push the pause on the self-destruct
As hideous as it's been getting what the Guardian called a peek at the American Psyche Year Two Zero Zero Four, there should be some measure of compartmentalization, for lack of a better word, in order to gain a better view of what's on the horizon.
First and foremost is abortion. There will probably be no lightning strike or hail mary here; if I were a betting man, I would put my money on a four to six year effort to not only block women from getting a choice whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, but to keep the 35 plus million in a constant froth on this "unfinished work" as well as to shape public opinion around the idea a Bush reelection makes banning abortion fait accompli.
With the way they stacked the courts in the first four (I read in Harper's last night the President got a remarkable number of judges appointed to federal bench positions, and a Nation piece a couple of weeks ago reported some were not only raving lunatics but also under-qualified), took Justice off chasing terrorists and onto abortion doctors, and keep putting out nonsensical anti-choice pron inre: the Supreme Court, again, the smart money's on a tenacious effort via the courts.
Gay rights in this election has been more of a cosmetic issue than anything - polls generally show Americans don't necessarily have anything against gays and lesbians, but they don't much care for them either. I recall telling friends over the summer after the president expressed his heartfelt need for a constitutional amendment clarifying that marriage was between a man and a woman was that the real damage to the gay and lesbian community was going to end up being an uptick in hate crime and harshly discriminatory laws passed on a local level: Whether they mean it or not, playing the hate card on so high and visible a stage makes it permissable in the minds of people who are really tuned into this nasty bit of zeitgeist, and becomes a kind of de facto-encouragement to fuck people up.
While it wasn't exactly going to be a sea change with Kerry - far from it - the foreign policy side of things is almost too horrible to consider. Already, the Admin is planning on a serious bang-up in Falluja, with no regard whatsoever for public opinion either at home or abroad - I mean, what, the man's not even been reelected a week? - and have just closed the U.S. embassy in Syria, whatever that means. With Yasser Arafat dying, the Palestinians will probably be leaned on and leaned on hard to accept, now, not later but now, a peace offer that will probably make Oslo seem like an estate sale. Then of course there's Colombia, our biggest oil-importer Venezuela, and maybe a Cuban surprise, and more all sorts of tough-guy posturing wherever and whenever it suits. More globalization, of course; again, while Kerry would not have called off the industrial economies' economic war on the rest of the planet, the Bush brand will be far more "robust."
And remember, there's not going to be a draft, really...
The worst of it - that is, the worst of it not involving setting fire to the Middle East and butchering or starving as many people as possible abroad - is going to be dismantling the so-called welfare state. In a rather feisty Bill Moyers interview last night, Gover Norquist said he was confident there would be not one, not two, but another four tax cuts. And during his first post-election press conference (only the sixteenth press conference he's held since 2000) the president did not talk about ridding the nation of the scourge of baby-killing doctors or man-on-man marriage or thong underwear, but "entitlement reform."
When future fiscally and culturally bankrupt generations look back, it will be this and this and this will be the actual legacy of Four More Years, less Tim LaHaye's sadistic take Christianity or even a Third Great Awakening, but a bigger, stupider Argentina.
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