Bush is re-elected
Watching Bush bound up onto the stage for his victory speech, I felt an unnerving, momentary flash of warmth towards the guy: There’s our President, and now he’ll be President for four more years. I imagine the sixty million people who voted for Bush across the huge red mass of states ranging from Florida to Idaho have similar feelings, only theirs are a thousand or a million times stronger and sustained them for four years. They just, well, really like their guy.
So I’ll join the two-bit political pundits in stating the obvious, that John Kerry couldn’t get elected because people didn’t, couldn’t, get to like him.
Now normally, after an election like this I would beat my chest and bemoan how this election heralds the end of America’s Golden Age and the start of its long decline. And few can doubt that societal trends, technology, and the growth in government has stretched our quaint democratic system far beyond its limits. Now the government is so dominant, and the means it possesses to get out its messages so powerful, that it can state that up is down and people will believe it.
Yet it remains a fact, to invoke a hoary old cliche, that American voters have made their choice. America is not some abstraction or ideal that these people are betraying; America is those gullible, ignorant people who chose four more years of Bush. We can’t want an American different than the one that actually exists in reality.
Recall that Bush won four years ago running on a neo-isolationist platform. This time he ran on a radical doctrine of pre-emptive warfare against distant lands, and won all the same states, but with uniformly higher margins of victory—proving decisively that voters are not basing their decision at all on actual policy differences. Imagine that—and John Kerry wasted the whole campaign actually talking about issues!
We are now witnesses to a race to the death between the severely debilitating effects of Bush’s policies in virtually every field, including foreign affairs, economics, and the environment, and, on the other hand, the ability of his regime to not just shade, but actually redefine reality as it is presented to the American people at large, filtered through the good-old-boy persona of George W. Bush himself. And it doesn’t seem to me that anything individuals like myself do can affect this race one way or the other. The only real hope for reality winning out in the end is the Bush people greedily overreaching, which is certainly not beyond them. Failing that, it literally seems that people in the Red States could be unemployed, be sick with no insurance, have their son killed in Iraq, and have a toxic waste dump in their back yard, and they would still vote for Bush. Get used to it. Those are your compatriots, and they are in the majority now in your country.
November 4th, 2004 at 05:20
BUSH FUCKING BRAINWASHED YOU WITH HIS ACCEPTANCE SPEECH!!!! IT WAS CRAFTED TO LUL YOU INTO SUBMISSION!!! HE\’S STILL THE ENEMY!!! GO AND LISTEN TO SOME AL FRANKEN (ON AIR AMERICA) AND YOU\’LL SEE THE LIGHT!!!
November 8th, 2004 at 13:30
My sentiments exactly.
In my frustration, the night of Nov the 3rd I imagined myself driving on the Country side of Tenessee around 6:30 PM and suddenly just pull over a house and knock at the door a-la Michael Moore.
A person opening the door.
Good ol\’ joe blow or mary jane.
This person is not a complicated person. Just a lady or a man with very, very simple view of the world and the issues.
Then me asking:
I know you voted for Bush, but do tell me: Do you like him, as a person?
And then hearing a resounding
YES! I LIKE GEORGE BUSH!
Who can argue with that?