I'm not conceding anything yet!

Any election is an inherently depressing process, because it shows precisely what percentage of your fellow citizens are morons. More on that later.



As usual, Bush wants to declare victory before the job's done--and as usual, the mass media is all too eager to help. Votes are still being counted. Nobody's won, nobody's lost. This may take a while--eleven days at least, for the Ohio provisional ballots--and we just have to be patient.



About Bush's apparent victory in the popular vote: everybody has been squawking about touch-screen voting and voter suppression for years, precisely because they would give us a false result in the popular vote! ONE-THIRD of the country was using touch-screen voting. Stories of voter suppression have been coming out for weeks. Ohio's now filled with stray boxes of paper ballots and GOP operatives. I don't care what the numbers say; if sufficient care wasn't taken to ensure that they would be fair and accurate, you shouldn't give them any authority. If somebody's cheating you, only a fool helps them do it!



Nicholas Kristof unwittingly puts his finger on it with his column in the Times today talking about how the Democrats need to reattract the heartland. No, people in the heartland need to stop living in the fantasy they've been indulging in since Ronald Reagan. No part of the US has gotten cheated worse over the last 25 years than the heartland. If somebody's cheating you, only a fool helps them do it!



In the article, Kristof quotes Oregon's Democratic governor, Ted Kulongoski: "[The Republicans have] created ... these social issues [read: guns, Gays, god] to get the public to stop looking at what's happening to them economically. What we once thought - that people would vote in their economic self-interest - is not true, and we Democrats haven't figured out how to deal with that."



Well, shit on fire, as they say in the heartland. If voters aren't acting in their own self-interest--economic or otherwise--the problem goes much deeper than the Democrats or the results of this election. Voting one's self-interest is the basic motivation for a democratic system. If the game has become who can fool the countryfolk better--who can play to their worst impulses, and we all know what they are--then the problem is with the citizens, not with the Democratic party. Kristof's column is more liberal Eastern Establishment inside baseball--how liberals love analysis! Would Kristof write, "What the Social Democrats need to do is stop being such elitists and start hating Jews better than the Nazis!" I say unto thee again, if somebody's cheating you, only a fool helps them do it!



Continuing with my Thirties theme, reelecting Bush in 2004 would be like reelecting Hoover in 1932. The war couldn't be going any more poorly. The economy is terrible. The country is divided and angry. That's on the one side. On the other: He talks about God a lot. No liberal I know--and certainly no Democrat--is disdainful of religion. What they're disdainful of is using it. That's not disrespectful, that's MORE respectful. The question raised by Kristof's column isn't "what does the Eastern liberal establishment need to do to convince people to vote their own self-interest?" but "how much pain and suffering does this country need to undergo before certain segments return to reality?" If the heartland wants to vote GOP because they think it believes in God, then maybe the heartland needs a draft to wake it up. Turning it into an economic wasteland hasn't been enough.



Irritation aside, I'm confident that there's a lot of story to be written yet, and Kerry may still pull it off. But if there's going to be four more years of Bush, this country will suffer greatly. Our job may be to be ready to pick up the pieces when it finally cries "Enough!" But I'd sooner lose every election than try to out-hate the GOP. If that's what winning means, winning isn't worth a damn.