OMG! Pat Buchanen knows about the Iron Range

Check out this transcript from a recent broadcast of the MSNBC program "Morning Joe" featuring host Joe Scarborough and commentator Pat Buchanen, both conservatives, along with other commentators and co-hosts of various ideologies and affiliations. I used to watch "Morning Joe" regularly but gave it up for the same reason some people give up vodka. It's a morning treasury of rarefied political spin fresh off the still.

Anyway, Scarborough and Buchanen are buying into the talking point that the Minnesota Senate race is being "stolen" by the Democrats, a charge evidenced by the thorough recount of every legal ballot (eg: an abomination of democracy). But midway through, Buchanen references, in jest, that there is a "station wagon" up on "the Iron Range" with 120 hidden Franken votes somewhere.

Hey, I resent that. I've got a station wagon but all the ballots in the back are leftovers from 2004. What I wouldn't give for some of those hot '08s!

I won't get into the politics of this or the ridiculousness of these accusations against what has always been a clean election state. I'm just glad to know that these national guys know, and apparently fear, the Iron Range. We made Karl Rove's election map during the '08 cycle as well. The Iron Range holds a strange mystique all over the country in political circles because no one has figured out how we've stayed so reliably DFL when social change has stratified so many other areas like ours. I explore this and many non-political topics in my new book "Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range." It's a collection of humorous and/or thoughtful essays about life under age 30 on today's Iron Range, written for people of all ages who have an interest in our unique region and state. Don't worry, conservatives. It cuts both ways and is (mostly) apolitical.