Well, folks ... meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I was going to say that when Kerry got elected, to cleverly point up the irony of choosing between two war presidents. Now, well ... it's just literally true. Let these five words you never wanted to hear roll over your tongue: <i>"George Bush. Two term President."</i> What happened? Well, democracy happened. Carefully controlled, media-massaged, corporate-guided democracy. Issues carefully weeded, candidates carefully groomed. As <a href="http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2466" source="Something Awful">America Excretes Democracy All Over the World</a> notes: <bq>Like an autistic child overcoming obstacles, America's democratic process is slow and stupid, but inspiring when it pulls through and manages to do something vaguely coherent.</bq> That was written the day <i>before</i> the election. Apparently, America is one step below <iq>autistic child</iq> on the old learning curve and seems to have an infinite supply of patience for reaching out to that hot stove just to see if it won't burn <i>this</i> time. <h>Some metaphors</h> Again from Something Awful: <bq>...I know four years of Kerry will be just as lousy, but at least it would be a new flavor of lousy. If you buy one of those ridiculous Kool-Aid flavors like "Pugnacious Peach" and it makes you vomit, you don't buy it again. You try "Bituminous Berry" instead and hope for the best.</bq> Hell, that's basically it ... while some had the luxury of voting their principles and choosing Nader (if you voted in a state that "didn't matter", a whole other can of worms), most simply had the choice between Bush and Kerry. Over 58 million people can't all be stupid, can they? I mean, it's not that fucking hard; here's a little metaphor to put the choice into perspective. <box title="Metaphor for the 2004 US Election" width="75%" align="center"> Imagine two little doors on a wall in front of you, like those on an advent calendar. You pull the latch and can see what's inside. OK, now imagine you opened the one on the right side and a boxing glove on a spring popped out and hit you in the face so hard that you cried for four years straight. It also magically made you lose your job and sent everyone you knew to die in a war in a country you couldn't locate with a Walmart full of maps and a hundred years. Then it made fun of you for being poor and not having any health insurance, sent you to jail for even thinking about pot and forced your daughter to bear the child her uncle implanted. Now, the other door, this one's marked with a label that says "I'm nowhere near as bad as the door on the right". You have no idea what's behind it though. It may be lying --- but, and here's the important part, <b>you know if you open the door on the right again, it will do even worse than the first time because it doesn't care if you open it again or not</b>. It can only be opened, at most, two times, so it's going to go for broke if you give it a second chance. Four years of constant overwhelming sorrow will be a tea party you'll fondly remember through the pain-fogged haze you'll call life if you open that damned door again. </box> So, there's the setup. The given. Now, here's the big question that over 58 million people answered differently than you might expect. You <i>have</i> to open a door --- which one do you choose? <h>No excuses this time</h> Four years ago, the country was split 50/50 over the choice between two guys, neither of whom had been president, who kind of, sort of, seemed to be peddling slightly varying versions of the same programs. Fast forward to today, where one of these guys has four years of track record, showing that he hasn't done a thing he promised, done a bunch of dangerous, horrible stuff he never mentioned he wanted to do and lied consistently about every last little detail. A train wreck of a presidency by any objective evaluation. Four years ago, you could forgive America for choosing so poorly. How was America to know? Now? Forget it. This is proof positive of two things: <ul> There is no God. The entire world was praying that Bush would lose and he didn't. Q.E.D. Half of America is either evil or dumber than a bag of hammers. </ul> Let me explain. Bush is the Machiavellian choice for some --- he guarantees a good personal income --- those are the evil ones. The rest succumbed to the crassest, most ham-handed brainwashing in the history of the world. The amount of reality so many people can ignore implies a massive willingness to believe in anything but the truth. 58 million people are simply not grasping reality in any significant way. Either that or there are a lot more people in the first camp. It really could have been the brainwashing, though. The <a href="http://www.theonion.com/infograph/index.php?issue=4044" source="The Onion">Election Opinion Polls</a> infographic is fake, of course, but, as with all good satire, a reasonable approximation of the truth. Faced with questions like the following, people of weaker judgement will have their opinion slowly, but surely, molded for them. <ol> <iq>Given a choice between two generic candidates, one who would steal your money to cater gay weddings, and one who was a strong and resolute leader, who would you choose?</iq> <iq>Who would you rather kill: the unborn or the terrorists?</iq> <iq>If you knew that John Kerry and Osama bin Laden were actually the same person, would you be more or less likely to vote for Ralph Nader?</iq> </ol> <h>What's next?</h> <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20041103/pl_nm/election_dc_57" source="Yahoo! News">Bush Camp Declares Victory; No Kerry Concession</a> mentions some quite horrifying facts, like the fact that <iq>Bush captured the popular vote this time</iq>. However, with only about 114 million people voting, that amounts to a mandate from about 25% of the eligible voting public. That's not all. The worst part is that Republicans now own <iq> 53 of the 100 Senate seats</iq> and a clear majority in the Congress. The Bush administration, never shy to begin with, and from which we don't expect to see any cast member changes, will be rolling forward with their agenda even more freely than in the last four years. Bush doesn't have to worry about being elected again, he's already proven he doesn't have to worry about being impeached (many times over) and an already lame Congress just increased the likelihood that it will roll over for every hare-brained scheme that catches his sick fancy by an order or magnitude. Chew on that for while. Bush is now officially <b>bulletproof</b>. He could have sex with 40 interns --- at once --- while punching his wife the entire time, mowing down dozens of minorities with an AK-47 and he would <i>still</i> get re-elected. He next State of the Union Address could consist only of him giving us the middle finger while he repeats "sit and spin" over and over again and his approval rating would still be locked at 50%. One of the scarier Republicans in America has already been caught slobbering over the possibilities: <bq>With a bigger majority, we can do even more exciting things," said House Majority leader Tom DeLay, a Republican from Texas.</bq> I can hardly wait. Poor people as an alternate energy source? England: the 51st state? Blacks back to their 3/5 of a person status guaranteed by the original constitution? The sky's the limit, folks! <h>Morals and Mandates</h> Despite winning the popular vote, the word "mandate" still doesn't fit. As mentioned above, only 25% of the eligible voters actually cast a vote for him. Just as many (statistically) voted against him. Many quite vehemently. I pretty much broke my number 2 pencil voting against him. Any other country, one whose inhabitants were in less of a media-induced stuporous daze, would be undergoing civil war right now. The country is split and the "uniter" that just got re-elected is jumping up and down on the wedge, driving it even further apart. We'll see how big the rift is 4 years from now. What's fascinating is to hear that people voted for him because he's <iq>authentic</iq> or for <iq>moral reasons</iq>. He and his administration have lied about everything under the sun. The word "moral" doesn't enter into it. What these people mean is that he agrees with them on a single slim issue, like stem-cell research being the work of the devil, and they have agreed to support the bankrupting of the country and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, because thinking about the bigger picture is just too fucking hard. It's easier to reduce national politics to a single issue. These are the kind of people that gravitate towards Charles Manson because "he's willing to follow through on his ideas". A President who was balls-out psychotic in his first term, started two wars, alienated the world, alienated half the nation and plunged it into the worst ecomony, jobs market and deficit ever ... is now poised to start his second term. It's in the second term that the President is no longer worried about getting elected: imagine the crazy schemes we're going to hear this time around. Coupled with the Republican majorities everywhere, it should be a fun, though perhaps long, four years.