A Progressive on the Prairie

Evangelicals believe God intervened to elect Bush this month. (Via Cursor).
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Still catching up on some of the post-election commentary. Realizing I need to let it go, this may be the last summary of post-election wailing, gnashing of teeth, reaction and bile. I want to note at the outset that with posts like this , this and this, it looks like Orcinus will provide valuable insight into what awaits.

Jen Sorensen, the creator of the Slowpoke comic strip, notes in her blog:

Meanwhile, unbelievably, some Democrats have displayed a spectacular lack of a learning curve by insisting that the party hasn't been centrist enough. This, after the 2002 debacle which followed numerous concessions to Repubs; this, after Daschle and Kerry, aq, both lost. If milquetoast both of whom voted for the authority to go to war in IrDems were mice in a Skinner Box, no amount of electric zapping would deter them from going after the cheese the same way. Note to wimpy Dems: No matter how you vote, your record will be distorted and your character demonized, so you may as well vote what you believe.

Ken MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction author and a "Trotskyite libertarian." He comments in The Early Days of a Better Nation:

It wasn't just another election. Something broke this week.

More than half the US electors have voted for smirking evil. They've voted for a President who openly believes he is above the law. They've voted for torture, tyranny and aggressive wars of conquest. They've voted for religious obscurantism. They've cast a vote of confidence in the past four years, and asked for four more years like them. They've done all this because they believe that this is what it will take to make them safe. They've voted against liberty for a little temporary safety, and they deserve and can expect but little of either.

As usual, Ted Rall has no qualms expressing his feelings:

If you voted for Bush, God damn you. You have condemned countless thousands of innocent people to death with the punch of a chad or the touch of a screen. If you voted for Bush, you endorsed the torturers in Bush's gulags at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. You deserve to feel every volt of electronic current, hear every scream, sink into the despair that comes with knowing that you have done nothing yet you will die in an anonymous prison. If you voted for Bush, you are to blame for the coming fiscal crisis, when there will be even less money for schools and roads and, yes, armies. If you voted for Bush, you will never be forgiven. You will never deserve respect, for the decision was simple yet you deliberately chose not to do what was right.

Similarly, an excerpt does not do justice to Elaine Cassell's post Running From The Religious Right:

Before Tuesday, I never thought we had evil in the White House. Those of you who hated Nixon, Johnson, and Clinton will look more kindly on them when you watch a puppet for Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson try to destroy your life. In a couple of years, we will all be longing for the moderation of a Rehnquist Supreme Court. You think weapons of mass destruction was a lie? Wait until you hear the lies that will be told in the name of religion. Wait until Bush tells you that God told him that all Unitarians or Jews who don’t “accept” Jesus can’t get a passport. Wait until he tells you that AIDS, cancer, heart disease, and more are God’s way of punishing you for sins past. Wait until he tells you that if God meant for you to have health insurance he would have given you a job to pay for it. I know this will come to pass because this is what they believe. This is what they say. This is what they do.

Finally, Michael Feingold more strongly echoes in the Village Voice what I said in my last post:

For make no mistake, this is the election in which American Christianity destroyed itself. Today the church is no longer a religion but a tacky political lobby, with an obsessive concentration on a minuscule number of social topics so irrelevant to questions of governance that they barely constitute political issues at all. These are the points of contention tied into what are blurrily referred to as "moral values," though they have almost nothing to do with the larger moral question of how one lives one's life, and everything to do with the fundamentally un-Christian and un-American idea of forcing others to live the way you believe they should. The displacement of faith involved is eerie, almost psychotic: Here are people willing to vote against their own well-being and their own children's future, just so they can compel someone else's daughter to bear an unwanted child and deprive someone else's son of the right to file a joint income tax return with his male partner.

If this isn't Christianity—and it isn't—still less is it in any respect like democracy. The whole meaning of America was predicated by the founding fathers on the right of citizens to practice their own faith and conduct their lives as they saw fit; to interfere actively in others' lives, on the basis of "moral values" about which there is no agreement, is the most radical repudiation of constitutional values in our electoral history, reducing the word conservative to absurdity. Today the Republican Party is not the right wing of anything; it is a band of violent radical reactionaries preaching medieval totalitarian bigotry. And Christianity as currently preached and practiced in Middle America is virtually Satan, by the standards of anyone who strives to follow the teachings of Jesus.

Yes, I need to let it go. But the disgust, fear and rage are just so overwhelming.
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I'm still struggling with hypocrisy of the religious right equating "moral values" to litmus tests of being against gay marriage and abortion. A friend today reminded me of certain verses from Chapter 25 of the Gospel according to Matthew. In the language of the New American Bible from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, here were some of Christ's values:

"Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,

a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me."

Then they will answer and say, "Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?"

He will answer them, "Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me."

And these will go off to eternal punishment[.]"

Let's see. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Care for the sick. Of course, the Christian right no doubt will be offended that a secular humanist (to borrow one of their hot button labels) suggests these are the moral values with which the religious right (and all Americans) should concern themselves. And it also would mean they couldn't vote for Repugnicans.

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A situation that has potentially significant ramifications for the Middle East is not a joking matter. Still, as my news home page keeps changing from "Arafat is dead" to "No he isn't" to "Yes he is," I keep thinking: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

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Not much posting as, aside from ongoing things in the real world, I find the election has me depressed. (Although not to this extent). Thus, this is a conglomeration of a couple posts I was preparing that followed up on my prior post. Hopefully, the delay in posting doesn't mean the links are outdated.

I'm not a big Thomas Friedman fan, but he made an extremely valid point in his NY Times column Thursday:

But what troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do - they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.

And that same day, Maureen Dowd was bluntly honest:

The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.

W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.

Mr. Bush, whose administration drummed up fake evidence to trick us into war with Iraq, sticking our troops in an immoral position with no exit strategy, won on "moral issues."

The president says he's "humbled" and wants to reach out to the whole country. What humbug. The Bushes are always gracious until they don't get their way. If W. didn't reach out after the last election, which he barely grabbed, why would he reach out now that he has what Dick Cheney calls a "broad, nationwide victory"?

Getting much more attention, though, was Garry Wills in yet another NY Times op-ed piece that same day. He said in a better fashion part of what I've been thinking since hearing "moral issues" were a dominating factor in the election and that the religious right may have been the deciding vote:

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

Tim Johnson got blasted earlier this year for a comment about the Taliban wing of the Republican Party. But I think there is some underlying truth there. Since when did the dominant Christian or moral values mean no gay marriage and no abortion? I would think Christ would have been more motivated by concern for those in poverty, working families who cannot afford healthcare for themselves or their children, and loss of life in a purposeless war.

Any post-election talk of conciliation or finding unity is hokum. The Bushies and the "moral issues" crew -- including Thune -- have no desire to unify this country. They desire only to impose their views regardless of the cost to democratic principles or the Constitution. Unfortunately, they think they have some God-given mandate to do so.

Why I am depressed? I foresee four years of hatred, intolerance and persecution. And the only silver lining I can find, an undoubtedly slim one, is that Bush will be the office-holder reaping the rewards of Iraq.

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