The Travails of the Astounding!

Wednesday, November 3rd was surely a blow to us all. I felt shock, then awe.....then betrayal, then an intense disorientation. Something close to ice-cream head and a bad mushroom trip. Y'know the kind where everything feels sickeningly cyclical. Like the awful loop will never end?? Was it possible that not 8 hours after Edwards had told us they were going to fight thins thing till the end that Kerry was bowing down like a nervously obedient choir boy before Sunday Mass? Shit, that was a Gore moment if I've ever seen one. And unfortunately for us all Ive seen TWO now.
"What do we want?
JUSTICE!!
When do we want it?!
Awwww, forget it. C'mon Teresea, let's go home, I'm due for a spankin."

Yes, it was by and large a sensation of most egregious perfidy. We were evidently betrayed by the youth vote, betrayed by the conservatives who said they wouldn't vote for Bush.... betrayed by God who had once hinted at something called justice. I thought the voting populace would be on the same relative page. And hell even if we weren't on the same page we were at LEAST reading the same book, and it sure as hell it wasn't My Pet fucking Goat. We might not have agreed on where to take this country, but we knew that Bush wasn't making anyone happy except the far Christian Right, and the money men. Now, I knew it was foolhardy to call for a landslide, but I thought for sure the drums had sounded and liberals were voting in droves. Things were going to change, damnit! The time for a democratic revolution was long overdue!

Weren't we all in for a surprise. Or were we? Perhaps that shock we felt as the liberal (and inherently more well informed) half of America was a bit premature.While it’s extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party’s registration in any voting jurisdiction – because of non-voters – Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number. In Florida, George Bush received 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans.

NOTE: Four years ago when Republicans thought he would be the middle of the road, fiscally conservative, uniting not dividing candidate Bush got 85% of registered Republicans.

Let's of course not forget that in 6 of the major swing states, exit polls showed Kerry ahead by considerable margins.
This from Republican pollster Dick Morris: " To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible." He goes on to suggest that the only possible explanation is a conspiracy by the 'Liberal media' to influence voters, however, when one looks at the larger picture, something else seems to develop. A pattern of skullduggery and fraud. Much like that of 2000.Then of course let's not forget Diebold, whose CEO brazenly swore in August to 'deliver Ohio to the Presidents doorstep'. Just today, Computer Science Professor Avi Rubin of John Hopkins University reports that an encryption key used in ALL electronic Diebold voting machines was hacked 7 years ago. " The implication is that by hacking one machine you could have access to all Diebold machines." Scary. So even if Walden O'Dell wasn't fixing the election himself, it is now apparent that ANYONE could have done just that.

My point is folks, were clearly losing this political war, but maybe the Presidential battle wasn't really lost. Kerry, frustratingly, seems all too willing to let lie the sleeping dogs of public outrage. We could sure use some of that mythic Dean rage right about now. YAAAAOW!Pruit Igoe from the album "Koyaanisqatsi" by Philip Glass