49 million Americans held hostage by power-crazed idiot savant

[Edward Teach]

Here's some food for thought.

Look at the map by _counties_ at such places at www.electoral-vote.com . It's kind of scarey to see all those red ones.

Visit the fun site www.smirkingchimp.com .

Have a look at this little piece by a favorite conservative columnist:

November 5, 2004
Buck Up, You Lefties!
There's reason for hope

by Justin Raimondo

The presidential campaign had hardly ended before the sounds of shocked outrage and the gnashing of teeth was heard across the globe:

"How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?" wailed the Daily Mirror.

"This is not going to make the relationship on the two sides of the Atlantic any easier," averred Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States.


"We didn't want Bush," said Amar Hassan Fayad, a professor of political science at Baghdad University. "Kerry could have made a fresh start. His mission wouldn't have been as complicated as Bush's."


"Never in the course of human history has such an inspiring election produced such a depressing result," moaned Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian.

On the home front, the mood was even darker. The knowing smirk on Jon Stewart's face was nowhere to be seen on election night, although it will doubtless make a return appearance all too soon. (Hey, it's a living). New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's lamentation typified the mindset of the post-Kerry Latte Liberal:

"What troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do – they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is."

Maureen Dowd cites a "Bush insider" who says:

"'He'll be a lot more aggressive in Iraq now. He'll raze Falluja if he has to. He feels that the election results endorsed his version of the war.' Never mind that the more insurgents American troops kill, the more they create."

This last possibility – nay, near certainty – is cause for grave concern. While the Latte Liberals are sitting around the café lamenting their beleaguered status as internal exiles, the "liberated" peoples of Iraq will bear the full brunt of the election results. We will "feel their pain," so to speak, from a safe distance.

Not that John Kerry would have given them a moment's respite from American state terrorism. How long, one wonders, before the Latte Liberals stop blaming the American people for being too dim to embrace Kerry as their savior and start reexamining what was possibly, if not the worst, then certainly the most passive political campaign in American history?

Remember the Democratic convention – where antiwar signage and sentiment was verboten? – that cravenly sought to mimic Republican militarism? Boston signaled the death wish of the Democrats: after all, why vote for Bush Lite, when the real deal is already in office?

When Bush's minions defamed Kerry's military record, smeared his supporters, and implied that a Kerry victory would be followed shortly afterward by the nuking of major American cities, the Democratic candidate … did nothing. Better to lose the election than that the word "chickenhawk" should ever pass the lips of a Boston Brahmin.

As Kerry sunk in the polls, and the possibility that he was deliberately throwing the election to the Republicans began to be bruited about, somebody must have woken up over at Democratic party headquarters, because – in a complete reversal – Kerry began pounding away at the president's conduct of the Iraq war. Not that he came out in opposition, yet, as I have pointed out before, he appropriated antiwar arguments in the final weeks of the campaign – and immediately began surging in the polls.

But it was too late, and, aside from that, the Republicans had a superior organization, fueled by the zeal of Christian fundamentalists who believe the president's policies are a divine writ from God. What sort of emotional-ideological fuel fired the Democratic machine – hatred of Bush? Whatever it was, it wasn't a love of Kerry's fabled nuances, and – more importantly – it wasn't enough.

Aside from Kerry's known limitations, however, I would urge the dejected to put their present travails in historical perspective. On November 11, 1972, Richard Nixon was reelected in what was truly a mandate for his monstrous foreign policy: it was one of the largest landslides in the history of American politics. Nixon crushed the Democratic nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, taking more than 60 percent of the vote.

A few months later, Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. were convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in the Watergate incident. By April, the Nixon White House was in disarray, as the Watergate conspirators scrambled in a vain attempt to cover up the cover-up. Senate hearings on the matter were convened in May. That summer, John Dean spilled his guts to Watergate investigators, who uncovered more incriminating evidence of illegal White House activities. October's Saturday Night Massacre sounded the death knell of Nixon's presidency, ensuring that, no matter what the ultimate outcome – impeachment or resignation – the 36th President of the United States would go down in the history books as a discredited and pathetic failure. A year after pulverizing the McGovernites – who, unlike the Kerry-ites, really were opponents of global interventionism – Nixon was whining "I am not a crook!"

While history never repeats itself in quite the same way, the possibility that Bush could wind up disgraced looms larger today than it did for Nixon in the winter of 1972. Back then, the Watergate burglars were still being depicted as a "rogue" operation, and no one believed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who doggedly uncovered the crimes that eventually brought down a president. Similar scandals are simmering on the back burner at the Bush White House: at least three, at last count. Any one of them could lead to big trouble for this administration, which had better start battening down the hatches just as soon as the last of the champagne is poured.

While the issue has largely been lost sight of on account of special prosecutor Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald's bulldoggish tactics – threatening to jail reporters for refusing to divulge their sources – his probe into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame by Washington neocons eager to discredit her husband, diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, is likely to reach into the vice president's office – and, from there, insinuate its way into the White House. It's the cover-up, not the crime, that gets them every time…

A related investigation into the basis of the infamous "16 words" of the president's 2002 State of the Union address is also percolating, and this should be even more interesting – and potentially damaging to the administration. Because this probes into the question of how so much blatantly false information made its way into the White House and onto the president's desk – including an outright forgery that was so crude it took the IAEA's scientists a matter of minutes with Google to debunk it.

Yet another looming legal case is the upcoming trial of neocon ideologue Larry Franklin, a specialist on Iran working in Douglas Feith's Pentagon policy shop, who was caught red-handed turning over highly sensitive top secret documents to two Israeli government officials and two top employees of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. In a fascinating piece on the sociology of the neoconservative movement, social anthropologist Janine R. Wedel characterizes them as an "informal" faction:

"I call these exclusive, informal factions 'flex groups,' for their ease in playing multiple and overlapping roles and conflating state and private interests. These players keep appearing in different incarnations, ensuring continuity even as their operating environments change."

In light of the Franklin case, however, the covert activities of the neoconservative "flex group" in the Pentagon appear to serve a purpose greater than mere mutual self-promotion. Rather than just furthering the interests of the individuals involved, clearly the idea is to promote the goals of a foreign power, namely Israel – the chief beneficiary, aside from Iran, of our post-9/11 foreign policy, and which clearly had an interest in rushing us to war. Now that Tehran is in Israel's sights – along with Syria and Lebanon – the same "flex group" is flexing its muscles and getting ready for action in Bush's second term. But there's nothing like a charge of espionage to put a crimp in the activities of even the most dedicated and energetic fifth column.

So, cheer up, all you disillusioned and depressed lefties and assorted liberals, who were (naively, in my view) counting on the deus ex machina of a Kerry victory to pull us out of the Iraqi quagmire. As an unreconstructed reactionary of the "isolationist" (i.e., anti-imperialist) Old Right, I can rightly claim to have never been taken in by this dubious panacea. In the interest of good taste, however, I'll refrain from any further displays of unseemly gloating, and merely remind my readers that they were warned: "It's Bush by a relatively substantial margin in the popular vote," I wrote in the "Notes in the Margin" section of this column the day before the election, and so it was.

Aside from confirming my predictive prowess – I meant relatively substantial compared to the 2000 contest – the Bush victory signifies much less than is readily apparent. Yes, it's one giant step backward, but the antiwar forces can confidently look forward to taking two or even three quite substantial steps forward in the months to come. While the public now knows that there were no "weapons of mass destruction," no lraqi links to 9/11, and no real threat to the U.S. posed by Saddam, the whole story of this administration's unparalleled mendacity has yet to be fully revealed. Bush's Watergate is bubbling up to the surface. The built-up pressure of months of investigations – years, in the case of the Israeli spy ring – is threatening to explode the deepest darkest secrets of the Bush White House onto the front pages. Now that Franklin has engaged Plato Cacheris, who first rocketed to fame as Attorney General John Mitchell's co-counsel in the Watergate case, the stage is set for a series of courtroom dramas – and possibly congressional hearings – that will not only tear the mask off the War Party but could discredit it for a good many years to come.

Screw John Kerry. We have just begun to fight.

– Justin Raimondo

With this crowd controlling both houses of congress, the supremes and many of the federal judges, ain't nothing like watergate gonna happen. In fact, what I heard discussed on Fox news Thursday was a call for opening investigations of Hillary Clinton.

Bush has a free hand to do whatever he wants and there ain't no telling what he wants.

Ed

 

[shereads]

Pure, I'd like to believe that his misdeeds will lead to his downfall. But face it, the man has gotten away scot-free with things that should have shocked and disgusted everyone, but didn't. "Bush's Watergate" could have been Chalabigate, HalliburtonGate, DeficitGate, or even GoatGate (referring to the kiddy book and the 7 Minutes of Stunned Helplessness). DebateGate looked like it might have legs, especially when he started whining, "It's hard being president. It's a hard job!" But no. America forgave all. "He's a creepy little redneck, but he's our creepy little redneck."

I still have hope that(AAaarrrghh!!)

Let me rephrase: I can see how others might hope that PlameGate will make it's way back onto the radar. But with Congress now firmly in Bush's pocket, the likelihood of any repercussions are zero to none.

With all respect to cantdog, I'm going to become one of those "why-should-I-care" slackers for a while. It's the one approach to politics that I haven't tried yet. No, I've been promoting the necessity of political involvement since before I could vote. I deserve a brain-nap.

My best friend took time off from her job to man the phones at a Democratic voter registration drive, and was a volunteer pollworker during the first week of early-voting here. She's been relentless. On Nov. 1, she sent this e-mail to everyone on her list: "I've done everything I could. Now it's up to the voters. I want you all to know that if Kerry loses tomorrrow, this is the last time you'll hear from me as a Democrat. I mean it. I can't take another loss as painful as the last one. If Bush wins tomorrow, by Wednesday I'll be indistinguishable from Laura Bush, right down to the navy blue pantsuit. If you don't like it, I'll find new friends at the Junior League."



Bitch couldn't go through with it. I told her she'd have to use Kathryn Harris' hairstylist, and she buckled.

Here's some food for thought.

Look at the map by _counties_ at such places at www.electoral-vote.com . It's kind of scarey to see all those red ones.

Visit the fun site www.smirkingchimp.com .

Have a look at this little piece by a favorite conservative columnist:

November 5, 2004
Buck Up, You Lefties!
There's reason for hope

by Justin Raimondo

The presidential campaign had hardly ended before the sounds of shocked outrage and the gnashing of teeth was heard across the globe:

"How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?" wailed the Daily Mirror.

"This is not going to make the relationship on the two sides of the Atlantic any easier," averred Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States.


"We didn't want Bush," said Amar Hassan Fayad, a professor of political science at Baghdad University. "Kerry could have made a fresh start. His mission wouldn't have been as complicated as Bush's."


"Never in the course of human history has such an inspiring election produced such a depressing result," moaned Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian.

On the home front, the mood was even darker. The knowing smirk on Jon Stewart's face was nowhere to be seen on election night, although it will doubtless make a return appearance all too soon. (Hey, it's a living). New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's lamentation typified the mindset of the post-Kerry Latte Liberal:

"What troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do – they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is."

Maureen Dowd cites a "Bush insider" who says:

"'He'll be a lot more aggressive in Iraq now. He'll raze Falluja if he has to. He feels that the election results endorsed his version of the war.' Never mind that the more insurgents American troops kill, the more they create."

This last possibility – nay, near certainty – is cause for grave concern. While the Latte Liberals are sitting around the café lamenting their beleaguered status as internal exiles, the "liberated" peoples of Iraq will bear the full brunt of the election results. We will "feel their pain," so to speak, from a safe distance.

Not that John Kerry would have given them a moment's respite from American state terrorism. How long, one wonders, before the Latte Liberals stop blaming the American people for being too dim to embrace Kerry as their savior and start reexamining what was possibly, if not the worst, then certainly the most passive political campaign in American history?

Remember the Democratic convention – where antiwar signage and sentiment was verboten? – that cravenly sought to mimic Republican militarism? Boston signaled the death wish of the Democrats: after all, why vote for Bush Lite, when the real deal is already in office?

When Bush's minions defamed Kerry's military record, smeared his supporters, and implied that a Kerry victory would be followed shortly afterward by the nuking of major American cities, the Democratic candidate â€| did nothing. Better to lose the election than that the word "chickenhawk" should ever pass the lips of a Boston Brahmin.

As Kerry sunk in the polls, and the possibility that he was deliberately throwing the election to the Republicans began to be bruited about, somebody must have woken up over at Democratic party headquarters, because – in a complete reversal – Kerry began pounding away at the president's conduct of the Iraq war. Not that he came out in opposition, yet, as I have pointed out before, he appropriated antiwar arguments in the final weeks of the campaign – and immediately began surging in the polls.

But it was too late, and, aside from that, the Republicans had a superior organization, fueled by the zeal of Christian fundamentalists who believe the president's policies are a divine writ from God. What sort of emotional-ideological fuel fired the Democratic machine – hatred of Bush? Whatever it was, it wasn't a love of Kerry's fabled nuances, and – more importantly – it wasn't enough.

Aside from Kerry's known limitations, however, I would urge the dejected to put their present travails in historical perspective. On November 11, 1972, Richard Nixon was reelected in what was truly a mandate for his monstrous foreign policy: it was one of the largest landslides in the history of American politics. Nixon crushed the Democratic nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, taking more than 60 percent of the vote.

A few months later, Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. were convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in the Watergate incident. By April, the Nixon White House was in disarray, as the Watergate conspirators scrambled in a vain attempt to cover up the cover-up. Senate hearings on the matter were convened in May. That summer, John Dean spilled his guts to Watergate investigators, who uncovered more incriminating evidence of illegal White House activities. October's Saturday Night Massacre sounded the death knell of Nixon's presidency, ensuring that, no matter what the ultimate outcome – impeachment or resignation – the 36th President of the United States would go down in the history books as a discredited and pathetic failure. A year after pulverizing the McGovernites – who, unlike the Kerry-ites, really were opponents of global interventionism – Nixon was whining "I am not a crook!"

While history never repeats itself in quite the same way, the possibility that Bush could wind up disgraced looms larger today than it did for Nixon in the winter of 1972. Back then, the Watergate burglars were still being depicted as a "rogue" operation, and no one believed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who doggedly uncovered the crimes that eventually brought down a president. Similar scandals are simmering on the back burner at the Bush White House: at least three, at last count. Any one of them could lead to big trouble for this administration, which had better start battening down the hatches just as soon as the last of the champagne is poured.

While the issue has largely been lost sight of on account of special prosecutor Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald's bulldoggish tactics – threatening to jail reporters for refusing to divulge their sources – his probe into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame by Washington neocons eager to discredit her husband, diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, is likely to reach into the vice president's office – and, from there, insinuate its way into the White House. It's the cover-up, not the crime, that gets them every timeâ€|

A related investigation into the basis of the infamous "16 words" of the president's 2002 State of the Union address is also percolating, and this should be even more interesting – and potentially damaging to the administration. Because this probes into the question of how so much blatantly false information made its way into the White House and onto the president's desk – including an outright forgery that was so crude it took the IAEA's scientists a matter of minutes with Google to debunk it.

Yet another looming legal case is the upcoming trial of neocon ideologue Larry Franklin, a specialist on Iran working in Douglas Feith's Pentagon policy shop, who was caught red-handed turning over highly sensitive top secret documents to two Israeli government officials and two top employees of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. In a fascinating piece on the sociology of the neoconservative movement, social anthropologist Janine R. Wedel characterizes them as an "informal" faction:

"I call these exclusive, informal factions 'flex groups,' for their ease in playing multiple and overlapping roles and conflating state and private interests. These players keep appearing in different incarnations, ensuring continuity even as their operating environments change."

In light of the Franklin case, however, the covert activities of the neoconservative "flex group" in the Pentagon appear to serve a purpose greater than mere mutual self-promotion. Rather than just furthering the interests of the individuals involved, clearly the idea is to promote the goals of a foreign power, namely Israel – the chief beneficiary, aside from Iran, of our post-9/11 foreign policy, and which clearly had an interest in rushing us to war. Now that Tehran is in Israel's sights – along with Syria and Lebanon – the same "flex group" is flexing its muscles and getting ready for action in Bush's second term. But there's nothing like a charge of espionage to put a crimp in the activities of even the most dedicated and energetic fifth column.

So, cheer up, all you disillusioned and depressed lefties and assorted liberals, who were (naively, in my view) counting on the deus ex machina of a Kerry victory to pull us out of the Iraqi quagmire. As an unreconstructed reactionary of the "isolationist" (i.e., anti-imperialist) Old Right, I can rightly claim to have never been taken in by this dubious panacea. In the interest of good taste, however, I'll refrain from any further displays of unseemly gloating, and merely remind my readers that they were warned: "It's Bush by a relatively substantial margin in the popular vote," I wrote in the "Notes in the Margin" section of this column the day before the election, and so it was.

Aside from confirming my predictive prowess – I meant relatively substantial compared to the 2000 contest – the Bush victory signifies much less than is readily apparent. Yes, it's one giant step backward, but the antiwar forces can confidently look forward to taking two or even three quite substantial steps forward in the months to come. While the public now knows that there were no "weapons of mass destruction," no lraqi links to 9/11, and no real threat to the U.S. posed by Saddam, the whole story of this administration's unparalleled mendacity has yet to be fully revealed. Bush's Watergate is bubbling up to the surface. The built-up pressure of months of investigations – years, in the case of the Israeli spy ring – is threatening to explode the deepest darkest secrets of the Bush White House onto the front pages. Now that Franklin has engaged Plato Cacheris, who first rocketed to fame as Attorney General John Mitchell's co-counsel in the Watergate case, the stage is set for a series of courtroom dramas – and possibly congressional hearings – that will not only tear the mask off the War Party but could discredit it for a good many years to come.

Screw John Kerry. We have just begun to fight.

– Justin Raimondo

 

[cantdog]

I apologize for my blithe optimism before the fact, too, Sher. I honestly believed the hip-hop vote and the mobilized voters would tip the scales, despite Kerry's lack of proactive issue-based campaigning.

I thought a military veteran would comprehend the chilling downside to torturing the captive insurgents, al Qaeda and not. If you don't observe the conventions, your own troops will likewise face the knives and blunt instruments, in the dark places far from help, if once they are captured in their turn. Abrogating the Conventions is a profoundly anti-military thing to countenance.

I thought a lot of things. Kerry did not have an anti-torture word to say on the campaign trail and his "plan for America" on the websites and elsewhere still seemed to buy the Administration lie about a few bad apples.

On issue after issue Kerry failed to come up to my ideas about universal humanity and peace, opposition to the weakening of the bill of rights, abandoning habeas corpus and even posse comitatus, and so on in a long list.

Most shamefully, he was a corporatist.

But I thought it would be pretty easy. I thought a president who supported torture and gutted hazard pay for his troops, a president who allowed Rumsfeld to send our children to war in very small numbers and authorized the bombing of civilian targets as a matter of policy, a president who suppported polluting more and being accountable not at all, would be a vulnerable president who could be effectively shown to the electorate for the venal, grasping, ideologically driven, shortsighted, lying and scaprgoating prick that he undoubtedly is.

I thought a president as openly discredited by the facts and revelations as George Bush was could be sent packing by merely casting the light of day on his iniquitous dealings. Especially his shielding of the Saudis, his support for torture, his ongoing campaign against women's rights and his religious bigotry would be plenty to bury him in the consequences of his own actions. All without having to even address his domestic policies of surveillance, persecution of muslims and latinos, his support for exporting jobs and his beggaring of the American exchequer. All without mentioning his driving wages down and driving deficits and unemployment and infant mortality up.

The man has been such a thoroughgoing shit in his ignorant and ideologically blinkered foreign policy and his classist and fascistic domestic agenda, tainted with zealotry, poisoned with environmental backwardness, and characterized by racism and denial of basic freedoms for his own people. How in hell could anyone fail to lose, given how very vulnerable Bush was to even the most perfunctory airing of the facts of his term of office, which itself was secured by judicial coup rather than election?

But no, he won, he won fair and square despite the thousands of cheats in the election. Therre wer enough sex-obsessed zealots to offset all of that. The hate vote was mobilized and the Kerry campaign had not bothered to tell the country why it was folly to allow these people to continue to usurp the government.

Because Kerry steadfastly refused to stand for peace, to stand for honor, to stand up for the middle class, to support the troops against the threat of torture and summary execution, amidst a host of other failings.

For the first of his campaign he merely reacted to the exorbitant lies of his detractors.

He agreed with the police state, he refused to oppose torture, he supported the war of aggression against a country which was no threat to us at all, only insisting on doing the war more intelligently.

The missed opportunities! Bush was a mess, vulnerable on issue after issue, not least beggaring the country for no discernable purpose except maybe to make the rich richer.

I thought it would be child's play, and I thought that the more people who went to the polls, the more complete Bush's downfall would have to be.

I was wrong.

 

[shereads]

I thought a president as openly discredited by the facts and revelations as George Bush was could be sent packing by merely casting the light of day on his iniquitous dealings. Especially his shielding of the Saudis, his support for torture, his ongoing campaign against women's rights and his religious bigotry would be plenty to bury him in the consequences of his own actions. All without having to even address his domestic policies of surveillance, persecution of muslims and latinos, his support for exporting jobs and his beggaring of the American exchequer. All without mentioning his driving wages down and driving deficits and unemployment and infant mortality up.

The man has been such a thoroughgoing shit in his ignorant and ideologically blinkered foreign policy and his classist and fascistic domestic agenda, tainted with zealotry, poisoned with environmental backwardness, and characterized by racism and denial of basic freedoms for his own people. How in hell could anyone fail to lose, given how very vulnerable Bush was to even the most perfunctory airing of the facts of his term of office, which itself was secured by judicial coup rather than election?

A reporter for NBC spent two months on the campaign trail with Kerry & Edwards. He was with with the candidates when they reviewed the tapes of the second debate. Remember when someone asked GWB what he considered the most serious mistake of his first term, and he answered that he couldn't think of any mistakes?

Kerry said, "I can't believe I''m losing to this idiot."






Neither could I. Poor bastard.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I apologize for my blithe optimism before the fact, too, Sher. I honestly believed the hip-hop vote and the mobilized voters would tip the scales, despite Kerry's lack of proactive issue-based campaigning.

I thought a military veteran would comprehend the chilling downside to torturing the captive insurgents, al Qaeda and not. If you don't observe the conventions, your own troops will likewise face the knives and blunt instruments, in the dark places far from help, if once they are captured in their turn. Abrogating the Conventions is a profoundly anti-military thing to countenance.

I thought a lot of things. Kerry did not have an anti-torture word to say on the campaign trail and his "plan for America" on the websites and elsewhere still seemed to buy the Administration lie about a few bad apples.

On issue after issue Kerry failed to come up to my ideas about universal humanity and peace, opposition to the weakening of the bill of rights, abandoning habeas corpus and even posse comitatus, and so on in a long list.

Most shamefully, he was a corporatist.

But I thought it would be pretty easy. I thought a president who supported torture and gutted hazard pay for his troops, a president who allowed Rumsfeld to send our children to war in very small numbers and authorized the bombing of civilian targets as a matter of policy, a president who suppported polluting more and being accountable not at all, would be a vulnerable president who could be effectively shown to the electorate for the venal, grasping, ideologically driven, shortsighted, lying and scaprgoating prick that he undoubtedly is.

I thought a president as openly discredited by the facts and revelations as George Bush was could be sent packing by merely casting the light of day on his iniquitous dealings. Especially his shielding of the Saudis, his support for torture, his ongoing campaign against women's rights and his religious bigotry would be plenty to bury him in the consequences of his own actions. All without having to even address his domestic policies of surveillance, persecution of muslims and latinos, his support for exporting jobs and his beggaring of the American exchequer. All without mentioning his driving wages down and driving deficits and unemployment and infant mortality up.

The man has been such a thoroughgoing shit in his ignorant and ideologically blinkered foreign policy and his classist and fascistic domestic agenda, tainted with zealotry, poisoned with environmental backwardness, and characterized by racism and denial of basic freedoms for his own people. How in hell could anyone fail to lose, given how very vulnerable Bush was to even the most perfunctory airing of the facts of his term of office, which itself was secured by judicial coup rather than election?

But no, he won, he won fair and square despite the thousands of cheats in the election. Therre wer enough sex-obsessed zealots to offset all of that. The hate vote was mobilized and the Kerry campaign had not bothered to tell the country why it was folly to allow these people to continue to usurp the government.

Because Kerry steadfastly refused to stand for peace, to stand for honor, to stand up for the middle class, to support the troops against the threat of torture and summary execution, amidst a host of other failings.

For the first of his campaign he merely reacted to the exorbitant lies of his detractors.

He agreed with the police state, he refused to oppose torture, he supported the war of aggression against a country which was no threat to us at all, only insisting on doing the war more intelligently.

The missed opportunities! Bush was a mess, vulnerable on issue after issue, not least beggaring the country for no discernable purpose except maybe to make the rich richer.

I thought it would be child's play, and I thought that the more people who went to the polls, the more complete Bush's downfall would have to be.

I was wrong.

You could spend a week outlining and defining the failure of GWB Cant. No matter how bad he is, he's the republican candidate. republicans will support him, just as Democrats supported Clinton though his trials & travails. In a two party system, the cries of he's a bastard, but he's our bastard ring loud and clear again and again.

A vote for GWB may have been a vote for a borderline moron, but a vote for Kerry would be...a vote for the Democrats! Ewwwww.

For a huge number of voters, it comes down to that. Democrats are no better, voting solidly for Clinton, despite the fact he had perjured himself. To the core of both parties, it just dosen't matter. They aren't called party loyalists for no reason.

The Dems focused on getting out the youth vote, a chancy thing at best. The gop concentrated on getting out the threatened vote. A much surer prospect.

As long as the Democratic party's domestic agenda calls for a removal of religion from public life, the plan to make us all safer by taking our guns, gay marriage, huge spending on social programs, raising taxes, socialized medicine, etc.etc. the threatened vote will be out there. The real problem is that in the last ten or so years, the GOP has become adept at getting it out.

I don't really see that changeing, no matter how bad Dubya is these next four years.

-Colly

 

[Pure]

Today's NY TIMES has an extensive analysis of Florida voting.

Looking at the counties, Kerry won a few on the eastern seaboard, and several in the Southeast Tip. Bush *campaigned* outside the big cities, and racked 'em in.

(What were the Dems doing; preparing for legal challenges! --Fighting the old battle. Turned out there were very few challenges by Republicans.)

Hats off to Rove.

(I can't urge people enough, to look at the *counties* maps of red and blue, e.g., at electoral-vote.com

There is a comparison map of counties that Gore carried. He did somewhat better outside cities. In general, as Wolfe says, below, the patterns are quite similar.)

 

[Pure]

Hey Cant and others, this is an excellent article on the Republican win, as seen by Tom Wolfe.

Cant, I hear your anger, but your analysis is focussed on 'facts,' and people's objective interests. The downfall of liberals and classic Marxists. Why is it that only Colly seems to comprehend this point?

Also you rely on*your* moral standards about 'iniquity.'

I thought a president as openly discredited by the facts and revelations as George Bush was could be sent packing by merely casting the light of day on his iniquitous dealings.


Toronto Star.
Nov. 6, 2004. 01:00 AM

Wolfe, Bush and `championism'


PHILIP MARCHAND
BOOKS COLUMNIST

It was a very subdued commuter train headed for Grand Central Station the morning after the United States presidential election. No one spoke. No one even looked at a newspaper. The important information, everybody knew about. George W. Bush was re-elected. The forces of darkness had won the election.

I got off the train and headed for Tom Wolfe's townhouse to interview him about his new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. Inside, on the 14th floor of a 15-storey greystone building just around the corner from Park Avenue, Tom Wolfe was positively serene, if not cheerful.

Didn't Wolfe, a supporter of the Democratic challenger John Kerry, think America had lived through an election that verged on Armageddon?

"Not at all," he said. "For a start, this is a very centrist country politically. If you look at this election — as intense as the feeling was — the country voted almost identically the way it voted in 2000. What kind of an Armageddon is that? I can only conclude that there were things that mattered more than Iraq."

And what might those things be? Wolfe, the Southern gentleman and one of America's most influential writers, has a theory about why Bush won the election, a theory having to do with what he called "championism." It's part of a theme that runs through his new novel, about a young woman from the hill country of North Carolina who attends a prestigious university — fictionalized in the novel as "Dupont University" — and experiences what can only be called a clash of values.

This young woman, Charlotte Simmons, comes from the heart of Bush country — the land of church-going, hard-working Southern whites, barely above the poverty line but utterly "respectable." They are also descended from the Scots-Irish, which is significant.

"I got a hint of this from listening to a remarkable figure," Wolfe said, referring to a novelist and former military man named James Webb. "He said any politician who thinks the issue of gun control is really about gun control is not using his head. He said there's a huge ethnic group — the Scots-Irish, who are the invisible ethnic group in this country. They're always lumped together with WASPs. They settled largely in the South, which includes places like southern Ohio, and they take an issue like gun control as an attack on their way of life. They're very stubborn about it.

"I just now wonder how much of that — what I call `championism,' in which you will vote against your own ordinary, rational interests, having to do with things like your level of income, and instead vote as if you were championing your fundamental core beliefs about who you are — played a part in the election."

Wolfe himself seems far too sophisticated to be affected by championism. This is the man who helped create the New Journalism of the 1960s; the author of seminal non-fiction works such as The Right Stuff (1975) and full-blown satirical novels like The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). The morning sun pouring into his townhouse illuminates floor-to-ceiling shelves full of art books, graphic posters from an early 20th-century German political journal on the wall, and other curious artifacts.

But it turns out that Wolfe, born and raised in Virginia, has indeed experienced feelings of championism.

"When 9/11 happened, two well-known clergymen — they were well known on television — Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell both said the attacks were the result of a disintegration of morality in the United States and the licentiousness and tolerance for gay sex. Of course, these were, in my opinion, unbelievably stupid statements. Then they were attacked and ridiculed and practically laughed off the planet over and over again as these hidebound Christians.

"Well, Pat Robertson went to the same college (Washington and Lee) I went to. And Falwell's from Lynchburg, Virginia, which is near the college I went to. I began to get my back up. How dare they treat these people as hidebound monsters. I know these people. I grew up with people just like them. I didn't take up the sword and defend them, but it aroused in me — and that's championism — the values of the people with whom I grew up with, or identify with, or sympathize with. And that overrides your rational self.

"When you look at the voting map and you see that nothing has changed since the last election despite this huge adventure, an unprecedented adventure in the Middle East. You realize the war had zero effect on this election. People made up their mind strictly along the lines of championism: `I'm going to wave the flag for my group's values irrespective of how it might affect my other interests.'"

Sports mania illustrates the point equally well, Wolfe said. Sports teams bear little relation to the economic realities of their fans, and yet the fans treat the athletes on their team as their personal champions. A few years ago, when the New York Rangers were playing a crucial game against the Montreal Canadiens, Wolfe recalled, a New York player was asked about the prospects of his team.

"Well, he said, `The Canadiens are a great team, I understand how it looks on paper, but most of their guys are from Eastern Canada, and most of our guys are from Western Canada, and we can get really fired up when we play these guys from Montreal.' I thought, wait a minute. This is supposed to be the New York Rangers. And they're fired up because of some intra-Canadian rivalry? And here we in New York are all wrapped up in them as representing us?

"And that, I submit, is pure championism. It goes back to a primary understanding that is more than a fictional belief, a primary understanding that, at some point, no matter how sophisticated modern weaponry may be, there are men who have to put their lives on the line to conquer. You see it in Iraq, where all of our guided missiles won't do you a damned bit of good if you're street fighting in Falluja. You have to have somebody who will do that kind of fighting."

 

[Guest]

. . . (I can't urge people enough, to look at the *counties* maps of red and blue, e.g., at electoral-vote.com )

Yes.

And especially look at the state of Kansas.

The ONLY blue county? Mine!

Lord, what fools these Kansans be!"

 

[Young_flo]

My contribution... maybe if the crazed idiot savant is a woman, or a gay guy he/she might change her/his mind...

 

[Pure]

Hi sweet sub.

You pulled off a miracle. If only there'd been a few dozen like you--strategically placed in other counties--, maybe Kansas would've gone blue!

For map nuts, there's a compilation [links] by Ritholtz at

http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002317.html#2317

Esp. look at the 'purple map.'

 

[Guest]

Hi sweet sub.

You pulled off a miracle. If only there'd been a few dozen like you--strategically placed in other counties--, maybe Kansas would've gone blue!

For map nuts, there's a compilation [links] by Ritholtz at

http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002317.html#2317

Esp. look at the 'purple map.'

We like to believe the well-educated Kansans in Douglas County chose well. *grin*

There are several colleges nearby. In the immediate area are Baker University and the University of Kansas.

Thanks for the link. The Free/Slave states comparison (though probably somewhat biased presented in that way) is very interesting.

Or disturbing.

 

[cantdog]

The left should realize they have allies in the Libertarians and others, the true conservatives, in this battle.

The jackals may be doing the democratic party a favor if they can render Hillary unviable in their minds. Because she would but definitely lose. But perhaps not. The conservatives stuck with Bush despite his increasing diversion into fundamentalist programs.

I could care about the dems. They had their shot and they fucked it up. They didn't oppose any of this.

 

[Edward Teach]

The Dems didn't want to fight and Rove did

Instead of taking a cue from Howard Dean, who energized the Democratic base by attacking Bush hard, the Democrats softened their stance in an ill fated attempt to entice the mushy middle. Only when they got desperate in the waning days of the campaign, did they go for the hard line attack. It was too little too late and they lost.

The Democrats have been running from the fight since 1998. Even though it was obvious that the whole country was sick of Clinton bashing and was ready for someone to fight back in 1998, every Democrat in the country, frightened by the right wing media, practically disowned him. Gore did the same in 2000.

You can look at the red states and counties but you have to remember that most of those would be blue with just a small percentage of change in the vote.

Probably the biggest thing the Democrats need is someone who can act like a regular person. Al Gore couldn’t do it even with lessons and John Kerry couldn’t do it even with a hair cut. God knows, wind surfing wasn’t the answer.

 

[shereads]

You could spend a week outlining and defining the failure of GWB Cant. No matter how bad he is, he's the republican candidate. republicans will support him,

For a huge number of voters, it comes down to that. Democrats are no better, voting solidly for Clinton, despite the fact he had perjured himself. To the core of both parties, it just dosen't matter. They aren't called party loyalists for no reason.

Oh holy crap. I thought the Clinton-is-just-as-bad-because-he-lied argument would have petered out after enough blood was shed in Iraq without a shred of unrefuted evidence that the invasion was justified.

If Clinton had lied to achieve support for the full-scale invasion of another country, at the cost of making us the world's largest debtor nation, alienating our allies, destroying our credibility around the world, and embroiling us in the next Vietnam - and justified it with evidence provided by a convicted con artist - no one I know would have remained loyal to him. There's a difference between blind loyaty and refusing to take part in a sexophobic witch-hunt. Republicans were alone in the world then, as now, in thinking anyone had the right to ask the question, much less that the U.S. should change presidents during some of the most prosperous and peaceful years in our memory just to satisfy the Morals Police. The distinction between lying and lying under oath is uniquely important to Bush supporters, which nicely explains Bush's refusal to testify under oath before the 9/11 commission. He could lie like a rug and not risk losing the moral high ground, or what passes for it in his world.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Oh holy crap. I thought the Clinton-is-just-as-bad-because-he-lied argument would have petered out after enough blood was shed in Iraq without a shred of unrefuted evidence that the invasion was justified.

If Clinton had lied to achieve support for the full-scale invasion of another country, at the cost of making us the world's largest debtor nation, alienating our allies, destroying our credibility around the world, and embroiling us in the next Vietnam - and justified it with evidence provided by a convicted con artist - no one I know would have remained loyal to him. There's a difference between blind loyaty and refusing to take part in a sexophobic witch-hunt. Republicans were alone in the world then, as now, in thinking anyone had the right to ask the question, much less that the U.S. should change presidents during some of the most prosperous and peaceful years in our memory just to satisfy the Morals Police. The distinction between lying and lying under oath is uniquely important to Bush supporters, which nicely explains Bush's refusal to testify under oath before the 9/11 commission. He could lie like a rug and not risk losing the moral high ground, or what passes for it in his world.

*Sigh*

The point of the statement is not what Clinton did or did not do. Nor is it to compare Clinton's failings with Bush's. The point is that no matter what a sitting president does, his party loyalists will support him in the next election. To the core of both parties, the failings of the person of the president do not mitigate the fact he represents thier party's platform. It is always the party out of power, that takes issue with his failings. In large part because they don't like him anyway and would vote against him if he were the next FDR or Lincoln.


-Colly

 

[Wildcard Ky]

So this time it's the majority that carries the election? This is getting to be confusing.

No, seriously, Wildcard. We know you won. It's crystal clear that your side won. It's a simple concept. He's a simple president. The outcome was never really in doubt.

"My" side won, and it was never in doubt because "your" side came up with a lousy candidate.

Bush was very beatable. He's a mediocre president at best. Yet fully one half of Kerry's votes were simply anti Bush, not pro Kerry. Kerry couldn't inspire or motivate even half of the Dems to say Kerry is my #1 choice. Was Kerry your first choice as Dem candidate? If he wasn't your first choice, how can you expect him to be the rest of the country's first choice?


A conservative movement began in the 80's and hasn't subsided yet. The Dems keep making the same mistake against a conservative opponent......nominate a die hard lib. Mondale in 84, Dukakis in 88, and Kerry this year. They then try to pass the ultra lib off as a moderate.

The one time the Dems got it right and nominated a moderate (left leaning but still moderate) was Clinton in 92, and look what happened. He became the Dems first two termer since the 1950's.

Did the Dems learn from this? Hell no. Gore was a Lib, but an understandable nomination. Gore lost (barely), so what do the Dems do? Go back for the ultra lib candidate. What's the result? Same as before.

America doesn't want a far left president trying to disguise himself as a moderate. Bush getting more popular votes than any president in history should be proof enough of that.

The difficulty that the left has is they think "What is wrong with everyone else, why don't they see things our way?" instead of asking "What's wrong with us?" and keep making the same mistakes.

Will the Dems ever realize this? Very doubtful as long as McCauliffe and international socialist billionaire and majority stockholder of the Dem party Soros are running the show.

 

[Wildcard Ky]

On the Clinton issue. I voted for him, but the man was a sitting president and DID committ perjury while under oath.

What the perjury was about, be it on a personal issue or professional issue is irrelevant. Perjury is perjury. He was the president and is a lawyer. He knew he was committing a felony when he perjured himself.

 

[shereads]

On the Clinton issue. I voted for him, but the man was a sitting president and DID committ perjury while under oath.

What the perjury was about, be it on a personal issue or professional issue is irrelevant. Perjury is perjury. He was the president and is a lawyer. He knew he was committing a felony when he perjured himself.

You not only voted for a man who has done nothing right since he came into office, you gave him absolute power over all three branches of government. Perjury your right-wing ass. There's no excuse for what you've done. Keep congratulating yourself for keeping a "liberal" out of the White House, and the consequences to others be damned.

If a single conservative in this forum had read even one of the half-dozen books by Republicans who found out first-hand what GWB is all about and tried to warn you at no small risk to themselves, you would at least have made an informed decision. You chose ignorance, and voted appropriately. You should be ashamed of yourself for not wanting to find out more.

 

[amicus]

Wildcard KY....

"...The difficulty that the left has is they think "What is wrong with everyone else, why don't they see things our way?" instead of asking "What's wrong with us?" and keep making the same mistakes.

Will the Dems ever realize this? Very doubtful as long as McCauliffe and international socialist billionaire and majority stockholder of the Dem party Soros are running the show...."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

Wildcard...Liberalism is a faith, much like the fundamentalist christians they hate...they are believers and will not, perhaps cannot be reached by reason and rationality.

They truly cannot seek the ethical and moral conflict in the abortion issue, wherein the so called 'reproductive rights of a woman' outweigh the life of an unborn child.

They will not even consider that homosexuality is a mental illness, to be treated, not foisted upon an unreceptive nation merely as an alternative lifestyle or sexual preference.

So it is hopeless to engage in debate or even discussion, like radical muslims, they would rather commit intellectual suicide than question their faith.

So be it.

amicus...

 

[Guest]

Wildcard...Liberalism is a faith, much like the fundamentalist christians they hate...they are believers and will not, perhaps cannot be reached by reason and rationality.

They truly cannot seek the ethical and moral conflict in the abortion issue, wherein the so called 'reproductive rights of a woman' outweigh the life of an unborn child.

They will not even consider that homosexuality is a mental illness, to be treated, not foisted upon an unreceptive nation merely as an alternative lifestyle or sexual preference.

So it is hopeless to engage in debate or even discussion, like radical muslims, they would rather commit intellectual suicide than question their faith.

So be it.

amicus...

*giggling*

Ami actually used the terms "reason" and "rationality". And in the same sentence!

Shazam!

 

[amicus]

Whatever it takes to cheer you up, my dear...a lil giggle be good fer ya!


your amicableness...

 

[shereads]

*giggling*

Ami actually used the terms "reason" and "rationality". And in the same sentence!

Shazam!

Well, sweets, as of Tuesday, he's officially part of the majority. If you arent' already embarrassed by this election, that should do it.

 

[Guest]

We're getting ready to hibernate.

Burrowing now, settling in, basically hiding in the only Kansas county that voted against the Shrub.

My family and I will remain safe and snug in our college town intellectual cocoon.

Of course, we cannot leave the confines of Douglas County for the next four years, but hey!

 

[amicus]

ahhh...the lowest blow of all...to be called a part of the majority...sighs...fortunately I am an atheist, in all ways and an admitted felon (custodial intervention 20 years ago) and not permitted to cast a ballot...nor would I have anyway...unless to write in my own name.

That democrats and liberal all over the nation are being urged by every talking head show I have seen in the days following the election, to revisit and change the party for face literal extinction in the politcal mix....thus...I am not alone in suggesting liberals reconsider.

There is need for an opposition party...we need you to question and debate the increasing influence of the religious right and we need you to be continually vigilant about the Patriot act...as we have adopted a war time stance in terms of civil liberties...

so quit whining and get on with it....

the rational and reasonable amicus...

 

[shereads]

ahhh...the lowest blow of all...to be called a part of the majority...sighs...fortunately I am an atheist, in all ways and an admitted felon (custodial intervention 20 years ago) and not permitted to cast a ballot...nor would I have anyway...unless to write in my own name.

That democrats and liberal all over the nation are being urged by every talking head show I have seen in the days following the election, to revisit and change the party for face literal extinction in the politcal mix....thus...I am not alone in suggesting liberals reconsider.

There is need for an opposition party...we need you to question and debate the increasing influence of the religious right and we need you to be continually vigilant about the Patriot act...as we have adopted a war time stance in terms of civil liberties...

so quit whining and get on with it....

the rational and reasonable amicus...

Your view that a human being with hopes and dreams and civil liberties begins at the moment of conception isn't science-based, so you might want to ask your doctor if there's a dormant form of the Evangelical Christian virus in your brain. As for the Patriot Act, I could have sworn someone with your politics would applaud the effort to keep the rest of us under constant watch. Seriously, a, this is the first peep out of you about anything being less than fabulous about the lower primate currently grooming itself in the Oval Office.

Dubya's right. People really can change on the whim of a hat.