Many voters will go back to their home fires, confident they have done their jobs for the next four years. Fewer will come back out in two years for the mid-terms. For some of us this is just the beginning of a long, hard road of responsibility. Our mandate comes from an apparently inchoate but promising movement of American patriots resisting the big corporate-media-government-religion merger in progress to hijack democracy for the rich, taking the middle class and poor, yes even “evangelical” voters, for fools.
Don’t count on the media to be on the watch to safeguard us. Be responsible, be wary, crank up the pressure of accountability.
From John Dufresne’s heads up, in his Nov 3 blog:
“Tom (not me) sends this along, suggests listening out of ear shot of the kids. Jon Stewart on the media.”
http://home.cfl.rr.com/jdha/stuff/ecmcotw/JonStewart_WTFH.mp3
As Americans, as Jews, Christians, agnostics, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, Native Americans, free-people-all, our work is cut out for us. The U.S. Constitution and true democracy are on the table and the doctors (quacks) are in.
It won’t be enough to let our one-party government lie. We can’t afford to watch them trip and fell us into more “disastrous success,” wait four years for the duped to come around. We have to help our country all we can and help it now.
More clever . . .
Maureen Dowd
“The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.
“W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.
“Mr. Bush, whose administration drummed up fake evidence to trick us into war with Iraq, sticking our troops in an immoral position with no exit strategy, won on "moral issues."
“The president says he's "humbled" and wants to reach out to the whole country. What humbug. The Bushes are always gracious until they don't get their way. If W. didn't reach out after the last election, which he barely grabbed, why would he reach out now that he has what Dick Cheney calls a ‘broad, nationwide victory’?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/opinion/04wills.html?th
. . . and smarter than me.
Garry Wills
“The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/opinion/04wills.html?th
New York attacked again
Thanks to Jon Jaspan.
Makes you want to move to an “island off the coast of Europe,” New York City.
Three of four New York City voters cast ballots for Sen. John Kerry. They seem to know who attacked them on 9/11/04. And they seem to know how Karl GWB Rove hijacked over 3,000 of their dead for a movement intent on turning America into the kingdom of their god, the almighty dollar.
“Some New Yorkers, like Meredith Hackett, a 25-year-old barmaid in Brooklyn, said they didn't even know any people who had voted for President Bush. (In both Manhattan and the Bronx, Mr. Bush received 16.7 percent of the vote.) Others spoke of a feeling of isolation from their fellow Americans, a sense that perhaps Middle America doesn't care as much about New York and its animating concerns as it seemed to in the weeks immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center.”
Read what the people on the streets where this nightmare started have to say:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/nyregion/04york.html?pagewanted=1
