slowly losing faith in America
last night, we got chelacked. There is no two ways about it. Yeah, there are a lot of instances of possible fraud reported, many of which were reported at www.michaelmoore.com, but now seem to be down. Also, you can find more at http://www.americablog.org/, including a shady pickup with bush/cheney stickers transporting ballots in Ohio to the wrong place. Finally, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/3/53438/6175 explains how the exit polls in only florida and ohio were way off while the others were pretty correct, which means that either the polls sucked or the votes were tampered with (remember that the guy in charge of voting machine manufacturer Diebold promised to "deliver" Ohio to Bush).
Ok, that was a huge diversion from my initial accepting failure theme. I think that all of these things need to be looked into, but in the end, it is unlikely it will make a difference. Sure, we'll complain about it for four years like we did in 2000, but it doesnt erase the fact that Bush is our president for the next four years. And yeah, I hate to say it, but Bush probabaly won fair and square (well as fair and square as politics ever is at least).
So, where does that leave us? There are a lot of pissed people around whose illusions that we were a secret majority have been trashed. As I said in my last post, the gay marriage issue likely fucked everything up, and we may still have a majority against the war, but that doesnt really mean anything now does it.
For the next four years, we have to get off our asses and speak up. we have to let Bush know, that even if he has a mandate, he still has to answer to the American people. He cant get away with a blank check to execute his neo-con plans. Hopefully, his administration really will extend an olive branch to the democrats and try to bridge the rift that divides our country, but I doubt it.
We are divided, some of us believe in a very different philosophy than Bush does. We know we are right, and we will not shut up. Hopefully, if Bush continues in the way he has thus far, people will realize that democrats ideals are better for them, and will vote based on things that really affect them, and not silly "values" issues, and in 2006 will show the Bush administration that they wont take anymore in the midterm elections. We have four years of crap ahead of us, but that is four years to rebuild, regroup, and field a better candidate in 2008. Or maybe even try and start a viable third party, wouldnt that be nice?
Ok, that was a huge diversion from my initial accepting failure theme. I think that all of these things need to be looked into, but in the end, it is unlikely it will make a difference. Sure, we'll complain about it for four years like we did in 2000, but it doesnt erase the fact that Bush is our president for the next four years. And yeah, I hate to say it, but Bush probabaly won fair and square (well as fair and square as politics ever is at least).
So, where does that leave us? There are a lot of pissed people around whose illusions that we were a secret majority have been trashed. As I said in my last post, the gay marriage issue likely fucked everything up, and we may still have a majority against the war, but that doesnt really mean anything now does it.
For the next four years, we have to get off our asses and speak up. we have to let Bush know, that even if he has a mandate, he still has to answer to the American people. He cant get away with a blank check to execute his neo-con plans. Hopefully, his administration really will extend an olive branch to the democrats and try to bridge the rift that divides our country, but I doubt it.
We are divided, some of us believe in a very different philosophy than Bush does. We know we are right, and we will not shut up. Hopefully, if Bush continues in the way he has thus far, people will realize that democrats ideals are better for them, and will vote based on things that really affect them, and not silly "values" issues, and in 2006 will show the Bush administration that they wont take anymore in the midterm elections. We have four years of crap ahead of us, but that is four years to rebuild, regroup, and field a better candidate in 2008. Or maybe even try and start a viable third party, wouldnt that be nice?
posted by Unknown | Thursday, November 04, 2004
3 Comments:
Yeah, conceding early was the right thing for Kerry to do, at least we wont look like jerks like we did in 2000. I think that any inquiry into election fraud should be done by independant parties, and not eitehr campaign.
Unfortunatly, the fallout from this is going to be the democratic party moving back to the middle, and away from the "far left" types of people such as Kerry (calling Kerry "far left" makes me laugh). So we will have to deal with mediocre candidates for a while.
well I guess clinton was pretty moderate, and he wasnt so bad.
Bush also does not have a mandate... in order to do such (in real political science terms at least) you have to have an overwhelming majority of the vote, with at least 10 percentage points b/t you and your opponent, and in presidential cases, around 12% while picking up significant amounts of seats in both houses. This clearly doesn't fit. Although, to paraphrase Steven Colbert on the Daily Show, this is a man who thought he had a mandate when he didn't even really win the election, so he probably thinks 51% is a good as 100%
See thats what I thought. Then Ducore is all like "more than 50% is a mandate, so the dumbass has a mandate and stop bitching punk". Being too lazy too actually research this myself, I am stuck wondering who to believe. Ducore, or a Kayla.... Yeah, I'm gonna go with Kayla, cuz her definition means that Bush doesnt have a mandate and we can make fun of him more for pretending he does.
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