I’m too disgusted to do this anymore. I leave you with a few choice words, some mine, some from others.
Tom Tomorrow quotes Tbogg in full rant mode, which is angry, sad, and mostly accurate:
Four more years of American soldiers being used as cannon fodder. Four more years of scientific decisions being made by people who believe in a ghost in the clouds. Four more years of debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. Four more years of racists and lunatics for judicial appointments Four more years of looting the treasury and squandering it on corporate cronies. Four more years of making enemies faster than we can kill them. Four more years of fear and darkness and racism and hatred and stupidity and guns and bad country music. I look at the big map and all of the red in flyover country and I feel like I’ve been locked in a room with the slow learners. We have become the country that pulls a dry cleaning bag over its head to play astronaut.
And Lessig quotes one of his commenters:
I’m going to spend time these next few days looking for the America in my heart. It may be a while before I see it anywhere else.
Billmon points us to HST in his prime:
This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
November 1972
And this:
The amazing thing to me about this race was that Bush could be as divisive as he wanted to be, but it never penalized him. The most important things in the world were responded to with infantile answers or complete ignorance. Where he stood was clear. Simplicity wins. Oliver Willis
Someone commented, a bit ago, that I should take comfort in it being a democracy, and that he was just as pissed off and certain of doom under Clinton, but see how it worked out?
I wish I could share that optimism, but I just can’t.
As for Clinton, I ask you this: What policies cost thousands of lives under Clinton? The British journal The Lancet estimates 100,000 Iraqi dead now, to say nothing of our own wounded and dead soldiers. What huge debts did he run up, to be paid by our children and grandchildren? What allies did he alienate in a rush to war against a country that wasn’t threatening us? What enemies did he ignore to do so? What CIA operatives did his administration “out” as political payback? When did he claim he could arrest anyone he wanted, declare them an “enemy combatant,” and be free of judicial oversight? When did his party actively campaign to amend the Constitution to LIMIT rights?
Near as I can tell, the worst thing he did was lie about a blow job in the midst of a political witch hunt. He wasn’t a great president, but he wasn’t a disaster like this guy, either.
Bush and his people have lied when the truth would do better for four years, but half the electorate doesn’t seem to care. He campaigned as a “uniter,” but cruised to office on a 5 to 4 vote and proceded to govern from the hard, hard right. His GOP is openly pandering to the nutball religious right and corporate interests, and in doing so is weakening even our last line of defense (the courts). A Bush-packed SCOTUS will be hostile to the vital decisions supporting, among other things, our right to privacy, and I’m kind of attached to it. (Remember, Griswold wasn’t about abortion; it was about the right to buy birth control.)
Add to all this the open hostility to accepted science, his endless saber-rattling while failing utterly to pursue Osama effectively, our growing quagmire in Iraq (which, contrary to Cheney, is getting worse, not better — check the stats), and frankly I don’t see much to be hopeful about. I doubt you can point to a similar list of events attributable to Clinton.
The trouble is, it wouldn’t be much better had Kerry won decisively. Under Clinton — the last president we can say really WON in the traditional sense — you saw how the GOP acted. They pursued him with a vigor and relish that defies belief for no other reason than he beat them in the election. They were gunning for him before he took office, for Christ’s sake, and they didn’t stop until they’d spent nearly a hundred million bucks and caught him in a lie about a blow job — when they were, ostensibly, investigating real estate in Arkansas. The GOP doesn’t want to govern; they want to rule, and their actions since Whitewater make that clear. There is no bipartisanship with Bush. There will be less now. They’re in power, and they’re willing to do anything it takes, pander to any divisive cause, and abandon any nominally American principle to do it. They don’t care what else happens.
Yes, it is a democracy. But you’ll never go broke pandering to the baser desires of the American populace (c.f. Fox). The GOP understands, and therefore appeals to the very worst of the soul of America. And they’re winning.
For now, I’m done. I have to figure out how to live in a country whose apparent values are hostile to tolerance, to complex solutions to complex problems, to truth, to accountability, and to critical thought.