Well, guess what... I'm already talking about politics. Sort of.
A friend of mine sent me a link to a brief essay that discusses whether the US is a democracy or a republic. Walter Williams is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University; he concludes his essay by asking the following:
Do Americans share the republican values laid out by our founders, and is it simply a matter of our being unschooled about the differences between a republic and a democracy? Or is it a matter of preference and we now want the kind of tyranny feared by the founders where Congress can do anything it can muster a majority vote to do? I fear it's the latter.
I have to say I agree with Dr. Williams, only I think it's worse than that. I think not only do we generally want the kind of tyranny he suggests, I think there are many who are actively working to ensure it. They know exactly what they're doing.
"Kisses spark a fuss; Presidential affection is off-putting for some," Raleigh News & Observer
Let me be the first to say...
Ew.
I did NOT need to see that first thing this morning.
I guess it only counts if the offendor is a Democrat. Republicans changed their party rules the other day, allowing Tom DeLay to keep his leadership position within the party after his potential indictment for accepting illegal corporate campaign contributions. The rationalization for this is that the DA investigating DeLay is on a vendetta against Republicans.
As I recall, the Republicans enacted this rule 10 years or so ago to show their moral superiority to the Democrats after two Democrats kept their leadership posts after they were indicted.
The difference ten years ago? The Democrats had the majority, and the Republicans were desperate to draw distinctions. I guess now that they're in control, they only have to pay lip-service to the morality thing.
Oh, wait. "Morality" really only refers to gay marriage and abortion. I forgot.
I'm speechless. I can't even come up with a printable response to this one.
From the Washington Post (free registration required):
To pay for those large tax cuts, the administration is looking at eliminating both the deduction for state and local taxes, and the business tax deduction for employer-sponsored health insurance. That would raise nearly $926 billion over five years, according to White House and congressional documents.
This site is not for the weak of stomach.
It's a website/blog that contains photos taken by photojournalists in Fallujah, Iraq. I haven't read the whole site yet, but my initial impression is the blogger is opposed to the US presence in Iraq.
My own feelings are pretty complex, and not a little conflicted. When I read things like this, from the London Times, I can only conclude that it is not possible to win the war and the public relations battle at the same time. The story of the Marine shooting an apparently unarmed injured combatant in a mosque dominates the world press, but I've only read about the following on the London Times' site:
In the south of Fallujah yesterday, US Marines found the armless, legless body of a blonde woman, her throat slashed and her entrails cut out. Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the US Navy Corps, said that she had been dead for a while, but at that location for only a day or two. The woman was wearing a blue dress; her face had been disfigured. It was unclear if the remains were the body of the Irish-born aid worker Margaret Hassan, 59, or of Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole abducted two weeks ago. Both were married to Iraqis and held Iraqi citizenship; both were kidnapped in Baghdad last month.
The Marines have been ambushed by insurgents playing possum, they have been victims of booby-trapped corpses and surrenduring insurgents rigged with explosives, they've been targeted by snipers firing from within "holy" mosques. They have to work with an Iraqi "army" full of insurgent sympathizers and deserters. They are fighting an enemy that flouts the Geneva Convention's rules of engagements by targeting civilians, dressing as civilians, etc. The US military is being held to a standard that their opponents refuse to adhere to, and are being convicted in the court of world opinion for every transgression.
They have been put in an impossible situation.
No matter how I feel about how we came to be involved in this war, or how I feel about Dubya as a president or commander-in-chief, I have to give the men and women on the ground in Iraq a lot of leeway when it comes to fighting the war itself. I've never been in the military, although I've read plenty of war history. I've never been shot at. The fault for this mess does not lie with the men and women who serve as the tip of the spear. The fault lies with those crafting policy and strategy, and with us, the American public, for endorsing the Bush administration's interventionist approach. Even if just barely.
Dubya can purge with the best of them.
Key transgression at the CIA appears to be requiring evidence before forming any conclusions. After all, what are "analysts" for if not to tailor the data to fit the White House's presumptions? Why should foreign policy be any different from the Bush Administration's approach to science:
The FDA has kicked a prominent drug safety expert off an advisory panel for daring to draw conclusions based on evidence, rather than lobbyist literature.
Conclusion first, and then gather data to fit. Reject any data that suggests your conclusion is erroneous. Brand dissenters as un-American.
Another opinion piece on Slate.com that supports the position that fear of gays did not win Dubya the election. Fear of terrorists did.
Here's an interesting commentary by David Brooks, in the New York Times (free registration required).
After looking at some of the election data, I've decided I was wrong and David Brooks is pretty much right. This election was not decided primarily by religion. Evangelicals as a block don't appear to have turned out in any greater numbers than in 2000. States that had anti-gay ballot measures did not go for Bush in unexpectedly high proportions; in fact, more than a couple went for Kerry. So, many voters voted for the gay-marriage ban AND for Kerry. This doesn't seem to support the left's reactionary claim that "ignorant Bible-thumpers" put W back in the White House.
The election was decided primarily by fear of terrorism. Despite very real concerns about Bush, the economy, etc, enough people did not find John Kerry a compelling enough candidate to switch from W. It's worth pointing out (again) that the margin was not that great, either in the electoral college or in the popular vote. Kerry's poorly constructed message of "vote for me because I'm not him" almost got him elected.
What this means to me is that the Democratic party is tone-deaf to the concerns of the middle class. Democrats can insist all they want that they're the better party to represent the working class, but the working class hasn't bought it. Stomping your feet and dismissing Bush voters as ignorant and uninformed only reinforces the point. Hard to win friends with this approach.
I do wonder if the Republicans won't be tempted to over-play their hand with respect to their moral agenda. Evangelicals clearly believe they delivered the election victory and will no doubt expect some action. I see this as potentially a no-win situation for the Republican party.
If W does plan on attempting to actually govern rather than rule, this will mean backing off the radical agenda desired by the evangelicals. Nominate judges that won't inspire huge confirmation battles, talk a big game on abortion, but not actually do much about it. If it becomes obvious that this is occurring, how the religious right reacts is anybody's guess, but I can't imagine they will be pleased. They will most likely feel that they've been used (they have), and will either try to flex their political muscles and force the issue, or they will conclude that national politics is not the best way to further their agenda. If an evangelical Christian in the White House isn't going to push their agenda, then nobody is.
If, on the other hand, W does buy into the "dance with the one that brung you" idea (even though it's not clear they actually DID make a huge difference compared to 2000), and start trying to turn the country into a theocracy, this could have a disastrous impact on Republicans' electability in the future. Most Republicans I know personally are Republican for economic and defense-related reasons, not religious. Surveys and polls uniformly indicate a large majority of the country is nervous with the religious agenda of the far right. Even the frequently tone-deaf and almost brain-dead Democratic party should be able to exploit a Republican religious agenda with some success. An overtly theocratic agenda might serve to alienate the very large middle of the road voting block.
Guess we'll see how it plays out, we should find out very soon which way W is going to play it.
The anger and disappointment have faded a little, to a kind of dull ache. I've had a couple days to think, and read other peoples' thoughts and to process some of the election data.
It looks like the 18-24 voter segment did show up, at least moreso than in previous elections. Can't pin the loss on the youth vote not showing up...
My brother-in-law asked me via a voicemail message who I plan on supporting "now that the Democratic party is dead." I have to say it's hard for me to see how they're dead... they got 48% of the vote, and the electoral college loss was fairly narrow, compared to some recent elections.
Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater in '64, with something around 60% of the popular vote. It turned out that the Goldwater loss actually layed the foundation for Republican victories in the 70s and 80s, and even into the present. The Republicans learned from their devastating loss in '64.
Nixon destroyed McGovern in '72, and yet Carter won a close election only four years later. Bush easily won in '88, and had an approval rating in the 90% range only 18 months before Bill Clinton unseated him (with some help from Ross Perot, of course).
The point is, the Democratic party may have serious issues with their message, and their candidate selection processes, but they are far from finished as a party. It is a grave mistake to underestimate your opponent in politics, as events can often cause radical shifts in public perceptions. Just ask George Herbert Walker Bush. And the fact of the matter is, John Kerry did not lose by all that great a margin. A more resonant message, a more charismatic candidate, and we could easily have been talking about a Democrat having taken the White House in '04.
I like this one. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about...
Robert Reich talks about how Republicans do not, and should not be allowed to claim they do, have a monopoly on morality. The explicit message from the Republicans has been "we're moral, and they're not." The Democrats have allowed the Republicans to get away with this message unchallenged, preferring instead to talk about policy in dry, programmatic language.
Reich is not advising that the Democratic party attempt to co-opt or adopt the religious right's messages, or even start talking about "God, guns and gays" the way the Republicans do. They need to hammer home the message that morality is not about banning gay marriage, it's about doing the right thing.
The Democratic party of the 60s talked fearlessly of morality, in terms of the civil rights struggle. Many of those messages still apply, it's just that they've been abandoned in favor of talking about plans for how government can help. Most people just tune that stuff out. Now, if you want to talk (with proper outrage) about the unfairness of the system, corporate welfare, environmental justice (ie, the toxic waste dump is always near the low-income neighborhood), etc, that might get you somewhere.
In other words, the John Edwards "Two Americas" theme. I bet that would get them somewhere.
Maureen Dowd's column on the post-election climate. Free registration required to read the article.
The trouble is, the people who most need to read this stuff have their minds snapped shut. I've heard more than one Republican acquaintance refer to Dowd with nothing but contempt, even though she's the one who wouldn't let the Lewinsky thing drop back in 1997-98. To them, if you disagree with their agenda, even a little, you're quite literally their enemy. There is no middle ground. These acquaintances consider John McCain a liberal because he says Democrats are not the enemy. Never mind the fact that he's anti-choice, anti-environmental, etc. If he compromises at all, if he even talks to Democrats, he's a liberal.
There is going to be no compromising with these folks. They will not be satisfied until they have crammed their agenda down everyone's throats. Even then, I'm sure they'll find new bogeymen to rail against.
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.
These folks are far more eloquent than I am. No less enraged, just better at articulating.
The general consensus is that just over 50% of the voting populace voted for W knowing full well what he is, and they're OK with it. They're happy to be in the beginnings of a culture war with the other half of the country. Gay marriage is way more important than dead American soldiers in Iraq... I have heard more than one person say with a straight face they were more upset over Clinton's consensual oval office blow job than Bush using nonexistant intelligence data to justify invading Iraq.
The only silver lining I'm coming up with is that the mess will be all Bush's for the next 4 years. Nobody else to blame. They have the White House, Congress, the "Supreme" Court, and most of the Federal judiciary.
Well, I have to give props to Dubya (or to Karl Rove). He certainly knows his constituencies. The way I see it, Dubya won thanks to massive turnout of his core base, which includes:
- the ignorant dumbass constituency
- the "I got mine, screw the rest of you" constituency
- the "God is a Republican" constituency
He scared enough people to make up the slack between these three groups and an ever-so-slight majority. Not that the Republicans will entertain even for a moment ideas of healing the divide, of bridging the gap with the 49% that didn't vote for them. No, I anticipate they will act as if they'd been elected in an electoral landslide and continue to shove their pyscho theocratic agenda down our throats.
Watch for continued demonizing of dissenters, nomination of Scalia-clones to the Federal bench and Supreme Court, and an aggressive anti-environment pro-"Christian" agenda.
It's going to have to get a whole lot worse before it will get any better. I thought it was as bad as it could get, but I forgot that it can always get worse.
The only good news I can think of is at least W will have to clean up his own mess in Iraq. He won't be able to say "It was going fine, and then President Kerry screwed it up."
But I'm not bitter.
I hope to hell whoever in the Democratic Party convinced everyone the youth/cell phone vote would deliver the White House is sent off to manage the office in Rapid City.
NEVER count on 18-24 year olds for anything. If your strategy for taking the presidential election is based on that age segment, you are f***ed.
I cannot believe we're going to re-elect that right-wing nutjob. We are truly a nation of idiots that deserves the world's contempt.
And boy are we going to get it, too.
Four more years of anger. Maybe I need to take up some form of substance abuse...
So, I've been reading Electoral-vote.com obsessively for the last few weeks, and have come to the same conclusion everyone else has come to: who will win will depend on turnout, specifically turnout in these states:
Minnesota (10)
Iowa (7)
Wisconsin (10)
Michigan (17)
Ohio (20)
Pennsylvania (21)
Florida (27)
The guy who maintains Electoral-vote.com is predicting a Kerry win of 291 - 242, with Kerry winning all of the battleground states except Ohio. I've read all sorts of stuff lately about how the traditional polling techniques don't work any more, lots of new voters are going to vote Kerry in, if the Washington Redskins lose, the incumbent loses, etc.
I'll believe it when I see it. The reason the pollsters try to account for "likely voters" is because it doesn't matter how many people register to vote, it only matters how many people actually go to the polls. Everyone I know thinks this a very important election (for a wide range of reasons), but the people I know are not particularly representative of the US population in general.
So, here's what I think. I figure my opinion is just as valid as any TV talking head, and it's certainly more valid than Ann Coulter's, who is a psychotic just-this-side-of-Attila-the-Hun partisan. Disagree with Ann and you're branded a traitor. Anyway, I digress...
Kerry wins:
Minnesota (10)
Iowa (7)
Pennsylvania (21)
Bush wins:
Wisconsin (10)
Michigan (17)
Ohio (20)
Florida (27)
This will give Bush a win by a 306 - 227 margin. And we spend the next 8 weeks watching recounts and court battles. Again. And we get to listen Bush - Cheney talk about a "mandate" for their nutso agenda. Again.
But I could be wrong, I figured Al Gore was toast, and he actually got more votes than Dubya.
Don't know how I missed this one, but Electoral-vote.com summarizes all the polls it can find and parses the data into some kind of half-assed election predictor. I have no idea how accurate it is, but it's certainly fascinating to look at.
Polling Report is another one.
So, which poll is correct? Gallup is predicting a relatively easy Bush victory, with W taking pretty much all the battleground states that Gore took in 2000.
However, the Zogby/Reuters poll has the race in a dead heat.
Who's right? Apparently, Gallup makes some attempt to correct their poll for voter turnout trends. Since Republicans have had better turnout in recent years than Democrats, the Gallup poll is somewhat biased toward Republican voters. Thus, the stronger showing by W.
This outcome could potentially be thwarted by strong voter turnout in the swing states, plus high voter turnout among the newly registered, since Democrats seem to be registering new voters at a greater rate than Republicans.
Good grief. As if there were any doubt TV People (particularly Political TV People) take themselves way too seriously, now we have a genuine TV People Feud.
Tucker Carlson is mad at Jon Stewart.
In case you're wondering, Tucker Carlson is one of the partisan yahoos who yells his way through Crossfire. I haven't watched Crossfire since Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan left, so I wasn't sure who he was either.
Gotta side with Stewart on this one. The Daily Show is funny as hell, and Carlson comes across as an uptight butthead.
The issue this particular time is a revision to the EPA's annual Draft Report on the Environment, which is supposed to be a thorough summary of the major environmental issues facing the country as a whole. Apparently, the report originally featured prominently a discussion of the effects of anthropogenic climate change. The Bushies didn't like this, because it contradicts their stated position of "we don't know," so out it came.
Not that I'm all that surprised. It's hardly the first time this has happened, or even the first time it's happened in this administration.