As President Bush forges ahead with his second-term agenda, I hope someone will show him this pie-chart:

Hardly a sweeping mandate…

So I stopped at the liquor store last night to pick up a bottle of Jameson. Not to be too melodramatic about it, but after the day I’d had, I needed — hell, I deserved! — a good stiff drink. The grog shop was unusually busy for a Wednesday night in Sandy, Utah, and I found myself wondering if the people in line around me were also disgruntled Democrats in need of a belt. There was no way to tell, of course. The guy in front of me looked like he’d just turned legal, and from the way he gingerly placed a single Smirnoff Ice on the counter in front of the cashier, I gathered he was experimenting with his new-found right to get potted. The woman behind me, meanwhile, was loaded down with a half-dozen bottles of wine and looked to be in a hurry. I guessed she had a dinner party to get back to. And right after I made that guess I started thinking that maybe everything in the universe doesn’t really revolve around politics after all. After all, the election of George W. Bush didn’t stop the sun from rising, the college kid from getting his first drunk on, or the wine lady from cooking a meal for her friends. Life continues. And realizing that little fact left me feeling much better about what happened on Tuesday.

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So it’s to be four more years, is it? I can’t say I’m surprised. Disappointed, dejected, disgusted, and very worried about what comes next, but not surprised. The fact is, I’ve been steeling myself for the big let-down for weeks now. I started planning what I would say about it here on Simple Tricks, if it became necessary to say anything at all, back around the middle of October. (Obviously, I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.) Except now it has become necessary to say something, and I find that most of what I had imagined myself saying no longer applies to how I’m actually feeling.

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I’ll be back later with my reaction to the election results, but for now I thought I’d share the best bit of political writing I’ve read this morning, a remarkably cogent analysis of the Ohio situation using an old ’80s sitcom to put it all into perspective. From Jaime J. Weinman’s blog “Something Old, Nothing New”, I give you The Family Ties Explanation:

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Well, it’s a cold day here in Utah underneath a high crystal sky — quite pretty actually — and the temperatures aren’t affecting the voting one bit. My own polling place was crowded like I’ve never seen it before, and everyone was talking about the turn-out. There was even an exit poller there from a media research group, the first time I’ve ever encountered such a thing in my sleepy little suburban precinct. The air felt charged with electricity, like it does before a concert or a long-anticipated film. People knew they were making history today.

One quick anecdote to relate: I overheard the woman in line behind me say that her husband had cut short a business trip and was driving in from Oregon today so he could cast his ballot.

It’s that important.

Take time off work, go during your lunch, go after work. But go.

In a little under fourteen hours, the process begins… the truly revolutionary concept that emerged from the minds of those Virginia planters back in 1776, the idea that the People could make up their own damn minds about who was going to call the shots.

I can’t begin to stress how absolutely vital it is for every registered voter who may be reading this blog to do their duty tomorrow morning (or this evening, if you live in one of the handful of states that allows early voting). You may think that your vote won’t carry much practical weight because of the screwiness of the electoral college. I know mine won’t. But that’s beside the point. There are people in the world who would die for the privelege that many Americans ignore because they think their vote won’t make any difference, or because they’re cynical about the candidates (there is a difference between Bush and Kerry, dammit!), or because it’s cold outside or any of a raft of other silly reasons. There are people who are dying right now to try and obtain this privelege as well as those who are dying because not enough of us bother to exercise the privelege. So, no matter which candidate you support, make sure you get out of the house and make your position heard. It only takes a few minutes.

If you’re not sure where you need to go to vote, consult mypollingsite.com for a quick and easy reminder. You might also try mypollingplace.com, but I understand that site has been slammed with traffic today and is intermittently off-line.

Finally, if you’re a Utah voter and you haven’t yet reviewed the Voter Information pamphlet that came in the newspaper a few weeks ago, please make sure you give it a look. There are more things to vote on than the positions of president or governor, including some very important legislation.

If you’re a religious sort, pray for a fast and definitive conclusion to tomorrow’s festivities. And if you’re not so sure about this God fellow, well, just hope for the best…

So, I don’t know about everyone else out there in Internet-Land, but I can’t wait for the election to be over with.

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Well, this is it. D-Day. Zero Hour. The Iceman Cometh. As I type this, Michael Moore is addressing a packed house at UVSC. And as far as I can tell by looking out my office window, the world has not — repeat NOT — come to an end. Oh, sure, it’s cold and rainy, and I can’t see the Wasatch Mountains through a low-hanging raft of gray clouds, but I’m pretty sure they’re still there. You wouldn’t know it from the nonsense that continues to swirl because of Moore’s visit, though. Before I left the house this morning, I caught a live broadcast from the parking lot of the McKay Events Center showing the police department’s mobile command center — basically a big RV, no doubt fitted out like a technophile’s best dream on the inside — set up and waiting to control any riots that may break around lunchtime today. I can’t wait until the evening news tonight to see if this precaution was needed or if the ravening mobs managed to restrain themselves from tearing the guest speaker limb-from-limb.

In case you couldn’t guess from my snarky delivery, this whole “controversy” continues to rankle me. I am simply appalled at how the people of this state, and of Utah County in particular, have reacted to the “threat” of hearing one man’s opinion. From the news segment this morning I learned that a number of donors to UVSC have made good on their threats to pull their money because of Moore’s visit, and there’s even been a last-ditch effort to cancel the appearance by means of a lawsuit. It’s all such nonsense.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need dissent in this nation. You can argue about Moore’s methods or the accuracy of his views, but many of those who would silence him aren’t concerned with these issues so much as the fact that he dissents at all. They want him to shut up and go away because he says things they disagree with. And that’s not right. That’s not America. I only hope that someday things calm down enough for people to start to realize that again…

Johnathan Chait writes today about Bush’s misleading claim that Kerry voted to raise taxes 98 times. I always cringe when candidates on either side start throwing around specific numbers like this without any further elaboration. In the case of “raising taxes,” it’s especially egregious because most bills that Congress votes on are conglomerations of many different “action items,” some of which a Congressman may support while others are harder to swallow. Oftentimes, a member of Congress is forced to hold their nose and vote on a bill that has portions they dislike in order to make sure something they do like passes. It’s lesser-of-two-evils time, something I think that few “civilians” understand. Politicians use that ignorance to their advantage when making this sort of attack. Yeah, a candidate may have voted on a bill that raised taxes or cut a particular defense program — but that same bill most likely also funded a school or provided disaster relief or trimmed fat out of a bloated budget or any of a thousand other positive results that taxpayers and voting citizens would likely approve. It’s the same scenario in reverse when a president is forced to veto a largely popular bill because someone managed to tack an unfavorable amendment on to it.

Attacking an opponent with this sort of claim is the worst possible case of taking something out of context.

Striking paragraphs in the Chait piece:

Kerry’s campaign has a detailed list of 642 Kerry votes to reduce taxes. (Maybe Bush should be painting Kerry as a crazed tax-cutting zealot totally unconcerned about fiscal responsibility.)

 

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney as a member of Congress from Wyoming voted to raise taxes 144 times. If 98 tax-hike votes make Kerry a far-out liberal, than Cheney would have to be placed somewhere in the ideological vicinity of Che Guevara.

I’m still working on those movie reviews I promised the other day, but in the meantime I want to share a very astute op-ed piece I ran across during my morning surfing. It’s the first of two-part analysis of the seemingly intractable cultural divide that is currently crippling our political process, our national discourse, and, in a very real sense, our national identity. The author doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to the flaws of the Bush administration, but he also lays the blame for this deadlock on everyone, including the Naderites who condemn both of the more mainstream parties.

Here’s a vital paragraph that nicely crystallizes the problem:

The polarized atmosphere, the abandonment of compromise, the triumph of extremism, and the collapse of even any attempts at moderation may have achieved primacy during the Bush administration, but the groundwork was laid as a truly bipartisan effort. Over the past three or four decades, both Democrats and Republicans have gerrymandered congressional districts to serve their political parties rather than citizens, society, or community. There are now so few truly contested districts left that there is not only almost no demand for compromise, but an almost explicit mandate against it. Ignoring constitutional ideals and basic democratic tenets, politicians have gutted this country’s established operating principles. We are paying for it now, but the real hell is just around the corner, when we find this country electorally unable to face the problems created.