post-election ranting (cont'd)

I may get over this week's events, but not yet.

Democrats have a tough road ahead. The Republicans have sold their souls to the evangelicals, and they are intent on hijacking the country and the Constitution. They have managed to define "moral issues" as abortion and gay marriage, and not much more than that. These folks are more upset about Bill Clinton getting a consensual blow job in the Oval Office than about W manipulating the evidence to justify invading Iraq.

Isn't morality also about helping those born into poverty, with essentially no way out except an illegal drug economy? Is it moral to grossly categorize the poor as lazy leeches who just need to get jobs? Is it moral to allow the oil and gas industry to re-write environmental regulations to their satisfaction? Is it moral for a draft-dodger to question the military service of those who volunteered to serve (and I'm not talking about just Kerry here, ask John McCain how Bush treated HIS service record in the 2000 campaign)?

I found some guy name Adam Yoshida, who has a dissapointingly popular blog. I'm not going to post a link to him, but you can find him easily enough through Google. This guy has serious issues, I'm sure any half-decent psychiatrist could forge a good career on him. He's like an even less-rational Ann Coulter. And boy is he angry.

Salon.com has a number of articles dissecting the election results (you have to watch a short ad to be able to read everything, but it's pretty painless). As expected, there are conflicting opinions on the best way to go forward. Some, like William Saletan at Slate think we should try to make inroads into the "Red" states, and if not accomodate the evangelicals, at least try to understand them better.

I'm not sure that's going to be worth the effort. It's sort of like spending time and money trying to get Florida to vote Democratic. Not gonna happen. I'm still in my "anger" state, but my feelings are more similar to this article, also on Salon.com, part of which is excerpted here:

By the time I had gone to bed, the chorus of pundits had fixed on a single tune, as they always do, and remarkably quickly, too. (Do they watch one another's feeds in the green room?) They had dusted off the old theme that the Democrats need to "reach out" more to the "heartland." Reach out? How, exactly? Forget that these folks blindly ignored all objective reality -- and their own best economic and national-security interests -- and voted for Bush. Look what they did at the Senate level. In Kentucky, they refused to use even basic sanity as a litmus test, and reelected a guy with apparent late-stage dementia; in Oklahoma, they tapped a fellow who wants to execute doctors who perform abortions, who was sued for sterilizing a woman against her will, who pled guilty to Medicaid fraud, and who largely opposes federal subsidies, even for his own state; in Louisiana, they embraced a man who has made back-door deals with David Duke and who was revealed to have had a long-running affair with a prostitute; in South Carolina, they went with a guy who thinks all gay teachers should be fired; and in Alaska, they reelected a woman who was appointed by her father to the job after a spectacularly undistinguished career as an obscure state senator. And compared with the rest of the GOP Class of '04, she's the freaking prom queen. These are the stellar elected officials that the "heartland" has foisted on the rest of us.

"Reach out" to these voters? Yeah. Then boil your hand till it's sterilized.