brainrow

Disappointed Democrats! Heartbroken Kerry supporters! Before you do something desperate like killing yourself or fleeing to Canada, consider this: Every time an anti-Bush voter kicks the bucket or leaves the country, Bush’s political mastermind Karl Rove celebrates by treating himself to a tasty devil’s food cupcake.

Don’t give him the satisfaction! Stand and fight!

My sister sent me Michael Moore’s 17 Reasons Not to Slit Your Wrists.

If you had 58 yards to go before you reached the goal line and then you barreled down 55 of those yards, would you stop on the three yard line, pick up the ball and go home crying — especially when you get to start the next down on the three yard line? Of course not! Buck up! Have hope! More sports analogies are coming!!!

Democrats seem to be heading for extinction when you look at the electoral maps showing red and blue states. There’s a different map here, showing every county in shades of red, blue and purple, based on how the vote was divided in that county. Except for that angry red welt in the west, America seems to be fairly purple.

A Slashdot user named Concerned Onlooker has this signature line:

Since Bush has won it’s time to put away our differences and support him. Just like the Republicans did for Clinton.

Why I’m not falling in line behind the president: Been there. Done that. Still have souvenir knife in my back.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Good questions from Mark Schmitt, discovered via Earl Bockenfeld:

The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior?

It’s been quite a few years since my heavy Bible-reading days. I remember Jesus. He was a healer and a great teacher.

He said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” And “Him that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” I’ve been out of touch. Listening to the voices from the Religious Right these past few days, I guess they must have a different guy in there now.

Personally, I liked the old guy.

A few election day stories from The Other Paper, a free news and entertainment tabloid here in Columbus, Ohio:

In Whitehall, a woman in line became faint, and officials called the squad. The medics arrived and put her on a gurney, but she insisted they not take her away until she voted. They put an oxygen mask on her and hooked her up to IVs, then wheeled her over to the booth so she could vote.

It started raining pretty hard at Thurber Towers on Neil Avenue, but even then no one left. Some people took out umbrellas, others just stood there in the rain. One old guy, probably 80 or 85, came out of the retirement center carrying a little folding chair and set it up at the end of our line, in the rain, to wait. No one seemed upset. One woman said, “I’ve waited four years for this. I can wait another two hours.”

A fifth-grader making homeroom announcements at Hubbard Elementary School asked the students to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, at which point everyone waiting to vote stopped talking, took off hats, turned and faced the flag, and said the pledge together.

I heard from several people there that one of the voting machines at Rosehill Elementary School in Reynoldsburg showed up with 500 votes for Bush already “in,” but they were quickly erased.

It’s discouraging to lose an election. It’s hard, sometimes, to keep fighting. But we have to do it. For all the people, right or wrong, who waited in line to cast a vote.

Recently there’s been a lot of attention paid to the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. They were added to the pledge in the 1950s, and there has been a debate lately about whether they belong there.

We’ve been worrying about the wrong words. Based on the eleven states that amended their constitutions to alienate selected citizens from their inalienable rights, we should have been worrying about “liberty and justice for all.”

Something tells me George W. Bush is finally trying to complete his Air National Guard obligation.

Bob Herbert writes that it’s time for progressive-minded folks to get back to work:

Here’s my advice: You had a couple of days to indulge your depression – now, get over it. The election’s been lost but there’s still a country to save…

Democracy is a breeze during good times. It’s when the storms are raging that citizenship is put to the test. And there’s a hell of a wind blowing right now.

Tom Paine said it well:

These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Finally, from Harriet Tubman:

Children, if you’re tired, keep going. If you’re hungry, keep going. If you’re scared, keep going. If you want to taste freedom, keep going.

At a press conference about the election and his second term, George W. Bush said, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”

Actually, George, you’ve already spent your political capital. You lost the election of 2000, yet you acted as if you had a mandate for a radical political agenda.

The Senate was divided 50-50, so you used the vice-president’s tie-breaking vote to prevent any kind of power-sharing with Democratic senators. You pushed your agenda with such little regard for bipartisan cooperation that Republican Senator Jim Jeffords quit your party in disgust, became an Independent, and started voting with the Democrats.

When the attacks of 9/11 united all Americans—all the world—you immediately started looking for ways to turn that tragedy into a partisan bonanza. The day after the attacks, Secretary Rumsfeld argued against striking Al Qaeda, using the tragedy instead as the pretense for an attack on Iraq, even though they’d had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks.

You’ve spent your political capital, George. You’ve blown through it just like you blew through the budget surplus you inherited from the Clinton Administration.

You’ve got a deep deficit, George. You owe us.

On Tuesday, we had the highest voter turnout since 1968. The American people came out to speak loud and clear. I’m still having these little “aw, crap” moments, when I get a new perspective on what Tuesday’s election means:

• George Herbert Walker Bush, the grown-up, the World War II fighter pilot, couldn’t get a second term. It’s his son—who ducked out of his National Guard obligations, who turned surpluses into deficits in Texas and in Washington, and whose Doctrine of Infallibility makes him incapable of learning from experience—he’s the one who gets the second term.
• On September 12, 2001, the entire world was united against the terrorists. Today, the entire world is united against the Americans. And the voters have said, “That’s the way (uh-huh uh-huh) we liiiiike it (uh-huh uh-huh).”
• In eleven states, voters amended their state constitutions explicitly to deny certain American citizens their inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Once, the American ideal was to extend freedom to more and more people. Those days are gone.

George W. Bush will probably name at least three new Supreme Court justices during the next four years. With GOP gains in the Senate, he can push through extremist judges who will blight our laws for thirty years to come.

I’m 52 years old. I’m not likely to live to see the end of the darkness that fell on Tuesday.

Abraham Lincoln:

It is said that an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.”

How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.”

And yet let us hope that it be not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath us and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

God help us.