Tuesday, November 02, 2004
It's All Over But For The Crying...
And it appears that Bush will be our President for another four years. Certainly I am disappointed. I think this will be bad for the country, bad for our foreign relations, bad for the environment, bad for the poor, bad for education, bad for social security and bad for equal rights. It will be good for the Republicans, the rich, the Christian right, Air America, corporations and the Democrats.
It's about time the Democrats got a wake up call. It's the second consecutive election in which they threw up what they hoped was the lesser of two evils. They need to reassess what they stand for and then decided to actually stand for it as opposed to co-opting the Republican positions and trying to split hairs to show the difference. They better hope that Barak Obama matures quickly and that he brings a new generation of leaders with him because otherwise they are in real trouble.
The next four years will be the most interesting of my lifetime. We'll see the fruition of the Bush vision for the world and I suspect that many won't be welcome there. The war in Iraq will still worsen before it gets better and we'll remain very alone. We'll see more terrorist actions against the United States and our allies. The economy will continue it's slow growth, but we'll see a rise in corporate profits while average wages continue to fall. We'll see a new Supreme Court overturn laws that have stood for decades, removing or at least restricting severely a woman's right to choose. Gays will find themselves relegated to second class status. The religious right will exert their pressures upon the United States and we'll see a moral police the likes of which we've not dealt with since the Puritans were in charge. We will lose more of our national forests to clear cuts, to drilling and development. Our skies will darken with pollutants as companies use lowered EPA standards as a means of saving money on safety improvements to raise their bottom lines. Our smug, tight lipped administration will continue to rule with a secrecy never seen before in the White House.
It's not a hopeless situation. It's possible that those who lost and who voted the other way will take this as a rallying cry, but right now I suspect that won't be the case immediately. For now it's all about the mourning...and hoping that there are 300,000 Democrats with valid provisional ballots in Ohio still waiting to be counted.
It's about time the Democrats got a wake up call. It's the second consecutive election in which they threw up what they hoped was the lesser of two evils. They need to reassess what they stand for and then decided to actually stand for it as opposed to co-opting the Republican positions and trying to split hairs to show the difference. They better hope that Barak Obama matures quickly and that he brings a new generation of leaders with him because otherwise they are in real trouble.
The next four years will be the most interesting of my lifetime. We'll see the fruition of the Bush vision for the world and I suspect that many won't be welcome there. The war in Iraq will still worsen before it gets better and we'll remain very alone. We'll see more terrorist actions against the United States and our allies. The economy will continue it's slow growth, but we'll see a rise in corporate profits while average wages continue to fall. We'll see a new Supreme Court overturn laws that have stood for decades, removing or at least restricting severely a woman's right to choose. Gays will find themselves relegated to second class status. The religious right will exert their pressures upon the United States and we'll see a moral police the likes of which we've not dealt with since the Puritans were in charge. We will lose more of our national forests to clear cuts, to drilling and development. Our skies will darken with pollutants as companies use lowered EPA standards as a means of saving money on safety improvements to raise their bottom lines. Our smug, tight lipped administration will continue to rule with a secrecy never seen before in the White House.
It's not a hopeless situation. It's possible that those who lost and who voted the other way will take this as a rallying cry, but right now I suspect that won't be the case immediately. For now it's all about the mourning...and hoping that there are 300,000 Democrats with valid provisional ballots in Ohio still waiting to be counted.
