A New Low for The Washington Post: '1 in 8 Trump voters lives in a county with no ICU beds'

FILE – In this file photograph taken Nov. 1, 2007, the masthead of The Washington Post is displayed on the office building, in Washington. The Washington Post Co. is reporting a surge in second-quarter earnings, helped by a big jump in profits at its education division and lower expenses. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

The left has never kept their disdain for rural Americans a secret. They don’t even pretend to view them as equals. But a new “analysis” written by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has managed to surpass even my lowest expectations.

The mildly unattractive Bump wrote about an article which appeared in Kaiser Health News. A new study has raised concern about a shortage of ICU beds in the rural parts of the country. Kaiser found that “more than half the counties in America have no intensive care beds, posing a particular danger for more than 7 million people who are age 60 and up.”

The title of the Kaiser piece is “Millions Of Older Americans Live In Counties With No ICU Beds As Pandemic Intensifies.”

Bump’s version of the story is entitled, “1 in 8 Trump voters lives in a county with no ICU beds.” Well, that’s quite a leap, isn’t it? Here are a few excerpts:

The presence of a hospital and of intensive-care units correlates to how rural the county is, as you might expect. But that also means there is a remarkable bit of overlap with politics, given how central the rural vote was to President Trump’s election in 2016.

Comparing the county-level data from Kaiser Health News to 2016 presidential election data, we discovered a remarkable bit of data: About 8.3 million people who voted for Trump in 2016 live in counties where there are no ICU beds or no hospitals. That amounts to about 13 percent of the total votes Trump earned in that election, or one out of every eight votes.

…He won 10 times as many counties with no ICU beds as did Clinton.

For every person 60 or older in a county which voted for Clinton and has no ICU beds, there are 10 times as many people in that age group in counties that backed Trump and have no ICU beds.

Before he concludes, Bump assures us this isn’t about politics. He writes:

The issue here isn’t politics. It is that many Americans have limited access to the sort of medical care the virus might necessitate. It’s that many others live in places where that access will quickly be strained by the volume of covid-19 cases that are expected to emerge.

For a president so heavily focused on his base, though, it is worth noting how heavily that former group overlaps with his most fervent support.

Of course the issue is politics. Bump has no concern that an elderly person living in rural America might have trouble finding an ICU bed. He feels nothing but contempt for Trump supporters, rural or otherwise.

So, tell us Mr. Bump. What makes you so special? It certainly can’t be your depth of character. Does it make you feel superior because you make more money than most Americans who live in rural areas, wear a better suit, or dine in more expensive restaurants?

Or is it just because they support President Trump?