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Tuesday, July 05, 2005
A sad map, no matter what color
It's hard to say for sure, since this map is not corrected for population, but it sure doesn't look like people from red states are dying in any greater numbers than those from blue states, no matter what line of crap the right is trying to feed the country. Red states aren't bearing a greater share of the burden of fighting the war but they bear 100% of the burden of electing the fool who sent all these people to their untimely deaths.
4 Comments:
It's an interesting map, but I don't see that it actually demonstrates anything.
Crunching the fatality numbers at Iraq Coalition Casualty Count vs. the electoral numbers at CNN, I get 3.33 fatalities per electoral vote for Bush states and 3.04 for Kerry states (I will forgo the annoying red/blue nomenclature).
Jambo - obviously I don't read the volume of political news/opinion/propaganda that you do, but I've never seen anybody put it in these terms. Are people really making these ghoulish calculations? (I mean, besides me...)
By 
Joseph Thvedt, at
9:50 AM
One of the early attempts to impugn the patriotism of Democrats included the claim that states that vote Republican send a lot more people to the military than Democratic states do. I don't remember the source but a little time with Google might find it. I think this was fairly quickly abandoned when the first wave of casualty numbers showed that four of the top five states in terms of service members killed were "Blue" states. California, Michigan and NY were three of them but I don't remember the 4th. That actually says nothing about whether it is Republicans or Democrats in those states that are joining the military (and of course with 10% of the nation's population it is not surprising that CA is near the top in sheer numbers) and I'm guessing relative numbers between states may have as much to do with economic conditions as anything else. I read several years ago that the officer ranks of the military were something like 12-1 Republican to Democrat which seems pretty large but not altogether unbelievable. I would suspect that the enlisted ranks are much closer. I would also be interested to see what effect the current war has on the political affiliations of the people fighting it. The guy who writes Daily Kos recently wrote that he went into the army a Republican but came out a Democrat.
I suspect that most enlistees are like most 18 year olds -- relatively uninterested in politics.
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