Madison County, Idaho was once dubbed “the reddest place in America” by Salon, but that didn’t make it any less shocking when elementary school children started chanting “assassinate Obama on the school bus.
According to an article which appeared in Salon in 2006, “You’ve heard of Jesusland, but Rexburg, Idaho, is something more. It’s not just a small town in rural Eastern Idaho. It’s a small town in rural Eastern Idaho completely dominated by a fast-growing Mormon college, Brigham Young University-Idaho.”
“Through this conservative convergence,” the article continues, “Rexburg and surrounding Madison County may well be the rosiest place in all of red America. Need numbers to prove it? In the 2004 presidential election, 93 percent of Madison County’s votes went to George W. Bush or minor-party conservative candidates — arguably the reddest result of any county in the entire country.”
The population of Madison County is not only heavily Republican but also 97.7% white. One of Rexburg’s lone Democrats, a professor at the university, told Salon that “she remembers the time when a group of classmates followed her third-grader home, shouting out ‘baby-killer’ all along the way. She took it up with the teacher, who didn’t seem to mind.”
Mormonism is sort of the Scientology of the 19th century (one guy makes up some stuff->gullible people succumb->religion ensues), but as an older religion it of course has had time to do what the big names do, kill people. Together with their interference in California’s Prop 8 vote they really are on course to join the big boys of fundie idiocy.
The fever for killing Obama is openly flaunted by rightists who revel in the murder of anyone not white, conservative, christian and capitalist. To be optimistic, let’s hope a brilliantly effective secret service keep Obama safe as this period brings the racism and eliminationism out of the woodwork and it can be confronted and defeated. This is beyond the policy let downs, Emanuel, Summers etc represent, if the forces of bigotry cannot be stopped from killing the most well protected man on earth then what is left? Open warfare? Many rightists claim to welcome such a breakdown but geniuses that they are they fail to realise they are outnumbered many times over, can it be impressed on their tiny minds- challenging their own bigotry is in fact their only survival option. It would be nice to be able to appeal to some higher rationale but they repeatedly indicate such higher thought is beyond them, so we’ll just have to keep it to that real simple selfish argument.