Oil-Qaeda Wins Big

Details here

I wondered about the "favorite bands" map shown to the left and its relation to the election.

Consider that map against the backdrop of yesterday's election results for various states.

As a kick-off example, consider that the favorite band shown for Arkansas is Wiz Khalifa.

Yet, their favorite Senator elect is Tom Cotton (R), who is a full on neoCon and is said to be ideologically and socially close to William Kristol.

Weekly Standard editor Kristol is the neoCon's neoCon, who has yet to see a U.S. invasion he does not like and approve of:

Cotton, you see, is the golden child of the Republican party's hawkish establishment. He still calls the 2003 Iraq invasion a "just and noble" war. He's young — just 37 — and fervently backed by some of the most influential conservative figures in the nation.

Like much of the GOP class of 2014, Cotton is extremely conservative on domestic policy. He scored a 92 on the influential Club for Growth's House scorecard last year, a rough approximation of a member's conservatism measured by their votes on economic legislation. That 92 puts him in the top 5 percent of most conservative House members.

But it's foreign policy where Cotton really distinguishes himself from the pack. As the Atlantic's Molly Ball breaks down in a fascinating profile, the Senator-elect's career began in 2006 with his criticism of the New York Times for revealing a clandestine US spying program targeting terrorist finances. "By the time we return home," he wrote to the Times reporters, "maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars."

At the time, Cotton was a lieutenant serving in Baghdad. When his letter was published on the conservative blog Powerline, it went the 2006 equivalent of viral and Cotton became a conservative media darling. He began corresponding with Bill Kristol, the editor of the flagship neoconservative publication, the Weekly Standard. According to Ball, Kristol and Cotton developed what the former calls "a bond beyond pure policy" over their shared foreign policy views.

(Vox, Meet Tom Cotton, emphasis added). Evidently,  while in Baghdad, he was not fighting for the U.S. Constitution --which guarantees a free press.

Contrast that with the favorite band of Kansas, Eric Church, whose hit "Like Jesus Does", seems to fit better than the Arkansas match up.

I say that because Kansas re-elected Gov. Brownback, a governor who needed a lot of forgiveness.

Moving on to Iowa, whose favorite band is B.O.B., and we run into the same mystery we did with Arkansas.

Their new senator is another neoCon, Joni Ernst, who is Sarah Palin on steroids:

Ernst, as liberals are eager to tell you, has logged some serious time out on the conservative fringes. She’s dabbled in U.N. conspiracy theory, backed a “personhood” amendment, suggested Obama was a “dictator” who needed to be impeached, and vowed that she’d be willing to take up arms against her own government “should they decide that my rights are no longer important.” Her less extreme views — a relative term — include abolishing both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education.

(Slate). The disconnect with the favorite bands of Kansas and Arkansas, compared to their choice of politicians, is strange.

I am reminded of the U.S. scoring next-to-last in a survey of how much citizens of nations know about their own nation (Etiology of Social Dementia - 12, cf. Agnotology: The Surge).

This is what happens when Oil-Qaeda wins big.

The next post in this series is here.