The overall popular vote doesn't mean a damn, as Al Gore and Sam Tilden will attest. The only polls that might foretell an outcome are ones that mirror the hand-me-down, winner-take-all charade that passes for democracy in America's sorry selection process. And since state-by-state polls are historically of questionable reliability, tea leaves might be a better bet.
...The whole world has watched the collusion of the "opposition" over the past few years. There is little sympathy left for a party that tries to spin its own spinelessness into a role as the Bush regime's first victim rather than its most willing collaborator - it's a kind of like Austria after the Anschluss. The left would deeply like to believe that Kerry can continue on his current course, with a wink and a nod, and then somehow govern from a mandate on which he never campaigned. The more likely outcome, of course, is that he will lose.
...Now, with the current regime on the ropes in virtually every field of endeavour, Kerry is like a boxer with nothing to grab hold of. It's hard to hold Bush accountable for the international crime of an illegal war you supported, especially when you insist on continuing to defend one of the worst ideas in human history. As far as Bush's domestic agenda is concerned, the waters are again deliberately muddied when they needn't be... Trade policy has impoverished workers and fattened corporate pockets in a murderous race to the bottom spurred on by both parties. And the bipartisan addiction to war that drains every available penny from any other priority... must I go on?
...[T]here appears to be a bright future in jailing troublemakers. The Republican National Committee's rehearsal with "Guantanomo on the Hudson", where the RNC apparently leased a contaminated Pier 57 which was subsequently used by the NYPD as a holding pen, bodes ill for the rest of us... As American apartheid mutates and assumes new forms, those who refuse to recognize it risk becoming its victims as surely as those bystanders caught up in the orange netting by New York's finest.
...And so it goes. The worst administration in US history is poised to avoid the drubbing any real popular democracy would hand it, while the dust swirls and the press pack pounces on tit-for-tat allegations about America's last great imperial failure.
...The American political elites just can't seem to get their minds around a crisis of this proportion. It's almost as if the unspoken horror unfolding in Iraq is so beyond the pale that gentlemen prefer to fight about smaller things... It is a frightening and sobering reality that Americans are almost completely clueless as to how isolated we are. If it's not on TV, of course, then it doesn't exist, regardless of what the rest of the world sees. This dangerous self-delusion is partnered with another: that ridding the top echelons of government of the proto-fascist junta now in power will somehow unswirl the chocolate from the milk.
More from Daniel Patrick Welch...
...The whole world has watched the collusion of the "opposition" over the past few years. There is little sympathy left for a party that tries to spin its own spinelessness into a role as the Bush regime's first victim rather than its most willing collaborator - it's a kind of like Austria after the Anschluss. The left would deeply like to believe that Kerry can continue on his current course, with a wink and a nod, and then somehow govern from a mandate on which he never campaigned. The more likely outcome, of course, is that he will lose.
...Now, with the current regime on the ropes in virtually every field of endeavour, Kerry is like a boxer with nothing to grab hold of. It's hard to hold Bush accountable for the international crime of an illegal war you supported, especially when you insist on continuing to defend one of the worst ideas in human history. As far as Bush's domestic agenda is concerned, the waters are again deliberately muddied when they needn't be... Trade policy has impoverished workers and fattened corporate pockets in a murderous race to the bottom spurred on by both parties. And the bipartisan addiction to war that drains every available penny from any other priority... must I go on?
...[T]here appears to be a bright future in jailing troublemakers. The Republican National Committee's rehearsal with "Guantanomo on the Hudson", where the RNC apparently leased a contaminated Pier 57 which was subsequently used by the NYPD as a holding pen, bodes ill for the rest of us... As American apartheid mutates and assumes new forms, those who refuse to recognize it risk becoming its victims as surely as those bystanders caught up in the orange netting by New York's finest.
...And so it goes. The worst administration in US history is poised to avoid the drubbing any real popular democracy would hand it, while the dust swirls and the press pack pounces on tit-for-tat allegations about America's last great imperial failure.
...The American political elites just can't seem to get their minds around a crisis of this proportion. It's almost as if the unspoken horror unfolding in Iraq is so beyond the pale that gentlemen prefer to fight about smaller things... It is a frightening and sobering reality that Americans are almost completely clueless as to how isolated we are. If it's not on TV, of course, then it doesn't exist, regardless of what the rest of the world sees. This dangerous self-delusion is partnered with another: that ridding the top echelons of government of the proto-fascist junta now in power will somehow unswirl the chocolate from the milk.
More from Daniel Patrick Welch...
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