It’s the morning after the election.
I’d expected that this would probably end up being a race that wasn’t decided
for weeks after Election Day, but I’d hoped that I was wrong, and that Kerry
would manage to pull in enough votes in Florida and/or Ohio so he’d be a clear
winner. Instead it’s going to be lawyers, recounts, provisional ballots,
absentee ballots, and charges about those damned electronic voting machines
for many days to come, all while Bush and his cronies sit around and smirk.
In the end we may end up with four more years of G.W. Bush trying to run the
United States even further into the ground, with more tax cuts for the wealthy,
more cuts in whatever social programs he can lay his hands on, more ballooning
deficits, more erosion of our rights, and more American men and women spilling
their lifeblood onto the ground in Iraq, Syria, Iran.
Or we’ll end up with Kerry in office by a razor-thin, court-mandated margin,
facing a Congress that is now even more in the grip of the Republicans, which
means that it’ll be exceedingly difficult for him to roll back many of Bush’s
policies.
Either way we’ll have to deal with the fact that apparently at least half of
the voters in this country think that having a liar-in-chief in office is just
fine, either because they’re so deep into Bush’s fantasy-based world that they
won’t accept that he’s lied, or because they don’t care as long as he supports
their side on this issues. The half of America that wants to have a monster
in office, as long as he’s their monster.
Frankly, it’s pretty depressing.