Category: default || By jt3y

(Warning: This is a completely partisan, bitter rant. Back to the lighter stuff tomorrow, I promise.)

As I write this, things don't look good for Long John. Cue Lee Andrews and the Hearts at the homes of doo-wop loving Kerry voters everywhere:

"Long, long and lonely nights
I cry my eyes out over you
Wond'ring if I did right
And why you left me with a broken heart."

Well, let me see. Yawn Kerry left you with a broken heart because he ran a lousy campaign that never hammered home a consistent message. And because he wrote off the South and Midwest -- including states like Missouri and Arkansas, which he could have conceivably won.

Also, the President's re-election campaign stayed relentlessly on message and spoon-fed the press corps lie after lie after lie --- and the press corps ate it up. Way to go, Fourth Estate!

"As I go along my lonely way I visualize your face
When I pass through (yeah!) my doorway
What's left for me to face?"

Let me think about that one, too. What's left for Americans to face?

How about four more years of the gap between rich and poor growing wider? Four more years of reckless spending, with no one paying the bills? Four more years of "faith-based" policies that fly in the face of science, reality and common sense? And no end to the quagmire in Iraq, created by a President who claims that he's never made a mistake, and that he takes instructions directly from God?

Excuse me --- Lee and the Hearts continue:

"Oh, oh, oh, long, long and lonely nights
I guess you're never coming home
Long, long and lonely nights
Ever since you've been gone."

Yeah, I'm singin' that one for the Bill of Rights. I been singin' it for four years. Which reminds me --- it's time to renew my membership in the ACLU. I joined up the day the Patriot Act was signed into law.

"Please, please, come back to me
You've been gone too long."

You know what's been gone too long? Civility, decency and Christian charity. They've been gone too damn long from the Republican Party.

But why worry about such weak-kneed, sissy concepts as those, when the strategy they've been using has worked so well? Focus on God, guns and gays. "John Kerry wants to allow gays to stop you from praying and take your guns away!"

And people believe this nonsense! Barnum was right.

You know what else has been gone for too damn long? The spines of moderate Republicans. They've allowed their party to be hijacked by the Flat Earth Society, just as the far-left hijacked the Democrats in the 1970s and '80s.

Other thoughts before I crawl into a beer bottle for the night:

-- The voter fraud in this election stinks out loud. Where the Democratic strategy was to mobilize voters at all costs, the Republican strategy was to stop Democratic voters from voting. Nice guys finish last.

-- If the Democrats can gain a majority in Congress --- and after watching this travesty unfold for the past eight months, I don't think they could successfully organize a fart at a bean-eating contest --- I look for some major investigations to be launched against the President's re-election campaign. The same patterns of arrogance and abuse of power that led to the Watergate scandal are evident in the Bush White House.

-- The lies and calumny slung by Republican party operatives, from the Not-So-Swift Boat Veterans to the right's water-carriers on TV and radio, were astonishing in their brazenness. Yet they were never effectively rebutted by the Democrats. At all. The Democrats allowed the opposition to lob big festering stink bombs at them, and then tut-tutted while everyone else was trying not to retch from the odor, instead of throwing the stink bombs back at the opposition.

-- President Dubya successfully turned this election into a referendum on his challenger instead of allowing Kerry to make it a referendum on his re-election. That speaks to the truly remarkable incompetence of the Kerry campaign.

-- This also speaks to the truly remarkable incompetence of Kerry's campaign: Kerry was running against a president who lost the popular vote in 2000, started an unpopular war, and turned a huge surplus into a huge deficit. Had he run a decent campaign, it would never have been close.

-- The fact that Kerry couldn't put a decent campaign together should give one pause about his ability to run the United States of America.

-- The much-vaunted youth vote that the Kerry camp was counting on stayed home in droves, as anyone with half a brain could have predicted. Young people don't vote. Maybe they'll vote in the next election --- while they're sitting on the Humvees in Iraq, Iran or North Korea.

Do I sound bitter?

Pardon my language, but you're goddamn right I am.

The United States of America --- a country that I love, a country that I would gladly volunteer to defend if they would have taken me, a country that I think is the greatest country in the world --- is right now a laughingstock.

And a large percentage of Americans want to send back to the White House the people who have harmed my country so badly through their arrogance and ignorance.

If you believe in prayer, please pray for the United States of America. It's going to need all of the prayers it can get.