Land of fruits and nuts is now "red"

According to CNN, that is. Their headline regarding the Dixie Chicks' abysmal ticket sales for their upcoming Bush Derangement concert tour was, "Red state backlash hurts Chicks' tour". Thing is, the article then goes on to say:

According to Pollstar, dates in Memphis, Tennessee, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, and Fresno, California, have been dropped from the tour schedule for now, while box-office sales also were canceled for Houston.

Well, we all knew the euphemism, "the land of fruits and nuts" only applied to the coastal cities, but it's nice to see that confirmed in print every now and again.

But there's very little guesswork needed to figure out why CNN and Reuters (where the story originated) felt the need to use such divisive color coding to describe the story--it takes away from the in-your-face report last week about the Chicks' number one Billboard CD sales, which some liberals had used as a blanket endorsement of their anti-Bush, anti-war message.


ed- cleaned up a grammatically messy post.