Apres moi, le deluge. Where things go from here.

Wat_Tyler

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Wed Nov-03-04 11:48 AM
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Apres moi, le deluge. Where things go from here.

Apres moi, le deluge.

It’s over. The cabal will occupy the White House for the next four years. For better or for worse, and you can imagine which side of that old cliché I currently favour, we are going to see the awful, smug, smirking face of George W Bush bludgeoning the lexicon at press conferences, humiliating himself and America in from of world leaders and generally wrecking all that is worthwhile for a good, long time to come.
And it will seem like a long time. It will seem like eons.
That’s the real taste of defeat. Not your own wounds, but your enemy’s lack of them.
Did I think John Kerry would be President-Elect this morning? Yes. Yes, I did. I bought the scenario. I saw millions of over-pierced, black-clad collegiates storming the polling stations and shocking the pollsters, surly harbingers of a new era of hope and reason. I believed. I laughed at the little voice at the back of my head mangling James Carville’s maxim ‘a candidate who relies upon people who don’t vote to get elected is a loser’. I had faith. Surely America would reject this conspiracy of weasels that had somehow slithered onto Pennsylvania Avenue?
Boy, was I wrong.
What was the cold moment of realization for you? For me it was around 9.30 MST. That’s when I realized that what I was witnessing was yet another election kick-in-the-teeth. At that moment, I exercised all the wisdom I’d learned from previous election nights; to wit, I turned the TV off and went to bed.
I’m resilient. I’m basically an optimist. I pride myself on my ability to take any blow my opponent offers and remain upright. Still, when presented with the concept of breakfast this morning, the mind was willing but the flesh was not.
So, what can we expect now, on this second voyage of the Ship of Fools? Another futile war, destabilizing an entire region? Yet more tax cuts for the rich, shifting the burden of all that debt onto the people who can least afford it? The dreaded inevitability of the draft? I can imagine, all too well, with these disturbing possibilities hanging in the air like a leaden pall that many people will choose to disengage, withdraw or leave. That may well be a reasonable option.
For those who remain to continue the fight, now is the time to bear witness.
This regime will bring disaster upon itself. That’s not a prediction. That’s reality. It is already happening. The people who voted for Bush / Cheney may not be fools, but they are desperately blinkered. And they are about to have a very rude awakening.
We’ve seen the polls. They believe the world respects Bush. They do not understand how much this misadministration has poisoned America’s international relations. They believe the Bush tax cut will eventually benefit them. They do not realize how much damage it has done to the national economy. They believe, despite all reports to the contrary, that the war in Iraq can be won.
These are the people I pity. They are about to be ripped from their ignorance by the events to come. They are about to discover the cold, harsh reality of a Bush second term.
I’ll leave you with a more positive thought, as much as any thought can be positive today. I recognize the feeling I have today. I had it before, in 1992. Not in November, but in April.
I was living in Scotland. All the polls for the General Election pointed to a small Labour win, or at the worst, a minority administration. All the polls were wrong. The Conservatives won a small majority. All of our fury, all our rage meant precisely nothing. Somehow, John Major had survived. We were resigned to the worst, feeling that we could never remove these thieves from office.
However, the Tories learned nothing from their close win, and they did nothing to unite people. They squandered all opportunities to bring the nation together. They misgoverned. They lied, they cheated, and they stole. And at the next election, they were crushed. Crushed into the dirt.
My father-in-law knows that feeling. He had it in 1988, when Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives bludgeoned their way to a second term in Ottawa, despite every effort of the other parties. Mulroney’s party never learned. They also did not unite. They continued on their path, heedless of all advice. In the 1993 General Election, they were reduced from over 160 seats in parliament to two seats. Yes, two.