[Mb-civic] (no subject)

[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

Whether you were pro Kerry (or just anti Bush) or pro Bush this is a 
worthwhile read...MD
Regarding the recent election and the state of America, this is hands-down 
the best thing I have read so far. From Fintan O'Toole of the Irish Times.

I think you should give it a read to the end.

JK

>After the 2000 election result, lovers of Bill Clinton's America
>could wash away their disappointment in oceans of consolation. A
>majority of Americans had voted for Al Gore.
>
>George W. Bush had not been elected but appointed by the Republican-
>controlled Supreme Court. The shenanigans in Florida reeked of a
>stolen election. The anthem for the next four years would be "Hail to
>the Thief". Bush was not the real America.
>
>This time, the only place for liberals to seek consolation is in
>fantasy land. Even if, by some combination of fluke and litigation,
>John Kerry were now to become president, his victory would be a sham.
>
>Bush has won a narrow but decisive victory in the popular vote after
>an election process that generated massive interest and presented the
>American electorate with real choices.
>
>With a sixth consecutive term in control of the House of
>Representatives, an apparently increased majority in the Senate, and
>the retention of a majority of state governorships, his party clearly
>reflects the popular will. Bush is the real America.
>
>Liberal Europeans have to face the fact that America has chosen,
>freely and fairly, to present itself to the world as an aggressive,
>unilateralist, neo-imperial power that doesn't much care what anyone
>else thinks. The rogue super-power that we have seen in action over
>the last four years is where Americans want to live.
>
>However much John Kerry may have deserved the "flip-flop" taunts, he
>clearly articulated the case for a return to an older,
>multilateralist USA that exercised its muscle by being the first
>among equals in a consensual world order.
>
>That many Americans would like it that way is obvious from the
>results. But so is the fact that they form an ineffectual minority.
>
>This truth is all the starker because, by any normal criteria, Bush
>should have been almost unelectable. He came into office with an
>extremely weak mandate and immediately broke all his promises to be a
>uniter, not a divider.
>
>He became the first US president in modern history to preside over a
>net loss of jobs. He turned the huge surplus he inherited from
>Clinton into a massive and still spiralling deficit. His tax cuts
>produced a flagrant bonanza for the rich at the expense of the middle-
>class. Five million more Americans ended up with no health insurance.
>
>The incompetence of his administration contributed significantly to
>the success of the attacks of September 11th, 2001. His defining
>action - the invasion of Iraq - was sold by deception and executed
>with staggering ineptitude.
>
>If this data was fed into a computer, there is no doubt what result
>it would produce: a Kerry landslide.
>
>What could possibly have trumped all these factors and given Bush
>victory? The answer is that a majority of American voters prefer to
>imagine a world divided between the Righteous and the Evil-doers than
>to deal with the complex problems of their vast nation.
>
>This conclusion is supported by the exit polls. The top three issues
>that influenced voters' choices were the economy, Iraq and "moral
>values".
>
>The first two of these issues are about facing reality, and people
>who made them a priority voted, by and large, for Kerry. Those who
>cited the economy as the most important issue voted overwhelmingly
>for Kerry: by 81 per cent to 17 per cent. Likewise, those who saw
>Iraq as the number one issue were far more likely to vote for Kerry.
>
>But the election did not turn on the economy, stupid, or on Iraq,
>even stupider. The Democrats were not able to articulate a fully
>truthful position on either of these issues for the simple reason
>that optimism is the only language of American public discourse.
>
>Historically, presidential candidates who say that things are bad and
>that they will take some time to fix tend to lose.
>
>The real case against Bush was the case for a reality check. It was
>about saying that there are structural problems with American society
>and the American economy and that some painful adjustments will be
>required.
>
>It was about saying that Iraq shows how delusional American
>militarist and imperial fantasies really are and that being the only
>super-power is not such a good deal after all. But both of these
>positions would have demanded a kind of language that Americans have
>been taught not to speak.
>
>Kerry would have had to challenge the whole notion that the US is
>God's own country.
>
>Bush, on the other hand, appealed to those who desperately want to
>believe that God wakes up every morning and salutes the Stars and
>Stripes. He won because the vast swathe of voters who saw the
>election as being about "moral values" backed him by 78 per cent to
>19 per cent.
>
>Nebulous as this phrase might be, Bush and his people have controlled
>its content brilliantly. The strange but increasingly viable alliance
>between secular neo-conservative intellectuals and the Christian
>right has determined what "moral values" are, and, more importantly,
>what they are not. They are not about grotesque inequality,
>starvation wages or the denial of healthcare to hard-working
>families. They are not about torture, the abuse of human rights and
>the deaths of perhaps 100,000 Iraqis.
>
>What they are about, though, is a range of evils that threaten the
>good life. The genius of Bushism is that it has forged an emotional
>connection between vastly disparate issues. Middle Eastern Islamist
>terrorists and American homosexuals; tax-and-spend liberals and stem-
>cell researchers; girlie men who want to take your guns away and
>unbelievers who won't let your kids pray in school; abortionists who
>kill American babies and traitors who claim that the US military
>committed atrocities in Vietnam.
>
>All of them can be filed under the capacious heading of Evil-doers.
>And in the words of a slogan that was printed on millions of badges,
>T-shirts, and bumper-stickers after 9/11, "Evil-doers Suck".
>
>What makes this bundle of fears into a powerful political movement is
>that it is not entirely nebulous. There are good reasons for
>Americans to be deeply anxious. Apart altogether from the threat from
>al-Qaeda, there are the enormous structural weakness manifested in
>everything from long-term trade deficits to crumbling public schools,
>and from an unsustainable addiction to cheap oil to the inability of
>an 18th-century system of government to function in the 21st century.
>
>What the Republicans have done so deftly, however, is to displace
>those anxieties on to the twin threats of cultural liberalism and
>Islamist terrorism.
>
>An emotional response that has proved itself so strong and so
>politically useful will not be appeased.
>
>The mandate for an aggressive America, acting outside of
>international law and contemptuous of those who don't offer 100 per
>cent support, is clear, and it is foolish to imagine that Bush won't
>act on it.
>
>The strategy adopted by Tony Blair of cosying up to Bush in the hope
>of bringing his inner liberal out of the closet, is now more hopeless
>than it ever was. Europe, in particular, is going to have to face
>without flinching a new reality: a world order in which the US is
>more part of the problem than it is of the solution. 
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