As part of my attempt to grasp the hugeness of the awesomeness of Tuesday, I'm just going to set out here a few questions that have been much on my mind since 2000 which now more or less have answers.
Q: Will one party control all three branches of government forever?The answer would appear to be no.
In and of itself, no matter what happens next, this is a huge deal for me. There is no doubt in my mind that if it had been possible, George W. and his cohorts would have engineered permanent one-party rule just the way they engineered an enviornment in which the minority party was completely disenfranchised and powerless. What was a doubt in my mind going into this election was whether they would be able to do it. They were not. Halle fuckin lujah.
Q: Will electronic voting be the death of our democracy?Answer: Perhaps, but not at this time.
Though Diebold did not in fact deliver Ohio to Bush this year, I still don't think that it will ever make any sense to conduct an election which does not leave a permanent verifiable paper trail. Nor do I think it makes any sense to continue using the companies that make these voting machines, since from what I can tell they are all less reliable than the average Dell laptop (and that's sayin' summat). If you must use electronic technology to speed up the process, do it with optical scanners. That way, if something breaks down, it doesn't slow down the voting process and it doesn't destroy the evidence. At any rate, we've got two years to do something about e-voting and now we are actually in a better position to make the argument, because it is no longer framable as a partisan issue.
Q: Can we have a fair and honest election in this country?Answer: Not really, but this one was close enough for government work.
If I were in charge right now, the absolute first thing I would do would be get investigators on the trail of every one of the incidents of voter suppression, voter intimidation, and voter fraud that came up during this election cycle. It is absolutely unconscionable that people can still get away with the shit the Allen campaign was pulling in Virginia, for instance, and robo-call harassment should not be tolerated either. Let alone all the reports of people destroying or not turning in voter registration forms with the "wrong" party affiliation. People need to be held accountable for that; and they need to do prison time. "Fines" my ass. The Civil War ended 141 years ago, it's about fucking time that we got serious about ending the intimidation and disenfranchisement of African-American voters.
Q: Is Karl Rove a terrfiyingly omnipotent genius?Answer: No, he is a ruthless, cunning political hack with just enough brains to do evil, and the blight he has inflicted on this country has just about run its course.
I've always said this: Karl Rove's only real talent, apart from being willing to do anything no matter how despicable, is his ability to manipulate perception and thus persuade people to believe what they see on TV instead of their lying eyes. As I have
said many a
time on this very
site, the big problem for Rove has always been that George W. Bush's rule has been SO disastrous, and reality has become SO bad, that most people can no longer ignore reality no matter how much they want to. You cannot persuade people that their children are alive if they are dead, or at home if they are in Iraq. You cannot persuade people that gas is cheap when it is expensive, or that the economy is booming when they are unemployed. You cannot persuade people that you are winning a war when you are losing it so badly that you can't even stage a convincing victory celebration. And you cannot persuade people that your secretary of defense knows what the fuck he's doing when he has spent three years turning a definitive military victory into a gigantic bloody disaster.
I think that those of you on DU who said this--and I remember people saying at the time--are right: it was when they put up that
Mission Accomplished banner that this administration jumped the shark. That was supposed to be the money shot for the 2004 election cycle. By 2004, it was clear that they'd wasted the money; they couldn't use the shot, it would only remind everyone of how badly the occupation had been handled. By 2006, not only were they not flaunting that image, they were actually trying to send it
down the memory hole.The story of "Mission Accomplished" is the story of Rove's downfall. Stick a fork in him. He is DONE.
Q: Was making Howard Dean the head of the Democratic National Commitee a good idea?Answer: Yes.
That seems obvious now; but let me just briefly take us back in time to February 2005, when Dean was elected DNC chair and everyone was freaking out. This is part of a post I put up in the GD forum here about why the fact that Dean was frightening the "establishment Democrats" was a GOOD thing:
Whatever you think about the efficacy of what Dean's doing, nobody can deny that it's different. The reason he's DNC chairman in the first place is that the grassroots party workers realized that what the leadership did during the 2004 election cycle didn't work. So Dean is doing something different. May work, may not, but at least it's not the same shit they were doing in 2004.
Which means:
1) Of course people who were the leadership in 2004 think what he's doing is crazy. That's because it's the opposite of what they would do. That's not news, it's inevitable.
2) If what Dean is doing actually works...then it will mean that what the "establishment Democrats" were doing before was wrong, and that it probably cost us the election. Nobody wants to be convicted of that in front of the party and the media.
OF COURSE the people who thought the 2004 strategy made sense think that Dean's doesn't. That's got nothing to do with Dean; it's to do with their own sense of themselves and the amount they have invested in doing things their way. And really, you can't blame them for standing up for the way they've always done it, because they must believe it's the right way or they wouldn't keep doing it.
BUT...let me just say that if the "establishment Democrats" could get the fucking job done, then John Kerry would be president right now. And he's not. So SOMETHING has got to be done differently.
Dean is doing it his way and who knows, maybe it will work. Maybe it won't, but at least someone will have EXPERIMENTED. We talk about how the Republican leadership just keeps making the same bullshit mistakes about Iraq, etc., and can't adjust even though what they're doing never seems to work. Well, our party leadership has been in the same kind of a rut, and something's got to get them out of it.
We're so afraid of being attacked in the media that we're afraid to try out new things. Look, folks, we will ALWAYS be attacked in the media. That's just the way it is now. It drives me crazy to see people talking about how if we just do this or that then the media will see how lovable we are and start reporting accordingly. No. We are never going to get the same kind of coverage the Republican Party gets from the mainstream media because we are not currently cracking the whip on the naked backs of their corporate masters. Dean knows, I hope anyway, that he is working with a media machine that is permanently set in "attack" mode, and figures, well, if they're gonna attack us, it may as well be for something good...
Instead of wailing about how people are saying mean things about us in public because of him, why don't we just watch and see whether this works or not. It's too early to tell.
What we were already doing in 2004 did not work for us. There will have to be a change.And lo, there was a change. And lo, it was frickin' AWESOME.
Q: Is now the time when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars and peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars?Answer: No, of course not. If we want peace we still have to work for it. These people are Democrats but they're still politicians. Accept that and work with it.
Yee ha,
The Plaid Adder
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