Post-Election Blues
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Don't ferget u can always e-mail the MooCow with cowments at MooCowMoo@aol.com!!!

Hmmm, looks like we're not the only ones saddened, frustrated, and fearful following yesterday's debacle at the polls. Udder outside Jesusland had a few interesting things to say, and you can always count on peopleliving outside the prison to have intereting things to say about those inside it.

Here's what Emma Brock of the UK's The Guardian had to say about the election:

Thursday November 4, 2004
The Guardian
The mistake we all made was in getting our hopes up. Until lunchtime on Tuesday, in accordance with the rules of superstition, lay supporters of John Kerry kept their outlook pessimistic. In bones, waters, winds and related vapours across the land, the election was divined by pro-Democrats to be in the bag for Bush. This is what is known as preparing a soft landing; it is measured in units of unhatched chicks.
We will never know who was first to break rank. But the earliest note of dissension I heard was at 7pm on the Heathrow Express. A man sitting in front of me called the election for Kerry, bold as brass, without qualifying it by spitting three times or chucking salt over his shoulder. "The young people will win it for Kerry," he said, as a shudder moved through the carriage and people reached for things to throw at his head. "The families of people in the military will win it for Kerry."
"Do you think so?" said his companion.
"Yes," he said, and it was as easy as that. The journey up, to be followed by a stomach-sliding descent some 12 hours later, had begun.
When people woke yesterday morning, those for whom Bush's overnight gains were unwelcome weathered two sensations: a slug of shock, followed by a surge of recognition. We had been here before. This was 1992, the morning after the general election when, despite hatred for the Tories having peaked over the poll tax, they still managed to bring home a 21-seat majority. And so, not even callers to 5 Live could summon any outrage; despondency was instant and lethal. On the way to work, the faces of people on the tube looked like chalk pavement pictures after a downpour. (OK, so they look like this every morning; but they had particular resonance yesterday, suspended as they were above front-page pictures of Bush smugly meditating). By 10am, as people got to their desks and began a day of low productivity and high personal email exchange, it became clear that the most pressing post-election question was not, "Where were you when you heard Bush was winning?" but rather, "Where were you when you allowed yourself to think it could ever have been otherwise?" Dismally, people asked each other how long they had stayed up the night before. "Until 4.30am," said my friend Jim. "Long enough to start crying like a girl."

Here's what Sidney Blumenthal, former Chief Advisor to President Clinton, had to say about the election:

"This country is going so far to the right you are not even going to recognise it," remarked John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's attorney general, in 1970. Mitchell's prophecy became the mission of Nixon's College Republican president, Karl Rove, who implemented the strategy of authoritarian populism behind George Bush's victory.
In the aftermath, the Democrats will form their ritual circular firing squad of recriminations. But, finally, the loss was not due to the candidate's personality, the flaws of this or that adviser, or the party's platform. The Democrats surprised themselves at their ability to raise tens of millions, inspire hundreds of thousands of activists, and present themselves as unified around a centrist position. Expectations were not dashed. Turnout was vastly increased among African-Americans and Hispanics. More than 60% of the newly registered voters went for John Kerry. Those concerned about the economy voted overwhelmingly for him; so did those citing the war in Iraq as an issue. But the Democrats' surge was more than matched.
Using the White House as a machine of centripetal force, Rove spread fear and fused its elements. Fear of the besieging terrorist, appearing in Bush TV ads as the shifty eyes of a swarthy man or a pack of wolves, was joined with fear of the besieging queer. Bush's support for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was underscored by referendums against it in 11 states - all of which won.
The evangelical churches became instruments of political organisation. Ideology was enforced as theology, turning nonconformity into sin, and the faithful, following voter guides with biblical literalism, were shepherded to the polls as though to the rapture. White Protestants, especially in the south, especially married men, gave their souls and votes for flag and cross. The campaign was one long revival. Abortion and stem cell research became a lever for prying loose white Catholics. To help in Florida, a referendum was put on the ballot to deny young women the right to abortion without parental approval and it galvanised evangelicals and conservative Catholics alike.
While Kerry ran on mainstream traditions of international cooperation and domestic investments, and transparency and rationality as essential to democratic government, Bush campaigned directly against these very ideas. At his rallies, Bush was introduced as standing for "the right God". During the closing weeks, Bush and Cheney ridiculed internationalism, falsifying Kerry's statement about a "global test". They disdained Kerry's internationalism as effeminate, unpatriotic, a character flaw, and elitist. "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," Cheney derided in every speech. They grafted imperial unilateralism on to provincial isolationism. Fear of the rest of the world was to be mastered with contempt for it.
This was linked to what is euphemistically called "moral values", which is social and sexual panic over the rights of women and gender roles. Only imposing manly authority against "girly men" and girls and lurking terrorists can save the nation. Above all, the exit polls showed that "strong leader" was the primary reason Bush was supported.
Brought along with Bush is a gallery of grotesques in the Senate: more than one new senator advocates capital punishment for abortion; another urges that all gay teachers be fired; yet another is suffering from obvious symptoms of Alzheimer's. The new majority is more theocratic than Republican, as Republican was previously understood; the defeat of the old moderate Republican party is far more decisive than the loss by the Democrats. There are no checks and balances.
The terminal illness of chief justice William Rehnquist signals new appointments to the supreme court that will alter law for more than a generation. Conservative promises to dismantle constitutional law since the New Deal will be acted upon. Roe v Wade will be overturned and abortion outlawed.
Now without constraints, Bush can pursue the dreams he has campaigned for - the use of US military might to bring God's gift of freedom to the world with no more global tests and at home the enactment of the imperatives of "the right God". The international system of collective security forged in the second world war and tempered in the cold war is a thing of the past. The Democratic party, despite its best efforts, has failed to rein in the radicalism sweeping the country. The world is in an emergency, but also irrelevant. The New World, with all its power and might, stepping forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old? Goodbye to all that.

Finally, here is columnist Ian Black:

Europe badly wanted John Kerry to win the US presidential election, hoping for a fresh start that would turn the bitter disagreements of the Iraq war into a thing of the past, even if it was always widely acknowledged that achieving it would be far from easy. But a second term for George Bush means that the transatlantic gap is now likely to yawn even wider than before.
It is true that some EU leaders - Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder in particular - calculated privately that life would be easier without a demanding, fence-mending Democrat in the White House. But the sensible, longer-term calculation was that Mr Kerry would at least moderate the unilateralist instincts sharpened by Mr Bush and the powerful neoconservatives on his team by wooing and consulting America's traditional allies.
Private European dismay at the outcome was masked by predictable and diplomatic public statements of determination to work together - though exactly how this will happen remains to be seen. "Despite the issue of our differing positions in the past, we all have to contribute to ensuring that the situation in Iraq stabilises," declared the German interior minister, Otto Schily. In Britain, Tony Blair will be hoping to benefit from the continuity of his much-vaunted "special relationship" with a re-elected Mr Bush, ineffective though many believe it has been, and highly damaging to his domestic standing as it undoubtedly is.
France, which led Old Europe's opposition to the Iraq war and spent months swapping furious insults with the US, was resigned to the inevitable. Michel Barnier, the foreign minister, could only praise American democracy for its vigour and a high turnout at the polls. His colleague Franco Frattini of Italy, another wartime Bush ally, spoke for countries on both sides of the divide when he talked of the need to maintain a close relationship with Washington.
EU leaders will be discussing the US election result when they meet at a Brussels summit on Friday. But their top foreign policy priority will be to seek urgent progress in the Middle East, where Mr Bush enfuriated many of them earlier this year by appearing to abandon the internationally backed "road map" to peace and endorsing Ariel Sharon's plan for holding onto the West Bank while unilaterally quitting Gaza. Mr Blair said again that he would doing whatever he could to create movement on this most volatile of fronts.
The other looming global issue is Iran, whose plans to develop nuclear weapons are likely to end up at the UN security council later this month, with demands from US hawks for sanctions or perhaps Israeli-style pre-emptive strikes against this member of what the president famously dubbed the "axis of evil." North Korea is a similarly complex and high-stakes dossier.
Iraq is likely to prove an extremely difficult issue in terms of transatlantic relations. Germany and France had been unlikely to respond to a call for troops from a President Kerry - thus the private relief in Berlin and Paris - but they will certainly not do so for Mr Bush, despite hoping for a successful outcome to the Iraqi elections in January.
Europeans will be watching very carefully to see who gets which jobs in the second Bush administration: every embassy in Washington is desperate to know who will succeed the retiring Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and Colin Powell at the state department, who may be replaced by the current national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
On another front, Nato's European allies are likely to come under renewed pressure to contribute more to the difficult job of nation-building in Afghanistan, as well as to cooperate whole-heartedly in the "war on terror." But they will want to know that human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal will not recur. No guarantees are likely to be forthcoming.
Other likely bones of transatlantic contention are the Kyoto treaty on global warming, which the US has refused to sign, and the international criminal court, supported by the entire EU but flatly rejected by Washington.
Wider philosophical differences between the old and new continents seem certain to persist: these include attitudes to the UN and international law, exporting democracy to the Middle East - ridiculed by outgoing EU commissioner Chris Patten as the idea of "Jeffersonian tanks" - and the gap in development aid to the world's poorest countries.
It is a commonplace of discussions about transatlantic relations that it makes no sense at all for European to define itself against the world's unassailable superpower. But for all the brave faces and bland words emanating from European capitals, that now seems a very real possibility.

Welcome to the New Theocracy, my friends. Have you made a close and personal relationship with Jesus yet? You'd better, if you want to stay employed, fed, and out of jail.
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- posted by The MooCow @ 7:49 AM