Rolling Back Women's Rights
Published: November 23, 2004
Dispensing with legislative niceties like holding hearings or full and open debate, President Bush and the Republican Congress have used the cover of a must-pass spending bill to mount a disgraceful sneak attack on women's health and freedom.
Tucked into the $388 billion budget measure just approved by the House and Senate is a sweeping provision that has nothing to do with the task Congress had at hand - providing money for the government. In essence, it tells health care companies, hospitals and insurance companies they are free to ignore Roe v. Wade and state and local laws and regulations currently on the books to make certain that women's access to reproductive health services includes access to abortion.
It remains to be seen exactly how the measure will work in practice. But the intention, plainly, is to curtail further already dwindling access to abortion and even to counseling that mentions abortion as a legal option. It denies federal financing to government agencies that "discriminate" against health care providers who choose for any reason to disregard state mandates to offer abortion-related services. This represents a vast expansion of the "conscience protection" that federal law currently gives to individual doctors who do not want to undergo abortion training.
The affront to women's rights, moreover, should not obscure the serious threat to the First Amendment involved in enacting what is likely to evolve into a domestic "gag rule" as, one by one, health care providers order doctors they employ not to provide patients with information about the abortion option. This echoes the way Mr. Bush reimposed a blanket Reagan-era gag rule for providers of reproductive health services abroad on his first full day in office back in 2001.
Unfortunately, vocal opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republican moderates was not enough to stop the pernicious assault on the rights of millions of women from becoming law in the rush to pass the spending bill. At least Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, won a promise from the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, to permit a direct vote on a bill repealing this measure not long into the new Congressional session. In the meantime, Americans, and American women in particular, are officially on notice that post-election, the Republican war on reproductive rights has entered an ominous new phase.
Anti-Reproductive Rights Legislators Seek to Suspend Availability of Mifepristone
Despite years of scientific study which repeatedly proved mifepristone to be safe and effect for medical abortion, Republican Congressman and Senator-elect Jim DeMint of South Carolina is planning on reintroducing a bill to suspend the sale of Mifepristone and allow the General Accounting Office (GAO) to investigate the process the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used to approve the drug.
Rep. DeMint and the bill’s co-sponsors, Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS), have shown interested in renewing the effort to pass this bill after the FDA’s announcement that mifepristone’s label will be changed to acknowledge that there are risks associated with any abortion, and that physicians prescribing the drug should instruct their patients to contact them if they experience excessive bleeding or bacterial infection. The FDA maintains that these adverse affects could occur “following any termination of pregnancy,” including miscarriage, surgical abortion, or medical abortion, the San Francisco Gate reports. If passed, the GAO would conduct an independent review of the FDA’s approval process, according to Kaisernetwork.org.
“There is no scientific or safety reason to suspend sale of mifepristone,” said Dr. Beth Jordan, Medical Director of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “While it’s important that patients and providers know well the risks, even the exceedingly rare risks, associated with a drug, it’s curious that these same legislators are not trying to get the safety of penicillin, aspirin, various anti-histamines or especially Viagra reviewed and the product suspended given the astronomically higher associations with complications these drugs have over mifepristone. Clearly, this is a politically motivated agenda.”
“It’s an unequivocal yes that we will reintroduce the bill,” Lisa Wright, press secretary to Rep. Bartlett told the Washington Times. The bill, known as the RU-486 Suspension and Review Act, was originally introduced after the death of a California woman who had taken mifepristone. Dr. Steven Galson, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, has said that he does not think that mifepristone was related to the infection that killed the woman, the Washington Times reports.
Mifepristone has been taken by roughly 360,000 women in the United States since it was approved by the FDA in 2000. According to the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, mifepristone is safer than taking a pregnancy to full term.
Last night on the show, Rory was in her dorm room talking on the phone to her mom and in the back ground, hanging on her wall was the Planned Parenthood Poster STOP THE WAR ON CHOICE. They showed it for quite a long time. Way to Go Gilmore’s!
Meet the new Republican senators. Five of them hope to make your worst nightmares come true.
BY DAN KENNEDY
________________________________________
WHEN THE NEW Senate storms Capitol Hill early next year, the narrow Republican majority of the past two years will disappear, to be replaced by a much wider Republican majority. Currently, the Senate comprises 51 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and an independent — Jim Jeffords, of Vermont, a former Republican who usually votes with the Democrats. Because of last week’s election, the Senate will soon seat 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and Jeffords.
Who are these people? Unlike the House, where Republican members lead lives of near-anonymous fealty dictated by Speaker Dennis Hastert and majority leader Tom DeLay, senators matter as individuals — not as just a voting bloc. There are moderate Republican senators, such as Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, of Maine; Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island; and Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania — who nearly got his head handed to him last week for daring to suggest that anti-choice judges might not pass muster. There are religious conservatives, such as Sam Brownback, of Kansas, and Orrin Hatch, of Utah. And there is Jim Bunning, of Kentucky, who’s in a class by himself: last week he was re-elected despite widespread reports that he has Alzheimer’s disease, and even though two of his supporters had sneeringly suggested that his Democratic opponent was gay.
Seven new Republican senators were elected last week. Two are unremarkable. Mel Martinez, of Florida, was George W. Bush’s first secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Despite a poor record on the environment, Martinez deserves some thanks from Democrats: he and the White House intimidated Congresswoman Katherine Harris (yes, that Katherine Harris) into not running for the Senate this year. In Georgia, Republican congressman Johnny Isakson will succeed Democratic senator Zell Miller, who’s retiring. Isakson — a moderate who’s pro-choice (except when he isn’t) — may well be more a voice of reason than Miller has been. That said, Isakson’s outburst earlier this year that Bush is "the best president the United States has ever had" was certainly embarrassing, if not nearly as embarrassing as Miller’s red-faced rant at the Republican National Convention.
What remain are five genuine specimens of right-wing Republicanism. Keep an eye on these guys. They’re dangerous.
1) Tom Coburn: Keeping us safe from condoms and the ‘gay agenda’
Fresh from helping to save Oklahoma from the scourge of teenage lesbianism, Tom Coburn arrives in Washington with perhaps the most bizarre set of right-wing credentials of anyone in the Republican Class of 2004. A former three-term congressman who was swept into office 10 years ago on the coattails of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, Coburn — who succeeds retiring Republican senator Don Nickles — is an obstetrician possessed of an obsessive fascination with other people’s sexuality.
In 2003, George W. Bush named Coburn to co-chair the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS. Coburn’s very first act was to speak out against the one preventative behavior (other than abstinence) that actually works. "I will challenge the national focus on condom use to prevent the spread of HIV," he said upon his appointment. Earlier, as a congressman, he had sought to force condom manufacturers to label their products as "ineffective" in slowing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
But that doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of Coburn’s so-called thinking. In his successful Senate campaign against Democratic congressman Brad Carson, Coburn called for the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions. That certainly gives new meaning to the term "pro-life." As a physician, Coburn himself performed abortions, although he says it was always to save the life of the woman. Tell it to the judge, Doc. Nor is that the only dissonant note from his career in medicine: Coburn was once accused of having sterilized a young woman without her permission. He says she had asked him to perform the surgery, though he conceded that he had lacked the written authorization that the law required.
In the 1990s Coburn criticized NBC for broadcasting Schindler’s List, the Oscar-winning film about the Holocaust, charging that it would encourage "irresponsible sexual behavior." That particular outburst was so odd that even one of his ostensible allies, self-appointed morals czar Bill Bennett, felt compelled to label Coburn’s remarks as "unfortunate and foolish." Coburn is also an outspoken opponent of the "gay agenda" in general and same-sex marriage in particular; as a member of Congress, he refused to allow the city of Washington to fund its program for domestic-partnership benefits.
Earlier this year, Coburn said that lesbianism is "so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl [at a time] go to the bathroom." Coburn’s source: a campaign worker. He later said his remarks had been taken "out of context," whatever that was supposed to mean. His spokesman gamely insisted that Coburn was worried that "our kids are getting mixed messages about sexuality." Mixed-up, rather, if they’ve been listening to Coburn.
Sources: Salon, September 13, 2004; AlterNet, March 28 and October 13, 2004; the Associated Press, October 12, 2004.
2) Jim DeMint: ‘The Family’ values, homophobia, and tax chicanery
If Tom Coburn is #1 on our list of exotic senatorial specimens, South Carolina’s Jim DeMint might qualify as #1A rather than #2. Congressman DeMint, who defeated Democrat Inez Tenenbaum in the campaign to succeed another retiring senator, Democrat Ernest Hollings, belongs to a secretive religious organization with anti-Semitic leanings, and is a tax-cut hypocrite and an outspoken homophobe to boot.
The decades-old religious group, best known for sponsoring the annual National Prayer Breakfast, is generally known as "The Family," "The Foundation," or "The Fellowship." A magnet for high-ranking conservative Washingtonians, it is said to have supported some vicious Third World right-wing dictatorships over the years — as well as performing the occasional good deed, such as helping to foster the relationship between Menachem Begin and Anwar el-Sadat. Members also reportedly believe that God’s covenant with the Jews is broken, and that they are "the new chosen." DeMint is close enough to the inner circle to have lived, along with five other congressmen, in a million-dollar Capitol Hill apartment subsidized by "The Family."
During his campaign against Tenenbaum, though, DeMint’s membership in this little-known group was far less of an issue than his mouth was. At a debate in October, DeMint said, "If a person wants to be publicly gay, they should not be teaching in the public schools." Even a local Christian Coalition official and DeMint supporter named Bette Cox said, "I wouldn’t have said that. It’s a civil-rights issue with me. You can’t cut off someone’s civil rights." DeMint refused to apologize — although he did apologize for saying that unwed, pregnant women should not be allowed to teach either. And he declined to fire an aide who’d sent out an e-mail referring to "fags" and "dykes" (or, to be more precise, "dikes").
One of DeMint’s key issues during the campaign was getting rid of the federal income tax and replacing it with a 23 percent flat national sales tax. It’s an idea that President Bush himself has been cozying up to in recent weeks. The simplicity of such a system is undeniably appealing, but, unless carefully designed, it would be the mother of all regressive taxes, biting deeply into the poor and the middle class for everything they buy. So it’s pretty amusing to learn that DeMint is a serial tax scofflaw, repeatedly making late payments on his federal, state, and local taxes between 1987 and 2001.
If nothing else, a flat federal sales tax would prevent well-connected people from gaming the system. People such as Jim DeMint.
Sources: Harper’s magazine, March 2003; the Associated Press, April 20, 2003; the Columbia State, October 4, 2004; 365Gay.com; Salon, October 7, 2004.
3) David Vitter: Putting young men and women in harm’s way
The election of Louisiana congressman David Vitter to the Senate is an ominous sign of the problems facing the Democratic Party, especially in the South. Vitter won more than 50 percent in a multi-candidate election last Tuesday, thus avoiding a runoff next month. The retiring incumbent, John Breaux, is a Democrat who’s conservative enough to inspire teeth-gnashing among liberals. But unlike Zell Miller, who these days sounds more Republican than Dick Cheney does, Breaux is a Democratic loyalist capable of pulling off the occasional bipartisan compromise. Vitter, though, is a straight-down-the-line ultraconservative.
According to rankings published by the National Journal, a nonpartisan political magazine, Vitter is the most conservative congressman elected to the Senate this year — more conservative than 87 percent of his peers. He has a 100 percent ranking from the National Right to Life Committee; a zero percent ranking from Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay-and-lesbian civil-rights organization; a zero percent ranking from the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club; and an "A" from the National Rifle Association.
Vitter’s opposition to reproductive choice is so unwavering that he has co-sponsored legislation to require doctors who prescribe RU-486 — a drug that, if used properly, can induce a safe, nonsurgical abortion — to have both the ability and the necessary equipment to perform a surgical abortion should one become necessary. As James Ridgeway observed in the Village Voice, "That’s a little like asking a doctor who prescribes heart medicine to be able to do open-heart surgery, right there in the clinic."
Vitter was also responsible for inserting a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires public high schools to supply the names and phone numbers of all juniors and seniors to military recruiters — an invasion of privacy that could have tragic consequences for impressionable, economically stressed young men and women. (To be fair, generous opt-out provisions are included.) When asked to explain his reasoning, Vitter said the previous nondisclosure policy "demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive."
Somehow, no right-wing success story is complete without an example of grotesque hypocrisy. So let the record show that, for several years now, Vitter’s supporters have been denying the claims of a Louisiana prostitute that she’d had an 11-month affair with Vitter when he was a state legislator. For the record, we don’t care whether the story is true or not. But you’d think the Christian Coalition, which gives him a 100 percent rating, and the Family Research Council, which grades him at 92 percent, would care quite a bit.
Sources: AlterNet, September 29, 2003; the Village Voice, March 27, 2001; Louisiana Weekly, December 29, 2003; National Journal, February 27, 2004. Interest-group rankings from Project Vote Smart.
4) Richard Burr: Corporate errand boy scoops up PAC money
North Carolina has come a long way since the days of Jesse Helms. Its Research Triangle is as sophisticated and well-educated as — well, as in any blue state. So it’s only appropriate that John Edwards’s successor in the Senate stand out as being somewhat different from his fellow Republican freshmen. To be sure, Congressman Richard Burr is as anti-choice, anti-gay, and pro-gun as the rest of them. But he comes from that strain of Republicanism more interested in sucking up to corporate interests than in joining hands with the godly.
How in the tank is Burr? With $2.4 million in donations, this distant relative of Aaron Burr received more money from political-action committees than did any other Senate candidate this year. "The main people he looks out for and answers to are the large corporations. That is the most troubling thing about Richard Burr to me," says Berni Gaither, a North Carolina Democratic Party official. Democratic activist Hayes McNeil puts it more succinctly: "Burr’s record in Congress looks like a whore’s bed sheet."
The good life, Burr-style, can be awfully good indeed. In April 2002, the National Association of Broadcasters — the fine folks who brought you corporate media consolidation — flew Burr, first-class, to Las Vegas for its annual convention. The amenities included poolside drinks and a massage, although Burr reportedly reimbursed the association for his spa stay. "It’s extremely valuable for members to get that overall snapshot of their particular industry," said Burr, who at the time was vice-chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "If not, we rely on everyone to come up here and tell us how things have changed."
North Carolina remains a place apart. Burr and his unsuccessful Democratic opponent, Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, were falling over each other to take credit for a federal buyout of the state’s struggling tobacco farmers. But there is an area where Burr stands out: his contempt for the environment. The League of Conservation Voters has named Burr one of its "Dirty Dozen" (along with fellow freshmen senators-elect John Thune and Mel Martinez). The particulars: he supported President Bush on an energy-bill provision protecting manufacturers of the gasoline additive MTBE from lawsuits over groundwater contamination; he voted six times against a ban on drilling for oil off North Carolina’s Outer Banks; and he has opposed efforts to reduce mercury contamination and greenhouse-gas emissions.
"He has one of the worst environmental records on clean air and clean water in the US Congress," says Mark Longabaugh, the league’s political director. "That’s one. Two, throughout his entire career he has shown a bias toward special interests, oil and gas or other polluters."
Sources: the Raleigh News & Observer, October 27, 2004; the Durham Independent Weekly, July 7, 2004; the Washington Post, March 11, 2003; Grist magazine, October 26, 2004; National Review Online, September 22, 2004.
5) John Thune: A simple-minded campaign of flag-waving and heterosexuality
Of all the freshmen Republican senators-elect, there is one celebrity — John Thune, of South Dakota, who knocked off Senate minority leader Tom Daschle. But though Thune, a former congressman, is an ultraconservative with ties to the religious right, he doesn’t stand out for any particular policy outrage. Rather, Thune is a master of the sort of political cheap shot that excites the imaginations of those who like their symbolism both simple and stupid.
Take, for instance, a debate between Thune and Daschle on NBC’s Meet the Press. Thune was agitated over something Daschle had said in March 2003, just before the war in Iraq began — that is, that "this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war." Never mind that a) Daschle was speaking the truth, b) he had voted in favor of the war resolution and later backed the $87 billion in reconstruction money for Iraq and Afghanistan, and c) he was a veteran and Thune was not. Thune took the opportunity to accuse Daschle of something close to treason, saying, "What it does is emboldens our enemies and undermines the morale of our troops."
Or take a proposed constitutional amendment against flag-burning — a cause that you might have thought had gone out of style with George H.W. Bush way back in the 1980s. Not, apparently, in South Dakota. "Unfortunately, Senator Daschle has consistently voted against this amendment. My record on this is very clear," Thune said at an event in Rapid City featuring some three dozen veterans, the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, and the singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Don’t you wish you’d been there?
Or, finally, take a radio ad that the Thune campaign broadcast this past summer that attempted to lump together Washington, Massachusetts, gay marriage, and Daschle in one unsavory stew. "The institution of marriage is under fire from extremist groups in Washington, politicians, even judges who have made it clear that they are willing to run over any state law defining marriage," Thune intoned. "They have done it in Massachusetts, and they can do it here."
This is just ugly, nasty stuff. The intellectual dishonesty of it all is matched only by its sheer brazenness. By appealing to voters’ fears and by demonizing anyone who would get in his way, Thune, unfortunately, demonstrated that he is well-qualified to join the Republican majority.
Sources: the Washington Post, September 20, 2004; the Rapid City Journal, South Dakota, September 22, 2004; Salon, September 30, 2004; the Advocate, July 16, 2004.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com. Read his Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.
Specter, Opponents Press Senate Leaders
UPDATED - Monday November 08, 2004 6:49pm
Washington (AP) - Sen. Arlen Specter is working the phones and embarking on a media blitz in an attempt to cement his standing as future chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the face of demands from conservatives that he be passed over.
Senate leaders are being pressured to deny Specter, the only Republican abortion rights senator on the Judiciary Committee, the chairmanship spot he's due because of his seniority.
Without any change in the support of the leaders who backed his re-election last week, the Pennsylvania Republican is likely to take over as chairman of the committee that will consider President Bush's judicial nominees.
Specter embarked on a public campaign Monday to help repair the damage from his comment last week that anti-abortion judges would be unlikely to be confirmed by the Senate. He told CNN, "I think I can help the president and I think I can help the country."
No one in the Senate has openly opposed a Specter chairmanship, aides said, although several senators have said they wanted to talk to him before he gets the job.
"Very rarely do they speak out against other members," said Rev. Pat Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition, who wants Specter voted down. Republican leaders "are putting their finger in the air and seeing which way the wind is blowing. This drama still has to be played out."
Mahoney said conservative groups plan to protest Specter's possible chairmanship at the Capitol next week, and are working to turn votes and the Senate leadership against his future chairmanship.
"This isn't what we worked for," he said. "It sends the exact wrong message to the core of the Republican Party that helped win this election. No matter what Senator Specter says, there is a complete lack of trust between him and us now, no matter how much he tries to do damage control."
Senators are taking statements Sunday by White House political adviser Karl Rove as White House support for the moderate Specter, Senate aides said.
Rove told "Fox News Sunday" that Specter assured the president that he would make certain that all appellate nominees receive a prompt hearing and reach the Senate floor. "Senator Specter's a man of his word, and we'll take him at his word," Rove said.
Moderate Republicans also have been trying to prop up Specter.
"The Senate system is based on seniority," GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said Sunday. "Senator Specter's seniority puts him next in line. And I think any effort to deny him his chairmanship will fizzle."
Ashcroft and Evans resign from Bush Cabinet -
TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
(11-09) 15:06 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --
Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans resigned Tuesday, the first members of President Bush's Cabinet to leave as he headed from re-election into his second term.
Ashcroft, in a five-page, handwritten letter to Bush, said, "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved."
"Yet I believe that the Department of Justice would be well served by new leadership and fresh inspiration," said Ashcroft, whose health problems earlier this year resulted in removal of his gall bladder.
"I believe that my energies and talents should be directed toward other challenging horizons," he said.
Both Ashcroft and Evans have served in Bush's Cabinet from the start of the administration. Evans, a close friend of Bush's from Texas, wrote, "While the promise of your second term shines bright, I have concluded with deep regret that it is time for me to return home."
The resignations were announced by White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who said Bush had accepted the decisions of both secretaries.
Ashcroft, 62, has been well liked by many conservatives. At the same time, he has been a lightning rod for criticism of his handling of the U.S. end of the war against terror, especially the detention of terror suspects.
Evans, a Texas friend of the president, was instrumental in Bush's 2000 campaign and came with him to Washington. Evans has told aides he was ready for a change. He was mentioned as a possible White House chief of staff in Bush's second term, but the president decided to keep Andy Card in that job.
One name being mentioned for Evans' job at Commerce is Mercer Reynolds, national finance chairman for the Bush campaign, who raised more than $260 million to get him re-elected.
Speculation about a successor to Ashcroft has centered on his former deputy, Larry Thompson, who recently took a job as general counsel at PepsiCo. If appointed, Thompson would be the nation's first black attorney general. Others prominently mentioned include Bush's 2004 campaign chairman, former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, and White House general counsel Alberto Gonzales.
This is from the new Bernstein biography of Jefferson. Jefferson sent the letter in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act:
"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."
Wallow In Chaos, And Laugh
A pro-Bush outcome and one enormous bitter pill and you without your vodka
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
Oh dear God please not again.
Oh dear God please don't let it be all convoluted and depressing and messy and stupid and please don't let it all embarrass us on an international level all over again even more than it already has and even more than it already is and even more than we've endured lo these past four debilitating and soul-crushing years. Hello? Please? Is it already too late?
Why yes, yes it is.
And lo and behold, it was apparently another completely tortuous and entirely knotted presidential election, unfinished until the wee hours and reeking of E-voting suspicion and exit-poll miscalculaton and it all came down to, what? Ohio? Are you serious? What a thing.
And now Kerry's conceded and the white flag has been raised and we are headed toward the utterly appalling notion of another four years of Bush and another Republican stranglehold of Congress and repeated GOP chants of "More War in '04!"
Which is, well, simply staggering. Mind-blowing. Odd. Gut-wrenching. Colon-knotting. Eyeball-gouging. And so on.
You want to block it out. You want to rend your flesh and yank your hair and say no way in hell and lean out your window and scream into the Void and pray it will all be over soon, even though you know you're an atheist Buddhist Taoist Rosicrucian Zen Orgasmican and you don't normally pray to anything except maybe the gods of really exceptional sake and skin-tingling sex and maybe a few luminous transcendental deities that look remarkably like Jenna Jameson.
It simply boggles the mind: We've already had four years of some of the most appalling and abusive foreign and domestic policy in American history, some of the most well-documented atrocities ever wrought on the American populace and it's all combined with the biggest and most violently botched and grossly mismanaged war since Vietnam, and still much of the nation still insists in living in a giant vat of utter blind faith, still insists on believing the man in the White House couldn't possibly be treating them like a dog treats a fire hydrant.
Inexplicable? Not really. People want to believe. They want to trust their leaders, even against all screaming, neon-lit evidence and stack upon stack of flagrant, impeachment-grade lie. They simply cannot allow that Dubya might really be an utter boob and that they are being treated like an abused, beaten housewife who keeps coming back for more, insisting her drunk husband didn't mean it, that she probably had it coming, that the cuts and bruises and blood and broken bones are all for her own good.
And this election, it might be all be very amusing, in a Mel Gibsony, blood-drenched hamburger-of-Christ sorta way, were it not so sad and dangerous. It might all be tolerable and cute, in a violence-engorged, sexist, video-gamey sorta way, were it not so lopsided and wrong.
This election's outcome, this heartbreaking proof of a nation split more deeply and decisively than ever, it simply reinforces the feeling among much of the educated populace: It is a weirdly embarrassing time to be an American. It is jarring and oddly shattering and makes you rethink what it really means to be a part of this country. The answer: It doesn't mean much at all. Not really. Not anymore.
This is the common wisdom on the progressive Left. Those first four toxic Bush years? A fluke. A phantasm. A stolen election. A gaff, a mugging, a crime. But this? An election this close makes you reconsider. Maybe, after all, we aren't nearly as far along as we think. Maybe we're not all that sophisticated or nuanced or respectable a nation as we sometimes dare to dream.
Maybe, in fact, we're regressing, back to the days of guns and sexism and pre-emptive violence, of environmental abuse and no rights for women and an sincere hatred of gays and foreigners and minorities. Sound familiar? It should: It's the modern GOP platform.
Here's the thing: For tens of millions of us, it is simply unconscionable that we could possibly be led for another four years by a small and spoiled little man who has very little real idea what he's doing and even less of how the hell he got there. It would be funny, in a Adam Sandler, toilet-humored sort of way, were it not so poisonous and depressing. And yet it looks like we're stuck with it, like a shard of glass buried deep in the eye.
And the rest of the world? Well, it can only watch us and shake its collective head and wonder just what the hell is wrong with us, why so many millions of us would even consider re-electing the world's most inept and war-hungry and insanely inarticulate man to four more years of unchecked power, why our much-hyped much-coveted supposedly ultra-superior democratic system is so very deeply blotchy and knotty and spoiled.
So then, to much of Europe, Asia, Canada, Mexico, Russia, the Middle East -- to all those dozens of major world nations who want Bush out almost as much as the educated people of America, to you we can only say: We are so very, very sorry. We don't know how it happened, either. For tens of millions of us, Bush is not our president and never will be. That's how divisive. That's how dangerous. That's how very sad it has become.
The GOP steamroller appears to be just too powerful, just too well-oiled and blood soaked and fear inducing to be stopped just yet. After all, the Right has been working on this master plan and building their takeover strategy for about forty years. It's gonna take those of us working for change and progress and raw spiritual juice a little more than one or two to dissolve it away like the cancer it so obviously is.
Apparently, there are lessons yet to be learned. Apparently we must hit some sort of new low between now and 2008, attain some sort of seriously vicious status in the world before we will snap out of it. You think?
This much is clear: We are not, with a grim Bush victory, headed for buoyancy and friendship and sincere hope for something new and refreshing. We are not, with another four years of what we just endured, headed toward any sort of easing of bitter tension, a sense of levity, or sexual openness, or true education, or gender respect, or a lightness of spirit and of step.
Maybe the best we can hope for, at this ominous and slightly sickening moment, is one hell of a lot more patience.
VOTE!!!!!
VOTE!!!!!
VOTE!!!!!
VOTE!!!!!
VOTE!!!!!