"King of the Hill" Democrats?

You just can't make this stuff up. (And neither can James Taranto & The Best of the Web Today crew.)

That Boy Ain't Right, I Tell You What

You've heard of "South Park Conservatives," those who lean to the right and enjoy the exuberantly obscene, and politically incorrect, Comedy Central series. (Buy the book here.) Matt Bai of the New York Times magazine is hoping there's a counterpart, "King of the Hill Democrats."

Bai interviews Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina, who is "is so obsessed with the show that he instructs his pollster to separate the state's voters into those who watch 'King of the Hill' and those who don't so he can find out whether his arguments on social and economic issues are making sense to the sitcom's fans." Easley has a whole theory of main character Hank Hill's political philosophy:

Easley told me that Hank would never support a budget like the one North
Carolina's Senate recently passed, which would drop some 65,000 mostly
elderly citizens from the Medicaid rolls; Hank, after all, has pitched in to
support his own father, a brutish war veteran, and he would never condone a community's walking away from its ailing parents. Similarly, Hank may be a lover of the environment--he was furious when kids trashed the local
campground--but he resents self-righteous environmentalists like the ones who forced Arlen to install those annoying low-flow toilets. Voters like
Hank, if they had heard about it on the evening news, would have supported Easley's ''Clean Smokestacks'' law, which forced North Carolina's coal-powered electric plants to burn cleaner, but only because industry was a partner in the final bill, rather than its target.

We're pretty sure South Park conservatives don't sit around trying to figure out what Eric Cartman's position would be on tort reform or the Central American Free Trade Agreement. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats take cartoons far too seriously.

Howard Dean must watch a lot of Daffy Duck.