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[David Douglas]

I'm wondering why people feel Pat's response is so ROTFLOL funny.  The
issue is less who is geographically-challenged than who is
metaphorically-challenged, or at least, to be charitable, behaving that
way.

There is a huge splotch of red between the east coast and the west coast
blue states (certain, er Midwest states excepted)--Florida all the way
to ! Idaho !.  The "geographically-challenged" democratic official
referred to the Midwest states that didn't get their message.
Presumably these are different states than the blue Midwest states.  

Metaphorically-non-challenged Pat understood that "Midwest" was used as
a, well, metaphor (perhaps "synecdoche" is a better term).  Wouldn't it
be a little wooden of Pat to assume that the official was strictly
referring to the dictionary definition?  If you want to take a whack
with your literal-stick, start with the democratic official.  And if he
was being literal, he should be whacked for only focusing on the literal
mid-west.  They did pretty well there.

We can't help but talk non-literally.  "NEWSFLASH" was neither news, nor
a flash.  And how trite am I to point that out, except to make a point?


David Douglas


By the way, neither m-w.com nor dictionary.com (
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=midwest ), list Oklahoma as
part of what is "generally considered" (as one of them puts it) to be
the Midwest.  Metaphorically, or otherwise, I don't have a problem with
calling it that, though.  Not surprisingly, neither does anyone else.
If Pat had said Oklahoma was part of the Midwest....I wonder.