Post-Election

First off, thanks for the comments. Here is a link sent by JR that seems to concur with my earlier election post.

Note he mentioned that Edwards "gets" the Red voters better than most democrats...maybe he should have been our candidate. Hmmmm. Kerry was picked by high priced consultants as the man to defeat Bush. Those people are the problem with the party.

At school today, a sad tone ran throughout the classroom, teachers and students alike extremely disappointed with the election results. I had a debate with friend who argued the backwardsness of people in the red states. He characterized them as racist bigots, pro-life religious fanatics. Many dems feel the same way. I agreed with him that Bush's domestic policy is pretty scary. I hate to see some uber conservatives added to the court. But I spoke up and said I think Bush's foreign policy, although far from perfect, is on the right track. He vehemently disagreed.

He started talking violence, jokingly (I think), how we need a civil war, how someone ought to assassinate Bush. Since last night I've heard two semi-threats on Bush's life (nothing worthy of reporting to the FBI), but joking threats nonetheless. It confirms my suspicion that the left is becoming horribly intolerant and undemocratic.

I asked him, do you think Arabs are backwards? He stuttered and said "certainly not all of them." Here we have a position that some liberals actually take quite seriously, that the red states in our country are more "backwards" than Muslim Arab states - these are of course states that kidnap and torture citizens who disagree with the govnerment or commit crimes (Syria/Saudi Arabia), or goverments who stand by as families stone women caught holding hands with non-husbands (Pakistan/Afghanistan), countries where women cannot vote or drive (Saudi Arabia), countries without a free press (nearly all), countries where athletes were tortured for not winning international games (Iraq) - we are not in a position to judge these countries or these people, or they somehow don't affect us...

There's all this talk about liberals moving out of the country, they can't stand to be represented by Bush. What even happened to being a democrat (small d)? Anyone who cannot accept the election of someone other than their own candidate ought to seriously check their political values. If you want a vanguard of moral philosophers to run the country...Earl Warren and John Rawls making our laws...maybe we'd be better off, but I somehow doubt it.

Whatever. I watched a couple of docs on TV the other day. One was the War Room, a great doc about the Clinton '92 campaign. I doubt if our country will ever, in my lifetime, be as well off as we were between 92-2000. I watched part of this other doc about soldiers by David O Russell, with horrible production value. One thing that stuck out were two Iraqi's talking about living under Saddam. One of them had been tortured. He said to all the people who are against the Iraqi war, that he challenged them to live just one month under Saddam in Iraq and he guaranteed, they would feel differently. I tend to believe him. I've heard similar accounts from people on the radio, etc, about living in Baathist places, Iraq and Syria...the emotion that they exude when talking about the horror of the Baathist state, disappearances, violence, torture...we cannot fathom it. So whatever one feels about Iraq or the war or whatever, we all have to recognize that doing nothing about these states where these atrocities occurr is NOT a morally neutral position.