Mandate or massive fraud?

The Democrats, along with the rest of the world, are stunned by the defeat. No one anticipated that the hatred of gays and abortion was so strong as to override everything else: the illegal and immoral war, the obscene national debt, unemployment, the rape of the environment, the lies and cover-ups, the failure to accept any responsibility for the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ENORMITY of the crime that has been committed. And now we are going to have more of the same.

How could 59 million people be so stupid the Europeans ask? How, indeed? It is hard to conceive of fraud on such a massive scale but there are many that believe it was fraudulent, and perhaps it was. Certainly our election rules are so confused and absurd that virtually anything is possible. Of course the Republicans will resist making any meaningful changes as they have repeatedly benefitted from the confusion. Personally, I am weary of the election and already even more weary of the postmortems. I don’t want to hear any more of “next time.” There may not even be a next time, now that the fascists have established themselves so completely in the corridors of power.

Even so we must not give in to hopelessness, the siren song of suicide. We can always hope that perhaps some of the scandals that have been covered up for so long will finally catch up with this band of liars and criminals. Whatever happened to the Plame case? Whatever happened to the legal question of Cheney’s secret energy meetings that was supposed to go back to the courts? Whatever happened to the complete investigation of 9-11? Whatever happened to the investigation of the torture scandal?

Perhaps those Evangelical Christians who voted against gay marriage and abortion may wake up to what else they seem to have voted for – never ending war, a draft, the destruction of social security and medicare, further pillaging of the environment, more rip-offs by the pharmaceutical industry, etc., etc. Apparently, in the United States, victory goes to the simple minded, at least in the short run. But, of course we need not worry about the long run, the Rapture will be upon us soon.