Comin’ from your extreme right ©2004 UrbisMedia
In 2000, from Hong Kong, where I watched the election being stolen, I emailed many friends (it’s not the same list of friends now) that “now the stealing from the national cookie jar will begin.” I’m not much of a prophet, but that was an easy one. Since then, with tax cuts for the rich, sweetheart deals for Halliburton and other corporate buddies, running huge deficits and rollbacks on environmental regulations, the stealing has exceeded all expectations. Now, as lame duck administration they will really go at it, and maybe even the dunderheads in Ohio who delivered this election to the Republicans because the majority of them can’t see their own best interests through their bigotry against gays and lesbians, their Taliban attitudes towards women, or their well-massaged fears that Osama bin Laden wants to blow up some of their precious Buckeyes, will figure it out (but I doubt it).
To hell with all the usual morning after bonhomie and bullshit about bi-partisan working together. This is a deeply polarized nation with the most pronounced and rancorous division in social values since the Civil War. Those guys never wanted to work together; Delay’s House routinely excluded the Democrats from such meetings (perhaps so they could bribe their own members), and an Executive Branch that ignored national and world opinion on its road to preemptive war has no such intent, and now needs it even less. Congress is even more extreme right conservative than before the election. The South has won this civil war and “Dixie” and “The Eyes of Texas” should replace the national anthem and God Bless America.
Analysis will show, I believe, that what was he deciding factor in this election, was good ole American bigotry and intolerance, the very attitudes that this nation was supposed to be fighting against with the noble notion that “that all men are created equal.” That will prove to be more of a hollow promise for those “men” who are women, those men (and women) who are gay, those who are not rich enough to receive a huge tax break, those who do not have Halliburton-like access, and those who are not evangelical Christians. Analysis will show that it is they, fired with their new-found intolerance of those who would like rights to social unions, intolerance to those who wish to control their own bodies, and their of terror they equate with a faith with for which they have no tolerance. They were mobilized from their pulpits (one of which had the seal of the president on it), and their bigotry was greater than the revulsion of the opposition for their leader.
I cut my list short with evangelical Christians because they, as I have said before, are the new American Taliban. They are not the followers of Christ I was taught about in Catholic schools. These “Christians,” many of them “Catholic,” care little for the poor, they shun lepers, they provide the grease to allow rich men to “pass through the eyes of needles,” and they have already decided who will receive their “rapture” and who will go to hell. They are bigots, and they made the difference in Ohio, and now they want to make a difference in our lives. Well, it is they who can “go to hell.”
So I think we should declare a new “war on terror” a war that needs to be fought against the terror that this administration and its faux-Christian minions has waged against the poor, the Middle Class, the Seniors, those without medical insurance, workers, people of color, women, the environment, and homosexuals.
Just as George Bush has made uncounted new violent terrorists from the lands of the Middle East we must now enlist from ranks of the newly politicized of this election “political terrorists” who must (hey, I writing allegorically here, Mr. Ashcroft) plant “roadside bombs” to take out plans to repeal Roe v. Wade; that must use rhetorical RPGs to destroy plans to rape Social Security. Congressional Democrats need to check in their drawers and see if they have the goods to use every parliamentary means at their command to stymie, frustrate, filibuster and otherwise harass this administration and its legislative minions. It’s time, too, to throw not just the moneychangers out of the temple, but its high priests bent on tearing down the separation of church and state.
This was an election in which the (barely) winner played on the worst emotions and attitudes of its constituency—fear and loathing. They were made to fear an enemy that was the wrong enemy, but believe that they were being made safer by a swaggering coward who stirred their bigotry under the guise that that’s what God has anointed him to do.
The up-side is that John Kerry will not have the burden of pulling us out of the mess the Bush administration put us in, and now we must count on the growing rifts among Republicans and the arrogance of their leader to bring the house down upon us all. It is an unfortunate way for a once great nation to heal itself, but it seems the only way the morning after.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.4.2004)