[7] If anything, by 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while Time Magazine and the Washington Post used an opposite scheme.[8][9][10]

So it began with the Republicans as the blue party. I’m not the only one who’s caught the switch. Along the way, someone in the media realized their opportunity to make the change and now it’s generally accepted by the public; complete with the underlying, hidden meaning that if the Republicans are red, they must be evil.

Very sneaky.

Republicans Point the Finger, Need to Get a Grip

Tony Perkins runs a tight ship over at the FRC. I might as well just post his dailies here. Anyway, a little background:

1. I vote for whoever most closely matches my values.
2. I get my values from the Bible.
3. These values are considered by today’s standards extremely Conservative.
4. Republicans are more Conservative than Democrats, in most cases.
5. I hate most politicians, regardless of Party, because they seldom tell the truth for more than 120 seconds.

Ok, with that said, a large number of Republicans are just as bad as the Democrats in my book. Here they show their true colors.

“To listen to some Republicans… you would think that traditional conservatives, the defenders of the unborn and the integrity of marriage… were responsible for two wars gone sour, over-spending at a level to embarrass Lyndon Johnson, the largest expansion of entitlement spending since the Great Society, numerous cases of GOP corruption, betrayal of the public trust… and the miserable results in the presidential and congressional elections…”

Like us, Tracy Mehan of the American Spectator is fed up with the Republicans’ post-election finger-pointing. In his op-ed “Social Conservative as Scapegoats,” he lashes out at the GOP’s centrists for blaming November 4 on “the solid and most loyal” wing of the Reaganite coalition.

To those of us in the pro-family movement, the Establishment’s diatribe is a familiar one. When the GOP succeeds because of social conservatives, our importance is ignored. When the party fails for overlooking us, values voters are somehow to blame. With the exception of Gov. Sarah Palin and some hollow overtures by the Democratic Party, the 20 percent of voters who cited “moral values” as their first or second priority in this election had no real horse in this race.

Maybe that explains why believers were less active in this election cycle. More than four million Americans who go to church more than once a week and voted in 2004 stayed home on November 4. Those voters would have made up half the difference between McCain and Obama. As the members of the Republican party jockey for position in this brave new Congress and sort out their internal leadership, a commitment to life and marriage is non-negotiable.

Without it, the prospects of a Republican revival are bleak. As Karl Rove rightly points out, “These values are often more popular than the GOP itself.”

Should U.S. Pull Out of Chicago?

Complete cut-and-paste from RedCounty.com because, who knows, someone might bring down the site after seeing this.

Perhaps the U.S. should pull out of Chicago?
Posted by: Rus Thompson | 10/20/2008 7:42 AM

WOW! Maybe we should have a PLAN to pull out immediately. I want to see a timeline and an action plan. When are the politicians and the Police going to take control of their streets, isn’t it about time for some personal responsibility? What’s the old saying? People that live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones? I do believe the same things go on in DC….

Body count: In the last six months 292 killed (murdered) in Chicago; 221 killed in Iraq.

Sens. Barack Obama & Dick Durbin, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., Gov. Rod Blogojevich, House leader Mike Madigan, Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan (daughter of Mike), Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of Mayor Richard J. Daley) …..our leadership in Illinois…..all Democrats.

Thank you for the combat zone in Chicago. Of course, they’re all blaming each other. Can’t blame Republicans; they’re aren’t any! State pension fund $44 Billion in debt, worst in country.
Cook County (Chicago) sales tax 10.25% highest in country. (Look ‘em up if you want).
Chicago school system rated one of the worst in the country.
This is the political culture that Obama comes from in Illinois. And he’s gonna ‘fix’ Washington politics for us!