Wednesday, November 06, 2002
WELCOME TO THE NEW DARK AGES
I’m not sure whether I should post tonight, since the election results so far are quite depressing. The Democrats need to win Minnesota, Missouri and South Dakota to retain control of the Senate. Plus, based on current Louisiana returns, Mary Landrieu will almost certainly face a runoff election in order to retain her seat – another seat that will be necessary to retain the Dem majority.
One thing to remember at a time like this is that life is not like the movies. In real life, the bad guys often win – and it certainly looks like the thugs in the black hats have won.
It’s a very dark time for the United States of America, the land that I love.
First of all, I’m gonna admit I was wrong. The election predictions I made last week were based on the polls I’d seen and my gut feeling of which way the last-minute undecideds would swing. By Sunday’s final polls, though, it looked like my gut feeling was almost completely wrong. I suppose I could’ve updated the predictions, but I decided not to second-guess myself.
Well, you might say, this is only one election…there’s always 2004. True, but the Republicans have so thoroughly poisoned the American body politic during the past 20-plus years – and are prepared to poison it even further as much as possible in the next two years – that there most likely will be no recovery during my lifetime. And I’m not that old.
One major way they’ve poisoned our politics is by packing the courts, particularly the appeals courts, with far-right extremists - and a Democratic Senate could've at least been something of a brake on that. We’ve already seen how right-wing judges, with their lifetime appointments, managed to pervert the justice system in order to try to hamstring our last legitimate president, President Clinton, with phony-baloney “scandals.” It was no accident that the “independent” counsels just happened to be right-wing Republicans – that’s because Chief Justice Rehnquist stacked the 3-judge panel that picked the counsels with right-wing judges, in defiance of the spirit of the law if not the exact letter. (The law said that priority should be given to senior or retired judges; Rehnquist simply ignored this provision and appointed a right-wing-dominated panel headed by a young political crony of Jesse Helms.)
Sure, the independent prosecutor law is gone, but the right wing has already demonstrated that they will use every sleazy judicial tactic at their disposal to try to destroy a Democratic president. Remember all the ridiculous lawsuits – especially the Paula Jones lawsuit – funded by right-wing organizations? Even if a Democratic presidential nominee somehow manages to get past the usual Republican smear campaign (in collusion with the so-called “liberal media,” of course), the new president will almost certainly be hounded 24/7, 365 days a year, for the next 4 years with frivolous lawsuits encouraged by a right-wing judiciary.
So, for the next 30 or 40 years, not even the election of a Democratic president and Democratic House and Senate will be able to repair the fiscal and social damage caused by The Squatter and his Republican predecessors. Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the hapless Dems will be permanently tied up by a right-wing-dominated judiciary - aided and abetted by the Republican Party's presstitutes in the so-called “liberal media.”
And meanwhile, your descendants will inherit a country hopelessly mired in debt and crippling interest payments, due to the Republicans’ incredibly irresponsible fiscal policies, and a society where the great American promise of “liberty and justice for all” is nothing more than a Big Lie.
So I guess this is how the great American experiment ends…
I’m not sure whether I should post tonight, since the election results so far are quite depressing. The Democrats need to win Minnesota, Missouri and South Dakota to retain control of the Senate. Plus, based on current Louisiana returns, Mary Landrieu will almost certainly face a runoff election in order to retain her seat – another seat that will be necessary to retain the Dem majority.
One thing to remember at a time like this is that life is not like the movies. In real life, the bad guys often win – and it certainly looks like the thugs in the black hats have won.
It’s a very dark time for the United States of America, the land that I love.
First of all, I’m gonna admit I was wrong. The election predictions I made last week were based on the polls I’d seen and my gut feeling of which way the last-minute undecideds would swing. By Sunday’s final polls, though, it looked like my gut feeling was almost completely wrong. I suppose I could’ve updated the predictions, but I decided not to second-guess myself.
Well, you might say, this is only one election…there’s always 2004. True, but the Republicans have so thoroughly poisoned the American body politic during the past 20-plus years – and are prepared to poison it even further as much as possible in the next two years – that there most likely will be no recovery during my lifetime. And I’m not that old.
One major way they’ve poisoned our politics is by packing the courts, particularly the appeals courts, with far-right extremists - and a Democratic Senate could've at least been something of a brake on that. We’ve already seen how right-wing judges, with their lifetime appointments, managed to pervert the justice system in order to try to hamstring our last legitimate president, President Clinton, with phony-baloney “scandals.” It was no accident that the “independent” counsels just happened to be right-wing Republicans – that’s because Chief Justice Rehnquist stacked the 3-judge panel that picked the counsels with right-wing judges, in defiance of the spirit of the law if not the exact letter. (The law said that priority should be given to senior or retired judges; Rehnquist simply ignored this provision and appointed a right-wing-dominated panel headed by a young political crony of Jesse Helms.)
Sure, the independent prosecutor law is gone, but the right wing has already demonstrated that they will use every sleazy judicial tactic at their disposal to try to destroy a Democratic president. Remember all the ridiculous lawsuits – especially the Paula Jones lawsuit – funded by right-wing organizations? Even if a Democratic presidential nominee somehow manages to get past the usual Republican smear campaign (in collusion with the so-called “liberal media,” of course), the new president will almost certainly be hounded 24/7, 365 days a year, for the next 4 years with frivolous lawsuits encouraged by a right-wing judiciary.
So, for the next 30 or 40 years, not even the election of a Democratic president and Democratic House and Senate will be able to repair the fiscal and social damage caused by The Squatter and his Republican predecessors. Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the hapless Dems will be permanently tied up by a right-wing-dominated judiciary - aided and abetted by the Republican Party's presstitutes in the so-called “liberal media.”
And meanwhile, your descendants will inherit a country hopelessly mired in debt and crippling interest payments, due to the Republicans’ incredibly irresponsible fiscal policies, and a society where the great American promise of “liberty and justice for all” is nothing more than a Big Lie.
So I guess this is how the great American experiment ends…
