The Calm & Rational View from Sodom & Gomorrah San Francisco

The Blog from the Core presents our favorites: Sorensen & Morford.

In their first post-election screeds.

Praise God And Pass Out The Cash.

Give credit where credit is due. President George W. Bush's faith-based initiatives did exactly what they were intended to do on Election Day. By giving, or promising to give, taxpayer money to churches, Bush was able to win the support of kinky clergymen everywhere.

His handout to religious groups was so successful that even the Roman Catholic bishops rooted for him. They spent the campaign badmouthing one of their own, John F. Kerry, who never knew what hit him.

The election campaign of 2004 turned out to be exactly as advertised, full of twists and turns, shocks and surprises, and more than a few dirty tricks.

One of the surprises was the inaccuracy of the exit polls on election day. Exit polls are famous for their accuracy, because they measure what is rather than what might be. They're almost always 100 percent accurate. The one exception is when George W. Bush is running for public office. Then the polls are off.

Could it be, could it possibly be, that the exit polls were accurate and the vote-counting off a wee bit? Naw, perish the thought. The Bushies play hardball, but they wouldn't cheat, would they?

I have to admit that the difference in Vietnam War records didn't turn out the way I expected. I thought going in that Kerry, the war hero, would crush Bush, the war zero, but I reckoned not on the legions of Swift Boat veterans who turned on one of their own.

What I've tried to imagine, ever since the Swift Boat ads started popping up, is where all those spectators were positioned. They must have lined the shores of the Mekong River like spectators watching a regatta on the Charles River in Boston.

With all those guys watching, you'd think that at least one of them would have pulled Kerry's boatmate out of the water rather than waiting for Kerry to do a U-turn down river and come chugging back for him.

One must wonder, too, what kind of impression Kerry made during his brief four months in Vietnam. How did so many guys get to know him in such a short period of time?

Life is full of mysteries.

In any case, John Kerry's failure last Tuesday ought to put to rest forever the belief that honorable military service is a plus when running for president. Not only did the slippery Bush beat a rock-solid war veteran, but the draft-evading Bill Clinton beat two genuine World War II fighters, George Herbert Walker Bush and Bob Dole. Before that, the flag-waving Ronald Reagan, who wore the uniform but never left Hollywood, defeated two bona fide military veterans, Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis.

In his appeal to so-called religious people, George W. Bush was true to the sentiments he expressed at a Gridiron Club dinner in Washington on March 24, 2001. At that time Bush paraphrased Lincoln when he said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you have to concentrate on."

By funneling your dollars to religious leaders, Bush knew he could count on those leaders to convince their parishioners to vote for him.

Their strongest selling point was that if Kerry got elected gay men would marry one another and that would rapidly lead to the destruction of the holy sacrament of marriage. Just exactly how that would happen wasn't made clear, but it didn't have to be if you bear in mind that you can fool some of the people all of the time.

It never occurred to those fine people in the redneck states (or red states, for short) that their own disregard for marriage vows, as indicted by their high divorce rate, is a greater threat than two same-sex sweeties and their cats sharing a bungalow with a framed marriage certificate hanging on the living room wall.

And then there was the dreaded embryonic stem-cell research.

Put Kerry in the White House, the pastors warned, and all those potential babies destined for the trash can would instead end up in scientific laboratories to be mercilessly slaughtered by mad scientists pretending to look for cures to diseases. Well, what fooled-all-of-the-timer could resist an appeal like that?

But it gets worse. The good pastors, not wanting to lose that faith-based money, warned their flocks that Kerry was pro-abortion and therefore the most immoral of immoral men, not fit to be dog catcher let alone president.

Whoa, Nellie, we can't allow an immoral man in the White House, the fooled-all-of-the-timers chimed in unison. We need a good, moral man like George W. Bush, who seriously regrets the 100,000 or so Iraqis killed accidentally by American troops.

Sure, Bush's message to the Iraqis is, "Become a democracy or we'll kill you," but these are desperate times, and desperate times call for desperate measures. Pastor Jones said so himself.

All in all, the Bush people ran a brilliant campaign. Of the 10 Democrats seeking their party's nomination, John Kerry was the choice of the Bushies. They knew he was the one they could beat, and they were right.

How do I know the GOP wanted Kerry? Because I watch Fox News and Fox News consistently badmouthed all the serious candidates but Kerry. It seemed strange that Fox was soft on Kerry, who was not my choice, until I realized what they were up to. Fox, the TV propaganda arm of the Republican Party, wanted Kerry to win the Democratic nomination.

Remember the infamous "Dean scream" in Iowa, when candidate Howard Dean, then the front-runner, seemed to be shouting like a madman? Replayed more than 700 times on television, that incident spelled the end for Dean.

But is was a bum rap. In the first place, it was nothing more than an exuberant candidate having fun with his friends at the end of a long but happy day. And, as ABC-12 in Michigan reported later, the noise in the room at the time was deafening, but the microphone Dean used picked up only his voice. Thus, Dean seemed to be shouting irrationally. Instead, he was merely struggling to be heard over the crowd.

What we witnessed with the "Dean scream" was news manipulation. The end result was that Dean, the only antiwar candidate who had a chance, was eliminated, and we ended up with Kerry, who came across like a milquetoast on the war issue.

I don't agree with those who say America is a Christian nation, but I'll concede that no non-Christian religions were professed by any of our founders. So, as a rhetorical shortcut, yes, you could call us a "Christian nation."

In that case, I think it's time — way past time — for those who profess Christianity to return to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Duping the devout is not Christian.

Wallow In Chaos, And Laugh.

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 miscalculation 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 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 Gibson-y, 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-game-y 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 a 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 ultrasuperior democratic system is so very deeply blotchy and knotty and spoiled.

So then, to much of Europe, Russia, Asia, Canada, Mexico, 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 years 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.

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 11/11/04 07:52:38 AM
Categorized as Media.