The news about Gov. Gregoire’s deal with the cattle association to put cattle as a “wildife habitat improvement” technique into the state wildlife areas (purchased with public money) for free grazing is now reached westward across the Cascades.
Here is a story by Joel Connelly, the well-known columnist at the Seattle Post Intelligencer. “Cattle vs. Wildlife at Whisky Dick.”
I had thought maybe the governor had gotten something in return from the cattlegrowers, but it looks like she is doing this just to make herself more popular in eastern Washington. This is a move that shows how little she understand the area, the people, and the fact that the cattlegrowers can’t and wouldn’t deliver the votes to a Democrat.
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Ralph, at least YOU get it. I AM a cattlegrower; I know my peers; and I know how they think and talk in private. They are, to be bluntly honest, bigots. They will smile and chat and say nice things and, in their own minds, they are so, so Christian in their beliefs; but, as soon as you are out of earshot, they will revert to their emotionally stunted and truly self-destructive habit of judging everyone by one of the most restrictive sets of racial, cultural, ideological, and ethnic rules that you will ever see outside of fundamentalist Islam. Gregoire can give them anything she can think of; but, in the depths of their thinking, as a woman, she can truly never aspire to be much more than a doll of some sort, no matter how tough she might be; as a politician with an urban background, she will never be fully trusted; and, as a Democrat, she won’t ever make the rightwing evangelical cut. If Otter hadn’t married into the Simplots, he wouldn’t have gotten anywhere either being a Catholic. I’m sorry; but, it’s the truth. Sure, they let some people of marginally diverse backgrounds hang around; but, those people are never truly in the inner circle, never. There’s also the problem with the inherent co-dependency built so deeply and so pervasively into their culture. It’s not just in that whiny C&W music, they live it. With that kind of co-dependent passive-aggression, there is no matter what Gregoire gives them; they will just take it and consider it as something they should have had all along. You can’t give a co-dependent a privilege or a gift; to them, a gift is always something that you secretly owe them and a privilege is always just a right that you just now got around to owning up to. I know. Been there; done that; got the t-shirt!