Well, the only thing I can say in my defense is that a fair number of oher folks believed the same thing on Tuesday afternoon. At 5 p.m., exit polling looked very good for Kerry in almost all battleground states.
While something may turn around in OH, I admit I don’t expect it. It appears that a small but sizeable majority don’t care about economic issues nearly as much as keeping gay people from marrying. Not sure how we survive the next four years economically, but right now, I’m off to get some sleep.
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We also cared more about not giving Osama and Saddam a victory. We cared about not entrusting our safety to a person who cares more about what France and the UN think than about what’s good for America. We preferred a president who respects our true and reliable allies, such as the UK, Australia and Poland, and doesn’t send his sister to tell them they’d be safer abandoning us. We were happy that Saddam is no longer funding terrorists, no longer conducting weapons research, and no longer putting people in plastic shredders. We were glad that there has been no significant terror attack in the USA in the past 3 years, and we wanted to keep the President who made it so.
Above all we were sick of the demented four-year-long smear campaign, the insane libels and ridiculous accusations, the fake documents and the fake draft notices; the raw hate dripping from the slavering jaws of Moore and Garofalo and their ilk, and the way the Democratic Party not only did not distance itself from them, but honoured them and even repeated some of their slanders.
And we thought the economy is actually going pretty well, all things considered. Since when did 5% unemployment become a *bad* thing?
PS: Not to mention Mohammed el Baradei’s last minute attempt to manipulate the election, with the active collaboration of the NY Times and CBS. Some of us, who collectively made up the majority you dismiss so lightly, deeply resented that, and not only would not fall for his tricks but no longer trust anything coming out of his agency, and completely support Bush’s decision to block his reappointment.
Oh, how sweet. Usually, I try to stay out of this sort of thing because tend towards being a moderate, but you know what, I’m not going to just walk by this little steaming right-wing dump in my own backyard.
“We cared about not entrusting our safety to a person who cares more about what France and the UN think than about what’s good for America.”
And drinking the spin master’s cool-aide. Pop quiz… what were Kerry’s actual words, in context, and what did they mean, in context? Granted, it can be somewhat hard to tell, given how Kerry is given to meander while speaking,
“We also cared more about not giving Osama and Saddam a victory.”
You assume here that Osama didn’t want Bush re-elected. If that was the case, he would kept hidden in his cave. Osama very likely *wanted* Bush re-elected. Why? Take a look at how the Middle East has become even more polarized, thanks to the invasion of Iraq and the Bush administration’s dropping the ball on the Mideast peace process between the Isrealis and Palestinians. Both of these plays into Osama’s hands. More strife in the region means more recruits for his jihad.
“We preferred a president who respects our true and reliable allies, such as the UK, Australia and Poland…”
Yes, let’s not forget Poland, who is <a href=”http://www.cnn.com/2004/WOR… on pulling their troops</a>? Or Spain. oops, they left too. How many have left the coalition? Or shall we just ignore that?
“We were happy that Saddam is no longer funding terrorists, no longer conducting weapons research…”
Which he was never doing in the first place. Did you bother to read the 9/11 comission report? There was never a single shred of evidence that Sadaam had restarted a weapons program, or that he had funded terrorists. There was no credible evidence to support those claims before the war. There is absolutely none now.
“Above all we were sick of the demented four-year-long smear campaign, the insane libels and ridiculous accusations, the fake documents and the fake draft notices;”
It’s funny… when you meet froth-at-the-mouth arguments with… froth-at-the-mouth arguments, you only really impress your own side. And which was worse… the forged documents that duped CBS into airing a story on 60 Minutes, or the forged “Yellowcake” documents used to bolster the case for a war on Iraq?
“…the raw hate dripping from the slavering jaws of Moore and Garofalo and their ilk…”
Which is so unlike the hate and disdain of pundits like Coulter? That drug addict Limbaugh? The choir of pundits chanting the “talking point” du jour? Unfortunately, that’s all that passes for civil discourse these days… two groups of madly ranting loonies who ignore facts in favor of knee-jerk emotional rhetoric.
To moderates, like myself, the most depressing thing about this election seasons was how transparent lies were accepted as gospel by both sides. Take a look at FactCheck.org for a few examples.
Voter behavior is always complex. I was making an offhand reference to the fact that for a large number of first time voters the thing that brought them to the polls was “moral issues” and many identified “gay marraige” as the most important moral issue — even over abortion or other traditional moral issues.
The inevitable problem with the tow party system is that if you vote for the party candidate, you vote for the whole package. I voted for Kerry despite my unhappiness with many of the proposals in question and my support of the Iraq war for reasons no one else in the universe agrees with. (short version, we carry a blood debt to the Shia and the Kurds since we encouraged them to rise in revolt in 1991 and then stood by when they were slaughtered.)
Similarly, anyone who voted for Bush must accept that we will now see a socially conservative agenda which includes a ban on gay marraige, further antiterrorism measures along the lines of the do not fly list, and what I consider to be a failed economic policy coupled with fiscal irresponsibility. (To me, the economic issues were a driving consideration. I do not look forward to the next four years or their aftermath).
For Zev, the analysis obviously turned on national security (on which I am not sold that the Bush administration is doing a particularly good job). Fine. But the polling data from many battleground states indicates that many people who believe the country is “headed in the wrong direction” economically and who did not rank national security as their highest concern still voted for Bush on “moral issues.”
So, to reiterate, and based on polling data:
“A small but sizeable majority don’t care about economic issues nearly as much as they care about gays getting married.” And, in OH, that was the swing vote.
What Gary said.
Also, I don’t find the idea of a “blood debt” to be bad on the face of it. Certainly we had a debt.
However, given how we did things, and continue to do things, and how the prospects for the Shia and Kurds don’t look especially cheery now, it’s hard to see that we have paid that debt. Rather it seems we’ve incurred another one. Maybe if we had gone in the way the generals wanted to, with an army of 500,000, we might have “succeeded.”
But I’m really, really tired of the false dichotomy that we had to either invade no later than April 2003, or else coddle Saddam forever. Clearly there were any number of screw-tightening techniques we could have used– as indeed we’ve found out, the sanctions in place and UN weapons destruction/inspection program had already largely defanged him.
What a wasted opportunity.
I’ve rather lost track among all the bullying: Wasn’t France right?
Not that a country has only one voice — certainly not the US. And not so long ago I was thinking that France had gone over to the “right.” But as long as American rightists insist on treating France as being “good”, “bad”, “right”, or “wrong,” what did France actually, in retrospect, get wrong? Or as the song says, “What did [they] say to piss you off this time, babe?”
While I’m at it, as long as we’re drawing battle lines and abandoning 250 years of relativism, what do folks think is an appropriate term for the new American right wing? I’m leaning towards “neo-fascists.”
We’ve been safe for three years because Bush “made it so?” Funny, I don’t feel safer. On 9/12 I was afraid of unarmed terrorists. Three years later under Bush I’m afraid of armed terrorists. And far more afraid of all three branches of the US government now being under the control of a group that tells us they will stop at no abridgement of liberty in order to… What, exactly? Breed and arm more terrorists?
Awwww, neo-fascists, aren’t we a history-ignoring academic? Who’s a cute academic? You are! Woogywoogywoo!
Dammit, learn a thing or two about fascism and/or Naziism before you open your little yapper.
How about you learn a thing or two about Iraq, as well: Saddam was openly paying money to the families of anyone who would carry out “suicide-bombings” on Israelis. IIRC, the amount was $23k or thereabouts.