Friday, November 05, 2004
The Election And Fundamentalists
I'm trying to think of the reasons why I seem taking this election defeat so well. Part of it may be that I'm trying not to think about what Bush may do with four more years, but I think the real reason is that the election didn't change anything, and in particular didn't change anything with respect to the whole fundamentalist Christian movement in this country. It's hard to talk about this without sounding "holier than thou", or sounding like you're trying to bash religion, so I'll mention up front that I believe in God and don't really appreciate all the people messing up and perverting a perfectly good religion with a bunch of hate and intolerance. Of course, they probably don't appreciate what I'm doing, just like moderate and radical Muslims don't appreciate what the other is doing, or like radical Christians and Muslims certainly don't appreciate what the other is up to. So now that we've established that everyone today pretty much hates everyone else, we can proceed.
Look, Bush didn't invent stupid, fundamentalist bigots... they were always around. Someone had to vote Gingrich in '94. They gave Republicans control of all three branches of government in 2002. The "Moral Majority" was around a long time ago. Even if we suddenly found 200,000 Ohio votes for Kerry stuffed in Karl Rove's garage or Mary Cheney's closet, they would still be there... a "win" this year wouldn't have changed any of this. Now it was surprising that even with a high turnout, the Republicans won the popular vote by a surprisingly large margin. But this doesn't mean that all the people that voted for Bush voted for him because they wanted a "culture war". First off, there are the people who voted Republican because of policy differences, the kind of people you can have legitimate debates with and work with. Then out of the others, there are some people that voted for him out of fear, others that voted simply because they hated John Kerry, and others that went Bush because they're accountants and everyone else in their firm hates Democrats by reflex, or some similar dumb reason. While there were an annoyingly large number of people who voted for Bush so that "God would be in the White House", they hardly represent the bulk of the 51%.
Still though, you have to acknowledge the clout of this fundamentalist bloc of voters. So there will be much discussion in the coming days, weeks and months as to who these people are, what drives them, and what the Democratic Party should do with them. Clearly, the Democrats have a problem with this, and clearly there is a divide. Some of these people can be reached out to and can realize that there is no substantive difference between the Republican and Democratic parties on "morals". Then again, there are people who thought that the Super Bowl halftime show was just the worst thing in the world, and that the country would collapse if they took "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance. Some of these people simply will not be swayed, nor should they be pandered to.
So that brings up the question of why this fundamentalist bloc seems to be growing and gaining strength, which leads me to one of the reasons why I'm not so upset that Kerry lost. I think that a lot of these people simply have never had their beliefs proven wrong. I'm not talking about their beliefs in God, I'm talking about the kind of people who march around carrying "God Hates Fags" signs while professing that the love of Jesus is in their heart. They were taught certain things as a kid and nothing's happened to change their mind. Think of someone like Jerry Falwell, who after 9/11, said, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'" You can't debate against Falwell after that statement, he's just gone, he's lost, he's not coming back. You can't prove him or his followers wrong, prove that God didn't let 9/11 happen because some gay people kissed on TV, because it's an assertion that can't be proven or disproven and they're certainly not going to believe you anyway.
So these people go on, them and their families becoming well off because hundreds of years ago, some people had the courage to face down their ancestors with the fact that the Earth revolved around the Sun and the planet isn't a few thousand years old, an enlightenment happened, and a prosperous, thinking society grew from that. But it's easy to forget these things and go back to thinking that it's OK if we kill and terrorize and torture Iraqis, because God is with us, and think that it's holy and right to save unborn babies but not the impoverished and the sick. You can't prove to these people that that's wrong with words alone, because no one remembers what the consequences for these actions are. They think that reality doesn't apply to them anymore.
But now, these people have their way. They have Bush in the White House, and they have DeLay in the House, and they have Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint in the Senate, and they'll probably have some in the Supreme Court. They have their gay marriage bans in 11 states. So when things go wrong, they won't have anyone to scapegoat anymore. When the budget explodes, they won't have "tax-and-spend liberals" to blame anymore. If another 9/11 attack happens, they can't blame it on Clinton or on gays or the ACLU. Ok, there will always be some people who say, "If we had only put down the homosexual culture more, God wouldn't have punished us again!", but I have to believe that the vast majority of the country doesn't think that way.
Now these people can be proved wrong. The fact that reality does matter will be made clear. It will be shown that scapegoating gays doesn't make your own marriage any stronger. Republicans in power will have scandals too, and people will see that no one party has a claim to "values" or to religion. And people will see that no matter how pious you look and how much you profess to have a direct link to God, power can corrupt you. I'm sure someone with more biblical knowledge than myself can point out a number of examples of this even in the Bible. But I'm pretty sure we'll get a first-hand example of these things pretty soon now, and if we do, I hope people are able to see it clearly.
Look, Bush didn't invent stupid, fundamentalist bigots... they were always around. Someone had to vote Gingrich in '94. They gave Republicans control of all three branches of government in 2002. The "Moral Majority" was around a long time ago. Even if we suddenly found 200,000 Ohio votes for Kerry stuffed in Karl Rove's garage or Mary Cheney's closet, they would still be there... a "win" this year wouldn't have changed any of this. Now it was surprising that even with a high turnout, the Republicans won the popular vote by a surprisingly large margin. But this doesn't mean that all the people that voted for Bush voted for him because they wanted a "culture war". First off, there are the people who voted Republican because of policy differences, the kind of people you can have legitimate debates with and work with. Then out of the others, there are some people that voted for him out of fear, others that voted simply because they hated John Kerry, and others that went Bush because they're accountants and everyone else in their firm hates Democrats by reflex, or some similar dumb reason. While there were an annoyingly large number of people who voted for Bush so that "God would be in the White House", they hardly represent the bulk of the 51%.
Still though, you have to acknowledge the clout of this fundamentalist bloc of voters. So there will be much discussion in the coming days, weeks and months as to who these people are, what drives them, and what the Democratic Party should do with them. Clearly, the Democrats have a problem with this, and clearly there is a divide. Some of these people can be reached out to and can realize that there is no substantive difference between the Republican and Democratic parties on "morals". Then again, there are people who thought that the Super Bowl halftime show was just the worst thing in the world, and that the country would collapse if they took "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance. Some of these people simply will not be swayed, nor should they be pandered to.
So that brings up the question of why this fundamentalist bloc seems to be growing and gaining strength, which leads me to one of the reasons why I'm not so upset that Kerry lost. I think that a lot of these people simply have never had their beliefs proven wrong. I'm not talking about their beliefs in God, I'm talking about the kind of people who march around carrying "God Hates Fags" signs while professing that the love of Jesus is in their heart. They were taught certain things as a kid and nothing's happened to change their mind. Think of someone like Jerry Falwell, who after 9/11, said, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'" You can't debate against Falwell after that statement, he's just gone, he's lost, he's not coming back. You can't prove him or his followers wrong, prove that God didn't let 9/11 happen because some gay people kissed on TV, because it's an assertion that can't be proven or disproven and they're certainly not going to believe you anyway.
So these people go on, them and their families becoming well off because hundreds of years ago, some people had the courage to face down their ancestors with the fact that the Earth revolved around the Sun and the planet isn't a few thousand years old, an enlightenment happened, and a prosperous, thinking society grew from that. But it's easy to forget these things and go back to thinking that it's OK if we kill and terrorize and torture Iraqis, because God is with us, and think that it's holy and right to save unborn babies but not the impoverished and the sick. You can't prove to these people that that's wrong with words alone, because no one remembers what the consequences for these actions are. They think that reality doesn't apply to them anymore.
But now, these people have their way. They have Bush in the White House, and they have DeLay in the House, and they have Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint in the Senate, and they'll probably have some in the Supreme Court. They have their gay marriage bans in 11 states. So when things go wrong, they won't have anyone to scapegoat anymore. When the budget explodes, they won't have "tax-and-spend liberals" to blame anymore. If another 9/11 attack happens, they can't blame it on Clinton or on gays or the ACLU. Ok, there will always be some people who say, "If we had only put down the homosexual culture more, God wouldn't have punished us again!", but I have to believe that the vast majority of the country doesn't think that way.
Now these people can be proved wrong. The fact that reality does matter will be made clear. It will be shown that scapegoating gays doesn't make your own marriage any stronger. Republicans in power will have scandals too, and people will see that no one party has a claim to "values" or to religion. And people will see that no matter how pious you look and how much you profess to have a direct link to God, power can corrupt you. I'm sure someone with more biblical knowledge than myself can point out a number of examples of this even in the Bible. But I'm pretty sure we'll get a first-hand example of these things pretty soon now, and if we do, I hope people are able to see it clearly.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Nick & Jessica
I think some of you may have been alarmed by my last post, where I stated that doom and gloom was a definite possibility now that Bush has been reelected. So I feel the need to put forward the other side of the story and showcase a more positive outcome of this year's election; indeed, it is proof that Karl Rove's healing magic is already working its way through the countryside.
Ladies and gentlemen, it was close, but thanks to the 11 ballot initiatives yesterday defining marriage in one way or another, the institution of marriage has been preserved.
Ladies and gentlemen, it was close, but thanks to the 11 ballot initiatives yesterday defining marriage in one way or another, the institution of marriage has been preserved.
Prediction Time
After Tuesday's Republican win, I wonder if Canada is enjoying its newfound popularity amongst slightly less than half of the US electorate. Suddenly our neighbors to the north are as "in" as Mini Coopers and "The O.C.". Now, people who know me know that I enjoy Canada. I've been there once or twice (depending on whether or not you count being in Canadian territorial waters as "being in Canada") and I like it - I like their cities, I like their people and I like their donuts. And I think their accents are preferable to the accents I hear now down in Tennessee. But the prospect of telling my kids that the reason they're Canadian is that George W. Bush won 51% of the popular vote is striking me as a little silly right now. I understand the feeling of wanting to head for the hills right now, and I have more than a little bit of that in me as well. Certainly if things here ever got Taliban-bad, or 1936-Germany-bad, we'd be leaving skid marks on the way out of here. But I don't think things are that bad yet. I don't recall there being a sequel to "To Kill A Mockingbird" where Atticus Finch says, "Fuck this shit, I'm heading to Montreal," and takes off up north with Scout and Jem. Things aren't hopeless here yet.
That said, let me make my wildly inaccurate and ignorant predictions as to how bad things might get between now and January 1, 2009, in five levels of badness. I'll do so on a percentage basis of how likely I think the chances are that things will end up as such:
A (10%): Things get better. Hey, you never know. Maybe Bush is born-again... again, or maybe we encounter an alien civilization with a free, non-fossil-fuel-based energy source. Or perhaps the Republicans are right about everything after all. I give the combined chances of all this happening a 1 in 10 shot.
B (30%): Neither better nor worse. The status quo. Kind of like things are going in 2004, I guess. This would be a lot less than 30%, but I'm factoring in the likelihood that we'll do some massive deficit spending and the day of reckoning for all that debt will be sometime after 1/1/09, which I think is a decent possibility.
C (20%): Steady decline. I'm thinking stuff we've seen during Bush's first term here - a steady rise in poverty and the number of people with no health insurance, poor job growth (probably not enough to keep up with a rising population), an underperforming economy increasingly saddled by cronyism and bad policy from Washington as well as the expense of our troops being in a quagmire overseas, and of course, a small well-to-do segment of the population that feels none of this hardship.
D (30%): Bad stuff. One or possibly more of the following: An economic crisis brought on by the growing realization that the government has no income but is spending money furiously; some sort of housing market bubble collapse; some sort of interest rate spike and its accompanying effects on all the people out there with insanely large amounts of debt; a major terror attack; significant erosions of civil liberties (because of a terror attack, or perhaps just for the hell of it); crisis with Iran/North Korea/any actual problem we've been ignoring while bogged down in Iraq; reinstatement of the draft; and/or an energy crisis due to depletion of oil reserves or other reason. Result being a probable recession, or worse.
E (10%): Collapse of civilization as we know it. This could be due to any combination of scenario D reasons, or maybe Bush goes nuts and invades France or something. This doesn't necessarily mean we all die or anything, but would certainly mean no more cushy American lifestyle that we've all known our entire lives. Perhaps The Day After Tomorrow happens, or maybe God gets pissed at everything going on in His name and smites us all. I think there's probably a 1 in 10 chance of one of these things happening.
Again, these are just wild predictions pulled out of my ass here based on no sort of scientific methodology at all (in other words, basically the same method used for our post-war Iraq planning). Some people here might think I'm being too pessimistic, some might think I'm being too optimistic. Of course I'd be happy to hear anyone else's predictions in the comments section as to what they think four more years of Bush-Cheney will bring.
That said, let me make my wildly inaccurate and ignorant predictions as to how bad things might get between now and January 1, 2009, in five levels of badness. I'll do so on a percentage basis of how likely I think the chances are that things will end up as such:
A (10%): Things get better. Hey, you never know. Maybe Bush is born-again... again, or maybe we encounter an alien civilization with a free, non-fossil-fuel-based energy source. Or perhaps the Republicans are right about everything after all. I give the combined chances of all this happening a 1 in 10 shot.
B (30%): Neither better nor worse. The status quo. Kind of like things are going in 2004, I guess. This would be a lot less than 30%, but I'm factoring in the likelihood that we'll do some massive deficit spending and the day of reckoning for all that debt will be sometime after 1/1/09, which I think is a decent possibility.
C (20%): Steady decline. I'm thinking stuff we've seen during Bush's first term here - a steady rise in poverty and the number of people with no health insurance, poor job growth (probably not enough to keep up with a rising population), an underperforming economy increasingly saddled by cronyism and bad policy from Washington as well as the expense of our troops being in a quagmire overseas, and of course, a small well-to-do segment of the population that feels none of this hardship.
D (30%): Bad stuff. One or possibly more of the following: An economic crisis brought on by the growing realization that the government has no income but is spending money furiously; some sort of housing market bubble collapse; some sort of interest rate spike and its accompanying effects on all the people out there with insanely large amounts of debt; a major terror attack; significant erosions of civil liberties (because of a terror attack, or perhaps just for the hell of it); crisis with Iran/North Korea/any actual problem we've been ignoring while bogged down in Iraq; reinstatement of the draft; and/or an energy crisis due to depletion of oil reserves or other reason. Result being a probable recession, or worse.
E (10%): Collapse of civilization as we know it. This could be due to any combination of scenario D reasons, or maybe Bush goes nuts and invades France or something. This doesn't necessarily mean we all die or anything, but would certainly mean no more cushy American lifestyle that we've all known our entire lives. Perhaps The Day After Tomorrow happens, or maybe God gets pissed at everything going on in His name and smites us all. I think there's probably a 1 in 10 chance of one of these things happening.
Again, these are just wild predictions pulled out of my ass here based on no sort of scientific methodology at all (in other words, basically the same method used for our post-war Iraq planning). Some people here might think I'm being too pessimistic, some might think I'm being too optimistic. Of course I'd be happy to hear anyone else's predictions in the comments section as to what they think four more years of Bush-Cheney will bring.
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
We Just Stepped In It
This morning I woke up to three steaming piles of poop around the house courtesy of my dog. I think this was a pretty good metaphor for what I woke up to from the country as well. I suppose I'm not giving up on the dog or the country, though I don't know if either is going to get better any time soon and my patience with both is running pretty thin.
I've always figured that my first post after the election would probably be something I'd look back on and want to delete. I'll try to avoid that, because there are two things I wanted to comment on this morning. Whether or not the results in Ohio turn out one way or the other, it looks like Bush got a pretty decent margin in the popular vote and the GOP picked up a few Senate seats. Apart from all the conservative bloggers and Republicans in general being right about those things, which is painful enough, I think it's important to remember that what they were right about was the election and not necessarily anything else. The GOP for the past four years and the Bush-Cheney campaign (and tenure in office) have always been about gaining more power and consolidating that power that they've already obtained. Look at the Texas redistricting, look at the judicial appointments, etc. This goes back to 2002 as well, when the Republicans initially opposed the Department of Homeland Security and then used the Democrats' refusal to go along with elimination of some labor protections in the Homeland Security bill, as well as their hesitancy to endorse a pointless war as a club to beat them with in the 2002 elections. If you look at what Bush has accomplished (though calling them "accomplishments" is probably giving them too much credit) they're largely for political purposes, not to actually improve things in the country. You've got a prescription drug program that no one really likes, an education reform program that wasn't fully funded but passed anyway just to say you did something, and an anti-gay marriage amendment to the Constitution that has no chance of passing but was introduced anyway for political purposes. This is a political machine that exists to gobble up as much power as they can, and last night they were apparently successful in that, which I guess isn't that surprising when you channel all your efforts into winning as many votes as you can rather than doing what's right for the country.
The second thing I want to mention is what I think this election means. Now, I don't want to stink this place up with a bunch of amateur punditry (any more than it already stinks), but this morning on some morning news show I saw Rudy Guiliani say that the reason that Bush won the election despite losing the debates and all that was that this was a referendum on leadership, and the public thought he would be a better leader. If he's right, then just like Reagan proved "deficits don't matter" (in the words of Dick Cheney), Bush just proved "results don't matter". The guy lost jobs, led us into an unnecessary war that's turning into a quagmire, and helped tear this country apart across partisan lines. He led us in the wrong direction for four years... but hey, he led us there pretty effectively, so let's reward that strong leadership. It's comforting to know that after the next 9/11, I'll have faith that my President will exploit the tragedy for the maximum political gain before invading some country with nothing to do with the attack, and will lead us into it with the highest standards of leadership. That's what scares me about this election - not the President's policies or his plans or anything like that. It's that he, or any other future president or presidential candidate can do pretty much whatever they want, say pretty much whatever they want as long as they appear to be a strong leader and the country is in enough trouble that they want a strong leader to guide them. That's why I think that in 2010, we'll be worse off than we are today because there's no incentive for a President to do a good job anymore, there's only incentive to posture and pander. Not to mention the doubts I have about this President's ability to do a good job, period. Of course, I hope I'm wrong about all this, but nothing I've seen so far indicates that I will be.
I would feel better about all this if I thought Bush would do a competent job in office; I can live with conservative ideology and conservative programs put into effect, but if they're put in place with just a tenth of the bungling that characterized the President's last pet project, our stewardship of post-war Iraq, then I'm very worried about where this country is heading. And I'm doing my best not to think about what the rest of the world thinks about us right now or about the Supreme Court.
I've always figured that my first post after the election would probably be something I'd look back on and want to delete. I'll try to avoid that, because there are two things I wanted to comment on this morning. Whether or not the results in Ohio turn out one way or the other, it looks like Bush got a pretty decent margin in the popular vote and the GOP picked up a few Senate seats. Apart from all the conservative bloggers and Republicans in general being right about those things, which is painful enough, I think it's important to remember that what they were right about was the election and not necessarily anything else. The GOP for the past four years and the Bush-Cheney campaign (and tenure in office) have always been about gaining more power and consolidating that power that they've already obtained. Look at the Texas redistricting, look at the judicial appointments, etc. This goes back to 2002 as well, when the Republicans initially opposed the Department of Homeland Security and then used the Democrats' refusal to go along with elimination of some labor protections in the Homeland Security bill, as well as their hesitancy to endorse a pointless war as a club to beat them with in the 2002 elections. If you look at what Bush has accomplished (though calling them "accomplishments" is probably giving them too much credit) they're largely for political purposes, not to actually improve things in the country. You've got a prescription drug program that no one really likes, an education reform program that wasn't fully funded but passed anyway just to say you did something, and an anti-gay marriage amendment to the Constitution that has no chance of passing but was introduced anyway for political purposes. This is a political machine that exists to gobble up as much power as they can, and last night they were apparently successful in that, which I guess isn't that surprising when you channel all your efforts into winning as many votes as you can rather than doing what's right for the country.
The second thing I want to mention is what I think this election means. Now, I don't want to stink this place up with a bunch of amateur punditry (any more than it already stinks), but this morning on some morning news show I saw Rudy Guiliani say that the reason that Bush won the election despite losing the debates and all that was that this was a referendum on leadership, and the public thought he would be a better leader. If he's right, then just like Reagan proved "deficits don't matter" (in the words of Dick Cheney), Bush just proved "results don't matter". The guy lost jobs, led us into an unnecessary war that's turning into a quagmire, and helped tear this country apart across partisan lines. He led us in the wrong direction for four years... but hey, he led us there pretty effectively, so let's reward that strong leadership. It's comforting to know that after the next 9/11, I'll have faith that my President will exploit the tragedy for the maximum political gain before invading some country with nothing to do with the attack, and will lead us into it with the highest standards of leadership. That's what scares me about this election - not the President's policies or his plans or anything like that. It's that he, or any other future president or presidential candidate can do pretty much whatever they want, say pretty much whatever they want as long as they appear to be a strong leader and the country is in enough trouble that they want a strong leader to guide them. That's why I think that in 2010, we'll be worse off than we are today because there's no incentive for a President to do a good job anymore, there's only incentive to posture and pander. Not to mention the doubts I have about this President's ability to do a good job, period. Of course, I hope I'm wrong about all this, but nothing I've seen so far indicates that I will be.
I would feel better about all this if I thought Bush would do a competent job in office; I can live with conservative ideology and conservative programs put into effect, but if they're put in place with just a tenth of the bungling that characterized the President's last pet project, our stewardship of post-war Iraq, then I'm very worried about where this country is heading. And I'm doing my best not to think about what the rest of the world thinks about us right now or about the Supreme Court.
Monday, November 01, 2004
Eleventh Hour
Well, I feel like everything's pretty much been said at this point. I don't figure that a "Go out and vote for John Kerry" post is going to do much, since if you want to vote you probably already are going to, and if you read this site you're probably voting for Kerry anyway.
I would say I'm as cautiously optimistic as I can be, since Kerry's doing basically as well in the polls as he has all year and his numbers have generally been trending upwards. I certainly won't allow myself to make any predictions or even expect a certain outcome - I don't even expect to know the winner by the time I go to bed tomorrow night, and I have my doubts as to how well I'll be sleeping tomorrow night and tonight.
I guess all I can say at this point is that I hope things go well tomorrow. I hope that things go smoothly at the polls tomorrow, that the results are honest, that there are no terror attacks or other violence, and that the lines are reasonable, because I'm certainly waiting as long as I have to to vote (I wanted to vote the last day of early voting here in TN, but the line was too long). And of course, I hope John Kerry wins.
I would say I'm as cautiously optimistic as I can be, since Kerry's doing basically as well in the polls as he has all year and his numbers have generally been trending upwards. I certainly won't allow myself to make any predictions or even expect a certain outcome - I don't even expect to know the winner by the time I go to bed tomorrow night, and I have my doubts as to how well I'll be sleeping tomorrow night and tonight.
I guess all I can say at this point is that I hope things go well tomorrow. I hope that things go smoothly at the polls tomorrow, that the results are honest, that there are no terror attacks or other violence, and that the lines are reasonable, because I'm certainly waiting as long as I have to to vote (I wanted to vote the last day of early voting here in TN, but the line was too long). And of course, I hope John Kerry wins.
