Liberal icon and strategic thinker Keith Olbermann celebrated Valentine's Day and expressed his love for his fellow Americans by calling for a civil war.  He tweeted:

We must have Economic Civil War. Blue States must financially starve the Red States, the Gun Lobby, the GOP, the Death Lobby, and the crooked judiciary into submission.

NOW.

He's concerned that we're not taking our gun problem seriously. He thinks it's time to get serious and take on:

• The red states — teaching the backward flyover states a lesson in coastal wisdom
• The gun lobby — which amazingly still believes that the Constitution means what it says
• The GOP — for not rolling over and dying as a good opposition party should
• The crooked Judiciary — for not being crooked enough to find an anti-gun emanation from a penumbra of the Constitution
• The death lobby — though I don't know what the abortion lobby has to do with gun control (that being the only group that actually lobbies for death)

So Keith thinks that doing violence to Americans is the best way to stop Americans from doing violence to one another.  To be fair, he isn't calling for a shooting war — because his side doesn't have much to shoot with.  But he is calling for starvation — because financial starvation ends in actual starvation.

I can see only three ways for leftists to wage this economic war.  They could cut off all federal funding to the red states.  Or they could absorb the country's wealth, leaving the red states destitute.  As a last resort, the blue states could even boycott red-state products.

I'm sure the leftists would love to cut off all federal funding to the Republican-leaning states.  All they'd need to do is zero out infrastructure, Social Security, and Medicare expenditures.  It's not as if they use any of the red-state infrastructure for stuff like shipping.  But there is a downside to zeroing out Social Security and Medicare: the GOP campaign commercials.  Just imagine the commercials of President Soft Serve and little Chucky Schumer pushing Grandma over the cliff.  Unlike the Paul Ryan commercials, these would be true.  That could be a bit of an electoral problem for the Dems.

The second option is actually a healthy one: economic competition.  The blues just need to create a social and business climate that's so irresistible that people and businesses migrate to them.  That would also leave the red states destitute — kind of like North Korea.

But if Keith hasn't noticed, this competition is already underway, and it isn't the red states who are starting to resemble North Korea.  Since 2010, California has had a net loss of nearly 2 million people — and that exodus is accelerating, with 600,000 lost in just the last year and a half.  The same thing is happening to New York State — which has seen the steepest loss of population of any state in the country in the last year.

Those people are taking their money and their businesses to places like Florida, Texas, Utah, Idaho, South Carolina, and South Dakota.  How's Keith's economic war working out for the blue states?  According to a Strategies Research article, as reported by Will Swaim of the California Policy Center and David Bahnsen, the founder The Bahnsen Group, California tax revenues declined by 42 percent, year over year, in January.  If this is what Keith has in mind, he needs to wrap his mind around the fact that his team is losing.

Maybe Keith wants to kick it up a notch and resort to an actual boycott — starving the red states by refusing to buy products from them.  Governor Hair Gel is actually on the same page with Keith on this one.  He imposed a state-funded travel ban to some of the red states and is asking Hollywood to stop filming in conservative locations.  So far, the red states are standing firm against this onslaught.

Maybe the blue states could get more serious with a boycott and stop accepting any red-state products.  How would that affect California — our most heavily populated blue state?  What products does California get from other states?

• It imports over 400 pounds of meat and eggs per person per year
• It gets 20 percent of its electricity from other states
• While they don't pay for it, most southern California cities get a significant portion of their water from the Colorado river — which gathers water from Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada
• It imports 1.4 million barrels of oil per day, most of which comes from other states — though President Gremlin is trying to change that to foreign sources

Maybe a boycott could work, if leftists are willing to

• Switch to that insect diet they've been promoting
• Stop heating or cooling their homes
• Stop fueling or recharging their cars
• And go without little things like baths

With those minor sacrifices, they could make the red states eke out a survival existence on food, water, fuel, and electricity.

That leftist mastermind, Keith Olbermann, seems pretty sure he wants this.  Are his fellow travelers on the left up for it?  They may be able to make all of their leftist dreams come true with just a little sacrifice.  They merely need to spend a couple of years living in the Stone Age to teach the rubes who provide them with a modern lifestyle a lesson.

Image: Keith Olbermann via YouTube, CC BY 3.0 (cropped).