Strong language ahead, people...
My last post was a result of something I heard on
Air America radio. Ralph Nader is challenging NH because it is small and easy to recount, and the machines used there were widely used. (I'd like to think this was his master plan all along, get his foot in the door and in a position to fight if necessary, rather than honestly believing he ever stood a chance.) And even if we can't get a complete recount, maybe we can get a serious revamping of the clearly dubious voting process.
I went a little crazy and decided to crosspost in about 20 John Kerry-related communities, thinking maybe my small (but beloved) circle of LJ friends might not be enough to shift the tide. I'm as politically lazy as the next guy, so this was some significant activism by my standards.
I don't know why I was surprised by the responses. I got a lot of "didn't we win NH?" I got a lot of "give it up" and "this is pathetic" and "face it. Bush won fair and square" and even one "you are an insult to the Democratic party." Someone actually said in
2004_elections "People are going to start leaving this community if this is the kind of post we can expect to see from now on." Sorry, but I don't see "2004 elections" as a community having a lot of staying power either way.
I unwittingly created an exit poll of my own, and the results are in....the Bushies are 100% right about us. We ARE a bunch of whining, crybaby pussies who would rather join communities and sit around and piss and moan and pull out our hair instead of actually doing anything helpful. Do you think the Republicans, seeing the
exit polls so overwhelmingly showing their candidate the winner, would just sit around and chuckle and wonder what went wrong when he lost? No, I guarantee they wouldn't. Because people in power like to stay in power, absolute power corrupts absolutely, yadda yadda yadda.
It makes me ashamed not only to be an American, but to be a Democrat.
Even Michael Moore seems to have decided to
roll over and take it. Even knowing all about the
Katherine Harris debacle, Florida 2000, he of all people is going to take the results at face value. I guess it's harder to make compelling, inflammatory cinema if your side actually wins. He is hoping maybe Bush will get twice as lazy in his last term and take a 4-year vacation. How sad is it when the country's only hope is that the president doesn't try to do his job?
I don't buy the results. It's not national headlines, but the owner of Diebold, the manufacturer of many of the voting machines, staunchly supports Bush and even wrote a letter promising to do whatever it took to deliver Ohio. Many of the machines used were owned by Republican-affiliated corporations. Every day Tery comes home with stories she hears on Air America about computer voting errors. A machine in Ohio that gave Bush 4000 votes in a precinct that only had 600 voters. A machine that was accidentally subtracting votes rather than adding them. A machine that stopped counting votes when the memory filled and no one noticed. Whole county results lost.
More fucking hanging chads. (thanks,
bohemian_charm) And in most places they didn't even bother to count the provisional and absentee ballots (and that includes the votes of all the people over there laying their lives on the line in the name of "democracy" in Iraq). How exactly does THAT fulfill the promise of "every vote counts, and every vote will be counted"? It seems to me if all the machine errors and paper ballots were actually tallied, those votes would start to add up. As would the wacky exit polls.
Kerry was very graceful in his concession speech, bowing out so easily. He can afford to be. As he said in the debates, he is one of the top 2% who actually benefited from Bush's tax cuts. Me, I'm tired of working two jobs (and currently applying for a third, God Bless America) to survive (but hey, at least I'm working). I'm tired of politicians that are supposed to represent me telling me who I can and can't marry. I'm tired of not having health insurance. I'm tired of the rest of the world hating us because of the rash, selfish actions of one man. I'm tired of a president who acts without regard for consequences or future generations. I'm tired of rightwingnuts deciding how the rest of us should live. And I don't need no steenking exit polls to tell me I'm hardly in the minority.
I may be beating the crap out of a dead horse. I should probably just let it go. A recount would cost money, though I guarantee not more than will be wasted by another Bush administration. I'm not going to recite anew all the many ways Bush has made this country, and this world, a worse place to live. I prefer not to think what he might do now that he doesn't have to worry about re-election. But whether it was through calculated planning or honest machine error, I don't believe he won fair and square. And the thought that he is making a joke of democracy TWICE is more than I can bear.
So, yeah, I'm bitter. We all should be.