getting over it
Okay, today I've decided to finally try to move on from the election, for purposes of my own sanity. As soon as I finish this post.
Saturday night Tery and I were channel-surfing and I stopped on something called "Gay Republicans." This quickly engrossed us as it looked at the reactions of four Log Cabin members in the course of the 2004 campaign trail. Apparently all had been right with the party until Georgie started all his Constitutional Amendment nonsense. This tore the group in two, as they actually felt shocked and betrayed that he could do this to them after all their support. Didn't Bush care about their 12,000 votes? They had to decide if they were Republicans that happened to be gay or gays that happened to be Republican. So the foursome being documented illustrated the two viewpoints; on the sensible side was a lesbian who had had a commitment ceremony with her girlfriend and a dashing, Rupert Everett-type guy who used to be some big-shot politician in Arizona until his orientation ruined his career. On the side of insanity was a prissy John Waters-type Palm Beach man who I wanted to kick in the teeth, and a Jim Jay Bullock-type asshole who I wanted to kick even harder in the teeth.
The highlights of the show: John Waters describing with great contempt the fact that Jimmy Carter wore sweaters in the Oval Office, and Clinton wore a T-shirt and jeans, as signs of their disrespect for their position: "Disgraceful!" was the exact word he used. Call me pragmatic, but I value my president's effectiveness and good leadership over his fashion sense. The lesbian attending a Republican rally and actually fearing for her safety. And Rupert Everett hiding out at a Revival-type Republican rally where the whole audience wore white to represent the sanctity of marriage, while some wildly misinformed fat guy read out statistics as ludicrous as lesbian partnerships having the highest percentage of domestic violence in the country (Tery leaned over and slapped my leg hard at this point. Then cowered in case I decided to retaliate. Which naturally I did).
But by far the most hateful was Jim Jay Bullock. He proudly considered himself a Republican first and a gay man second or even third. He smugly believed that other gays invited attacks by announcing that they were gay, whereas he could walk into a room and no one would know that he was. Evidently he has no mirrors in his house on top of being totally deaf, because he had a definite lisp and was undoubtedly on the effeminate end of the spectrum. I think the only thing that would cast any doubt at all on his orientation would be the big old Bush/Cheney T-shirt he always wore. He also had the nerve to tell other gays that Bush wasn't saying they couldn't get married, they just couldn't get married to a member of their own gender. He saw absolutely no irony in this statement either. The best part was when he went door to door campaigning for Bush (this was after the Log Cabin party decided to endorse Kerry, so he was flying solo) and got in an argument with a guy over Iraq. The guy's argument was factual, such as the fact that we decided to attack a country that had no large-scale weapons program and no plans to attack us. Jim Jay's only rebuttal (no pun intended) was that he was pulling his "facts" out of his ass, and proceeded to mime pulling things out of his own butt and calling them facts (Tery wanted me to make an icon of it). Demonstrating not only that Kerry supporters are much better informed about the reality of things, but that they are a hell of a lot more mature than Bush supporters as well.
This whole thing led to a discussion between Tery and I. I admit, I honestly didn't know what the political difference is between Dems and Republicans, except that Republicans are evil and the obvious class divide. She explained that Republicans believe in minimal government intervention, minimal taxes, and have a money-oriented "I've got mine" outlook. She said that Alex Keaton on "Family Ties" illustrated the quintessential Republican....humanitarian, but profit-oriented. She said this new party is not Republican as established originally with the heavy religious slant. Which was my next question. They believe in government staying out of our private lives, but it's okay for it to decide who can get married and that a woman can't get an abortion. And they believe in every man for himself, which goes against most religious principles that I grew up with. Neither of us can figure out how its members can reconcile these enormous dichotomies in belief systems, although it might explain why they are so uptight. I also would like to know when the moral, upright citizens who call themselves Republicans started believing that Democrats (or I should say liberals) were hedonistic, orgiastic demonspawn, or how churchgoing folk can think peaceloving, anti-war tendencies are a bad thing. I was raised in a Republican household with good moral values. I turned out bisexual but still consider myself a good person with compassion for my fellow man (though some days this is harder to manage than others) and a strong live-and-let-live attitude. I'd like to think that deep down inside, we really aren't that different from each other in terms of what we want out of life. Making me, I suppose, extremely naive and idealistic.
All this was rolling around in my brain when I went to work yesterday morning, the gaping schism between Republican and religious ideology, and of course the election. I listened to the best of Randi Rhodes on Air America, where she talked to a computer guy who asserted how incredibly simple it would be to program the voting machines to do whatever you wanted them to. Rather than firing me up like this talk normally does, I instead felt an incredible weight of depression on my shoulders. I'm not one to get depressed easily...my opinion is there is no sense getting upset over something you have no control over. But that was precisely what was doing it, the feeling of helplessness that dishonest, unjust shit was going down and there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about it. I spent the entire morning in a deep, deep funk that wasn't helped by talking to my Republican boss who laughed when I said the election was unfair. He said the exit polls were taken in only Democratic areas, explaining how skewed they were. I doubted this was true, but hated him all the same. I shouldn't though....I think he is Republican in the true sense of the word, voting only to keep his taxes down. He doesn't care about all the religious malarky. He did believe all the voting booths should go electronic. I have no doubt I would feel the same way if it meant my candidate won every time. I kept telling myself, and I honestly believe this, that I could handle Bush winning if I believed it was an honest, fair win. But my overdeveloped sense of justice simply cannot come to terms with the margin of error that occurred in this election. I was depressed not because of Bush, but at the thought that the entire democratic process was tainted and untrustworthy. Sure, I'll keep voting, but never again with such a foolish sense of optimism, and this saddened me more than I could bear. I'd like to see a focus in the next four years not so much on coming up with a viable Dem presidential candidate as on voting reform and fixing the margin of error. I don't know what it is estimated at, but 2-3% error is no longer acceptable when that's what the winner wins by.
So I went to see "The Incredibles" after work, despite being dog-tired. I really felt a desperate need to laugh. And I did, though not as much as I had hoped. The movie seemed more action-oriented rather than humor. Maybe I'll watch it again when I'm not in such a bad state of mind.
As of now, I am going to (try to) get over it and move on.
November 04, 2004
Kerry should be glad he lost
ANATOLE KALETSKY
FOR THOSE of us who were disappointed, and even horrified, by George W. Bush’s return to power there was one consolation in yesterday’s result. On the contrary, the previously unmentionable hope for the supporters of liberal politics in America, is that Senator Kerry has done the Democratic Party a favour of immense, historic proportions by losing to Mr Bush. In military history, it is a commonplace that there are certain battles worth losing rather than winning - and if ever this were true in politics, then the 2004 US election would be a case in point.
To see what I mean, step away from America for a moment and consider the most successful left-of-centre party in the modern world: Britain’s “new” Labour Party. Now ask yourself what electoral event laid the foundation for Labour’s success. This would be the 1992 election, in which a manifestly incompetent Tory Government was unexpectedly and undeservedly returned to power.
If Neil Kinnock instead of John Major had won the 1992 election, the devaluation of Black Wednesday would have occurred even sooner. The monetary crisis which undermined the Tories’ long-established reputation for economic competence would have been blamed on Labour’s mismanagement. Black Wednesday (or Monday or Tuesday) would almost certainly have brought down the Kinnock Government and would unquestionably have ended Labour’s hopes of ever again becoming a serious party of government. Indeed, as a very minor contributor to the outcome of the 1992 election through my articles unravelling Labour’s absurd tax plans, I have often been thanked by friends in the party for inadvertently helping them to avoid the terrible fate awaiting them if they had gained power.
So was 2004 a good election to lose, just like 1992 in Britain? Will the Democrats one day thank John Kerry for losing, just as Labour is grateful to Mr Kinnock? This seems distinctly possible, given the challenges now facing America, especially in geopolitics and macroeconomics. Iraq is a mess which Mr Bush created and it is surely fitting that he should be the one forced to clean it up. The same is true of ballooning government deficits, escalating oil prices and the small but growing, threat of a crisis in the US balance of payments leading to an international run on the dollar.
Extricating American forces from Iraq will be extremely difficult for Mr Bush, especially if he tries to maintain significant control over its foreign policies and its energy resources. Restoring stability to Iraq, without handing the country over to an overtly anti-Western or theocratic regime will become even harder if Mr Bush decides to pick a fight with Iran over nuclear proliferation - or, even worse, if he backs Israel in a “pre-emptive” military attack. To control America’s public finances will be equally difficult, given that the President and his party are now totally committed to ever-lower taxes, ever-more aggressive military postures and ever-more generous corporate subsidies.
It is quite likely, therefore, that in the next year or two President Bush could face a military or economic crisis (or both) - and, crucially, that such a crisis would be analogous to Black Wednesday in its political effects. If Mr Bush suffered a serious military setback, either in Iraq or in a broader confrontation involving Iran, Israel and other Middle East countries (not to mention North Korea or Taiwan), the Republicans would lose their reputation as the “party of national security”, just as the British Tories lost their reputation as the party of economic competence in 1992. The damage to the Republicans’ national security reputation would be even greater if America were hit by a serious terrorist attack or if withdrawal from Iraq turned into a disorderly Vietnam-style humiliation.
On the economic front, the Republicans risk disgrace if they raise taxes or if, as is much more likely in my view, America suffers a financial and inflationary crisis because of its failure to bring the federal budget back under control.
But even if the Bush Administration manages to avoid any such disasters, the analogy with Britain in the early 1990s suggests that the Democrats should be grateful to stay out of the White House for the next four years. The electorate’s decision to let Mr Bush clear up his own messes does not just threaten the incumbent with poetic justice; more importantly it offers a reprieve from a potential death sentence on the Democrats. If a newly-elected President Kerry were to suffer a terrorist attack or a humiliation in Iraq or some kind of fiscal crisis, the political backlash against the Democrats would be far worse than the damage faced in similar circumstances by Mr Bush.
For as hard as Mr Kerry would try to blame the Bush legacy for any such disasters, the public would see them as evidence that the Democrats as a party are weak on terrorism, prone to defeat in military confrontations and ideologically committed to higher tax. It is again worth imagining the public reaction in Britain if it had been the economic policies of Mr Kinnock, instead of Mr Major, that were blown away by the markets six months after the election of 1992.
In sum, the next four years could be a good time for the Democrats to let right-wing Republicans take their policies to their logical conclusion and beyond. Just as Mr Major took Thatcherism beyond its logical conclusions with policies such as rail privatisation and the bizarre moralising of “back to basics”, the Republicans could overreach themselves not only in economics and foreign policy but also in social and environmental matters and on the membership of the Supreme Court.
Saturday night Tery and I were channel-surfing and I stopped on something called "Gay Republicans." This quickly engrossed us as it looked at the reactions of four Log Cabin members in the course of the 2004 campaign trail. Apparently all had been right with the party until Georgie started all his Constitutional Amendment nonsense. This tore the group in two, as they actually felt shocked and betrayed that he could do this to them after all their support. Didn't Bush care about their 12,000 votes? They had to decide if they were Republicans that happened to be gay or gays that happened to be Republican. So the foursome being documented illustrated the two viewpoints; on the sensible side was a lesbian who had had a commitment ceremony with her girlfriend and a dashing, Rupert Everett-type guy who used to be some big-shot politician in Arizona until his orientation ruined his career. On the side of insanity was a prissy John Waters-type Palm Beach man who I wanted to kick in the teeth, and a Jim Jay Bullock-type asshole who I wanted to kick even harder in the teeth.
The highlights of the show: John Waters describing with great contempt the fact that Jimmy Carter wore sweaters in the Oval Office, and Clinton wore a T-shirt and jeans, as signs of their disrespect for their position: "Disgraceful!" was the exact word he used. Call me pragmatic, but I value my president's effectiveness and good leadership over his fashion sense. The lesbian attending a Republican rally and actually fearing for her safety. And Rupert Everett hiding out at a Revival-type Republican rally where the whole audience wore white to represent the sanctity of marriage, while some wildly misinformed fat guy read out statistics as ludicrous as lesbian partnerships having the highest percentage of domestic violence in the country (Tery leaned over and slapped my leg hard at this point. Then cowered in case I decided to retaliate. Which naturally I did).
But by far the most hateful was Jim Jay Bullock. He proudly considered himself a Republican first and a gay man second or even third. He smugly believed that other gays invited attacks by announcing that they were gay, whereas he could walk into a room and no one would know that he was. Evidently he has no mirrors in his house on top of being totally deaf, because he had a definite lisp and was undoubtedly on the effeminate end of the spectrum. I think the only thing that would cast any doubt at all on his orientation would be the big old Bush/Cheney T-shirt he always wore. He also had the nerve to tell other gays that Bush wasn't saying they couldn't get married, they just couldn't get married to a member of their own gender. He saw absolutely no irony in this statement either. The best part was when he went door to door campaigning for Bush (this was after the Log Cabin party decided to endorse Kerry, so he was flying solo) and got in an argument with a guy over Iraq. The guy's argument was factual, such as the fact that we decided to attack a country that had no large-scale weapons program and no plans to attack us. Jim Jay's only rebuttal (no pun intended) was that he was pulling his "facts" out of his ass, and proceeded to mime pulling things out of his own butt and calling them facts (Tery wanted me to make an icon of it). Demonstrating not only that Kerry supporters are much better informed about the reality of things, but that they are a hell of a lot more mature than Bush supporters as well.
This whole thing led to a discussion between Tery and I. I admit, I honestly didn't know what the political difference is between Dems and Republicans, except that Republicans are evil and the obvious class divide. She explained that Republicans believe in minimal government intervention, minimal taxes, and have a money-oriented "I've got mine" outlook. She said that Alex Keaton on "Family Ties" illustrated the quintessential Republican....humanitarian, but profit-oriented. She said this new party is not Republican as established originally with the heavy religious slant. Which was my next question. They believe in government staying out of our private lives, but it's okay for it to decide who can get married and that a woman can't get an abortion. And they believe in every man for himself, which goes against most religious principles that I grew up with. Neither of us can figure out how its members can reconcile these enormous dichotomies in belief systems, although it might explain why they are so uptight. I also would like to know when the moral, upright citizens who call themselves Republicans started believing that Democrats (or I should say liberals) were hedonistic, orgiastic demonspawn, or how churchgoing folk can think peaceloving, anti-war tendencies are a bad thing. I was raised in a Republican household with good moral values. I turned out bisexual but still consider myself a good person with compassion for my fellow man (though some days this is harder to manage than others) and a strong live-and-let-live attitude. I'd like to think that deep down inside, we really aren't that different from each other in terms of what we want out of life. Making me, I suppose, extremely naive and idealistic.
All this was rolling around in my brain when I went to work yesterday morning, the gaping schism between Republican and religious ideology, and of course the election. I listened to the best of Randi Rhodes on Air America, where she talked to a computer guy who asserted how incredibly simple it would be to program the voting machines to do whatever you wanted them to. Rather than firing me up like this talk normally does, I instead felt an incredible weight of depression on my shoulders. I'm not one to get depressed easily...my opinion is there is no sense getting upset over something you have no control over. But that was precisely what was doing it, the feeling of helplessness that dishonest, unjust shit was going down and there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about it. I spent the entire morning in a deep, deep funk that wasn't helped by talking to my Republican boss who laughed when I said the election was unfair. He said the exit polls were taken in only Democratic areas, explaining how skewed they were. I doubted this was true, but hated him all the same. I shouldn't though....I think he is Republican in the true sense of the word, voting only to keep his taxes down. He doesn't care about all the religious malarky. He did believe all the voting booths should go electronic. I have no doubt I would feel the same way if it meant my candidate won every time. I kept telling myself, and I honestly believe this, that I could handle Bush winning if I believed it was an honest, fair win. But my overdeveloped sense of justice simply cannot come to terms with the margin of error that occurred in this election. I was depressed not because of Bush, but at the thought that the entire democratic process was tainted and untrustworthy. Sure, I'll keep voting, but never again with such a foolish sense of optimism, and this saddened me more than I could bear. I'd like to see a focus in the next four years not so much on coming up with a viable Dem presidential candidate as on voting reform and fixing the margin of error. I don't know what it is estimated at, but 2-3% error is no longer acceptable when that's what the winner wins by.
So I went to see "The Incredibles" after work, despite being dog-tired. I really felt a desperate need to laugh. And I did, though not as much as I had hoped. The movie seemed more action-oriented rather than humor. Maybe I'll watch it again when I'm not in such a bad state of mind.
As of now, I am going to (try to) get over it and move on.
November 04, 2004
Kerry should be glad he lost
ANATOLE KALETSKY
FOR THOSE of us who were disappointed, and even horrified, by George W. Bush’s return to power there was one consolation in yesterday’s result. On the contrary, the previously unmentionable hope for the supporters of liberal politics in America, is that Senator Kerry has done the Democratic Party a favour of immense, historic proportions by losing to Mr Bush. In military history, it is a commonplace that there are certain battles worth losing rather than winning - and if ever this were true in politics, then the 2004 US election would be a case in point.
To see what I mean, step away from America for a moment and consider the most successful left-of-centre party in the modern world: Britain’s “new” Labour Party. Now ask yourself what electoral event laid the foundation for Labour’s success. This would be the 1992 election, in which a manifestly incompetent Tory Government was unexpectedly and undeservedly returned to power.
If Neil Kinnock instead of John Major had won the 1992 election, the devaluation of Black Wednesday would have occurred even sooner. The monetary crisis which undermined the Tories’ long-established reputation for economic competence would have been blamed on Labour’s mismanagement. Black Wednesday (or Monday or Tuesday) would almost certainly have brought down the Kinnock Government and would unquestionably have ended Labour’s hopes of ever again becoming a serious party of government. Indeed, as a very minor contributor to the outcome of the 1992 election through my articles unravelling Labour’s absurd tax plans, I have often been thanked by friends in the party for inadvertently helping them to avoid the terrible fate awaiting them if they had gained power.
So was 2004 a good election to lose, just like 1992 in Britain? Will the Democrats one day thank John Kerry for losing, just as Labour is grateful to Mr Kinnock? This seems distinctly possible, given the challenges now facing America, especially in geopolitics and macroeconomics. Iraq is a mess which Mr Bush created and it is surely fitting that he should be the one forced to clean it up. The same is true of ballooning government deficits, escalating oil prices and the small but growing, threat of a crisis in the US balance of payments leading to an international run on the dollar.
Extricating American forces from Iraq will be extremely difficult for Mr Bush, especially if he tries to maintain significant control over its foreign policies and its energy resources. Restoring stability to Iraq, without handing the country over to an overtly anti-Western or theocratic regime will become even harder if Mr Bush decides to pick a fight with Iran over nuclear proliferation - or, even worse, if he backs Israel in a “pre-emptive” military attack. To control America’s public finances will be equally difficult, given that the President and his party are now totally committed to ever-lower taxes, ever-more aggressive military postures and ever-more generous corporate subsidies.
It is quite likely, therefore, that in the next year or two President Bush could face a military or economic crisis (or both) - and, crucially, that such a crisis would be analogous to Black Wednesday in its political effects. If Mr Bush suffered a serious military setback, either in Iraq or in a broader confrontation involving Iran, Israel and other Middle East countries (not to mention North Korea or Taiwan), the Republicans would lose their reputation as the “party of national security”, just as the British Tories lost their reputation as the party of economic competence in 1992. The damage to the Republicans’ national security reputation would be even greater if America were hit by a serious terrorist attack or if withdrawal from Iraq turned into a disorderly Vietnam-style humiliation.
On the economic front, the Republicans risk disgrace if they raise taxes or if, as is much more likely in my view, America suffers a financial and inflationary crisis because of its failure to bring the federal budget back under control.
But even if the Bush Administration manages to avoid any such disasters, the analogy with Britain in the early 1990s suggests that the Democrats should be grateful to stay out of the White House for the next four years. The electorate’s decision to let Mr Bush clear up his own messes does not just threaten the incumbent with poetic justice; more importantly it offers a reprieve from a potential death sentence on the Democrats. If a newly-elected President Kerry were to suffer a terrorist attack or a humiliation in Iraq or some kind of fiscal crisis, the political backlash against the Democrats would be far worse than the damage faced in similar circumstances by Mr Bush.
For as hard as Mr Kerry would try to blame the Bush legacy for any such disasters, the public would see them as evidence that the Democrats as a party are weak on terrorism, prone to defeat in military confrontations and ideologically committed to higher tax. It is again worth imagining the public reaction in Britain if it had been the economic policies of Mr Kinnock, instead of Mr Major, that were blown away by the markets six months after the election of 1992.
In sum, the next four years could be a good time for the Democrats to let right-wing Republicans take their policies to their logical conclusion and beyond. Just as Mr Major took Thatcherism beyond its logical conclusions with policies such as rail privatisation and the bizarre moralising of “back to basics”, the Republicans could overreach themselves not only in economics and foreign policy but also in social and environmental matters and on the membership of the Supreme Court.