uTopianTurtleTop

UNDERREPORTED

Election day almost here. Last week I was nervous as a cat, jumpy & twitchy & staring at absences. This week-end I’ve been cheerfuller.

Months ago I predicted a big Kerry win. I underestimated the strength of the Republican propaganda machine. And I underestimated the “we love Dubya cuz he blows up Arabs” factor in the electorate. As a friend of mine pointed out to me one night, the breadth of the appeal of Bush’s implicit racism is big. Because the idea that the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with our security is based on only 2 things: the deliberate outrageous lie of the administration, abetted by the conservative media, that Saddam & Osama were allies; and the related racist idea that all Arabs are terrorists.

Despite this, I think Kerry is going to win. The anti-pragmatic racist jingo vote is big, but not a majority, not even combined with the single-issue anti-abortionists and anti-homosexuality-ists.

A couple stories I wish had gotten more publicity:

1. Widely reported on the liberal side of blogville, but not much elsewhere, the appalling & depressing news that the majority of Bush supporters believes Cheney’s lies about the connections between Saddam and Osama, and believes Bush’s deliberately misleading insinuations that Iraq had something to do with the atrocity of 9/11, and believes that Iraq’s fictional WMD are real and have been found, and believes that a majority of the world supports what we’ve done in Iraq. (I read this on a few blogs, linked on my linklist, but I don’t have a specific link.)

2. The astoundingly widespread effort of the official Republican Party to lie and cheat their way back into the White House by unethically and illegally seeking to keep Democrats from voting. All of these stories should be front page news. A lot of Republicans should go to jail. That NO SINGLE REPUBLICAN can be found to denounce any of these tactics -- lying to voters about polling places and election day and Democratic Party positions, lying to elections boards about the addresses of new voters -- is shameful. They simply do not want the satisfaction of winning fairly and squarely. They obviously don’t think they can. All of these stories should be front page news.

3. In one of the debates, Kerry pledged to dismantle America’s permanent military bases in Iraq. “We have no territorial ambitions in Iraq,” is what he said, or something very close to it. This is a hugely significant promise, and I think it’s great. But with so much else going on in the election, I can understand why it’s not getting much attention.


Go Blue States, Beat Big Red. And run up that score, baby, we need a big win, I want to see the other team droopy and deflated, I want them to think about what they’ve done.