Exactly what I wanted to say. Except more eloquently put.
You want Kerry to do stand up for the UN? Because had he tried this, they would have laughed themselves into a hemmorage.
I don’t like this, because I think SSM is a fundamental right…actually, I think marriage is a fundamental right, and government should have no say in who you marry, but if he had come out like that he would have lost by 10% points. Like it or not, the country is not ready to embrace gay marriage. That much was made (disapointingly) clear yesterday.
Fuck the UN, man. This what Kerry should have said to us. Kerry could offer to blow everyone in the UN, for all I care (After all, nothing says a man’s committed to a cause like taking another man’s cock in his mouth.), the UN ain’t electing Kerry, and it was Kerry’s bullshit about what he would have done had he been President instead of Bush that hurt him.
I don’t like it, either, but until the various gay organizations can come up with someone as charismatic as Martin Luther King, Jr., there’s not much else that can be done, I think. My hope with that portion was to drive home the point that if the government can deny gays the right to marry, they can interfere in everyones marriage.
They already do. Marriage is a civil arrangement regulated strictly by law.
What the hell else do you mean by government being involved in marriage?
I’m very disappointed in this result. While I expected it would be close–I never anticipated a landslide one way or the other–I held out hope for a narrow but clear Kerry victory. My reasoning was that here in Florida, all of the Gore voters from 2000 would vote for Kerry. I also expected most of the Nader voters from 2000 to shift to Kerry. Furthermore, I hoped that many non-voters from 2000 would be motivated enough to participate in this election, and that their votes would largely go to Kerry. I even entertained the possibility that some Bush voters from 2000 would switch over to Kerry. I based this last point on conversations with my father, who is deeply conservative but who has expressed dissatisfaction with Bush at times.
I was apparently mistaken (about the Florida result, and probably about my father’s vote, as I suspect he stuck with Bush after all).
I’m deeply worried about the future of this country, and the world. With both the legislature and the executive in firmly Republican hands, I expect that we will see further erosions in environmental protections and in workers’ rights, as the Bush administration provides more favors and privileges to corporations. Gay rights and abortion rights are under particular threat. It frightens me that Bush will now have a stronger chance at amending the Constitution to ban gay marriages or civil unions, and at pushing for more restrictions on abortion rights.
It may not be entirely fair to say that Bush favors persecuting gays, or sending women back to the days of back-alley abortions. But I am greatly troubled that he will have the chance to stack the Supreme Court with very conservative justices who will likely curtail many personal freedoms, and may even consider overturning Roe v. Wade. If Bush has both a Republican Congress and a friendly Supreme Court behind him, he can institute many long-lasting changes in American society, and these changes could be terribly deleterious to traditional American freedoms.
And then there’s Iraq and the War on Terror ™. The former is a mess, which will only get worse. I cannot forgive Bush for leading the U.S. into a war on deceptive grounds (or, at least, on very dodgy intelligence). And it enrages me that he and his administration can turn such a willfully blind eye to the disaster that they’ve left our troops to deal with, all the while maintaining that we’re making “good progress” in Iraq. Bush has no clear strategy for Iraq, other than speaking in platitudes about bringing democracy and freedom to the country–his refusal to recognize that the insurgents regard Americans as occupiers, not liberators, and that these insurgents are increasing in numbers and (most alarmingly) gaining support among certain segments of the Iraqi population, is a sign of either naivete or just simple incompetence.
As for the War on Terror, this seems to be Bush’s “Get Out of Jail Free” card–whenever things are looking bad in Iraq, or when the economy begins to tank, he shifts topics by reminding us of 9/11, and presto! his approval ratings shoot up. His exploitation of 9/11 in order to further a dangerous strategy of pre-emptive warfare is very, very scary. Furthermore, I’m not convinced that he’s made the US safer from terrorism. In fact, our actions in Iraq have almost certainly stirred up more resentment against us throughout the Arab world. I think the situation in Iraq will spawn future acts of violence against the US and/or US interests, though I doubt it will be on the scale of the 9/11 attacks (I don’t share Cheney’s belief that the terrorists are poised to set off a nuclear device in a major metropolitan area any moment now).
IMO, Bush is not the worst possible president–in fact, I disliked Reagan far more than I do Bush. The key difference is either president’s respective context: Reagan’s whims were checked by a Democratic-controlled Congress and by the presence of the Soviet Union (albeit a Soviet Union in decline). Bush doesn’t have such opposition, either domestically or internationally. This gives him almost free rein to enact whatever initiatives he cares to, so his influence can be much worse than Reagan’s (even though I still regard Reagan’s memory with more loathing).
The next four years will be long ones, I fear, and their effects may last even longer.
Yeah, but how many times did Kerry say, “Bush had him cornered at Tora Bora, but he outsourced the job, and Osama got away.”? He said it like a million times. He was obviously going for the repetitive soundbite. You can Monday-morning quarterback him all you want, coming up with what he didn’t say, but the fact is that he did play the Osama angle, and he hit it hard, over and over. It just didn’t work, that’s all. There is a certain segment of the population (mostly in the middle and in the south) that is going to back Bush no matter what. I don’t think there’s anything anyone could have said that would have changed their minds. To them, it’s not about effective foreign policy, or which targets are the right ones to go after. They just see Bush as a “good ol’ boy” who wasn’t afraid to open a can o’ whoopass on them terrorists. They don’t care about subtleties like the fact that he went after the wrong people. And in the end, there were just more of those people than there were of us, that’s all.
I didn’t see Kery saying that from the beginning. Towards the end, yeah, he did, but he didn’t have the simple thrust of “Where’s Osama, stupid?” Remember Clinton got a lot of mileage out of “It’s the economy, stupid.” Not, “You’re outsourcing our jobs, stupid.” It’s the simple thrust that does it.
How’s this for a rant:
I’m glad it is the sons and daughters of Bush Country who die in Iraq;
As they lay bleeding in the sand,
Thousands of miles away from their obese parents,
and their sub-standard schools,
and their shabby homes filled with tacky furniture from Walmart,
I hope they realize that they had a choice and they chose this.
Two final thoughts, before I resume trying to think happy thoughts:
We saw much of the same mind-set during Watergate: that our President gets a great deal of benefit of the doubt, until the truth is painfully in-your-face obvious. Americans as a whole seem to be very reluctant to come to the conclusion that their president is a liar and a crook. Nixon won in a landslide 4 months after the break-in, and maintained high approval ratings for another year or more.
It looks like Bush can thank one person for his victory: San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom. (not an original thought, but a coalescing of multiple stories on NPR today). Newsom made a rookie mistake in allowing gay marriages in SF in February; it thrust him onto the national stage and brought him a whole lot of positive press, and his constituency loves him. But the backlash was huge. Bush countered with the non-starter constitutional marriage ban, which brought the debate forward, and forced every politician in the country to take a stand. And the conservative base voters, who may have been waffling on Bush thanks to his putrid record on every other issue, rallied around him on gay marriage.
Whoa.
I wondered how long we’d go on here before the Blame the Gays Game started.
Why don’t you thank Rosa Parks for electing Bull Conner, jsc?
Or George Wallace, or Orval Faubus, for that matter.
I wasn’t taking a position, per se; just replaying the political chess game. Personally, I thought at the time that Newsom was brilliant & courageous. His brilliance & courage played right into Karl Rove’s hands, unfortunately.
Sorry, jsc. I’ve been waiting for someone to start that game since Wednesday morning, and kind of jumped when it looked like you did.
No prob, jj.
In the short run, whenever a progressive movement generates a backlash it’s easy to blame the progressives. In the long run, progress can’t be stopped; and Rosa Parks will be remembered much longer than Orval Faubus. But it’s going to be a damned uncomfortable 4 years, though, as we live through the Faubus administration.
I have never done this on the SMDB, but your piece of shit rant deserves a hearty “fuck you.” Do you even know one person who’s laid down their life for their country in Iraq or Afghanistan? I know more than I’d care to–none of them fit your description. We serve because we want to give back to our country, which has given us freedom and opportunity.
I’m sure by now everyone’s seen the county-by-county red and blue maps. Truly fascinating. L.A. County, the NYC boroughs, the Bay Area, Cook County and environs, Philly and Pittsburgh…and just about every other major urban center went for Kerry. Considering how many suburban and exurban communities L.A. County (and even the city, to some extent), takes in, it’s remarkable that we ended up blue. San Diego and most Southern cities were not unexpected exceptions to this. They’re red.
So even in the blue states, they’re still mostly red, in terms of geography, though the red areas barely match the blue in terms of population.
And I’ll state for the bazillionth time why.
Because the blue deals with the consequences of the red, and we don’t want that shit.
Can you make this a little clearer? I think I agree with your sentiment here, but I must not have seen all the other bazillion posts.
Believe me, I’m not happy about the the fact of almost the entire map being red, especially since it will play into the winners’ hands as they point to it and falsely claim that almost the entire country is Republican on the strength of the map. I only mentioned it because I thought it was a fascinating demographic/political tidbit.
Doesn’t most of the gay (is that the PC term?) population lives in the blue areas. The Blue areas are the targets for the terrorist attacks. Etc etc etc. I’m also aware it cuts both ways, but these are consequences that only we deal with.