When I went to bed this morning, at about three, I was so sure we had won; and so, I think, were the people on the BBC. It seemed just, fitting, divinely ordained, almost. When I woke up at seven I felt I’d just trod on a rake.
When we recoil in horror from the people who voted Bush because — so far as we can see — they are blinded to overwhelming reality by fear and desire, we shouldn’t suppose that we’re immune.
It seems absolutely clear that a large majority of the smart, well-educated and well-informed voted for Kerry and quite probably we thought we must win. The voters who suppose that Bush will prevail in his struggle with reality should be more prone to self-deception than we are. If we can’t even cure ourselves, why did we think they could somehow be cured?
Today is one of the lowest days I can remember. I’m still in disbelief. Unlike Bush, I’ll snap out of it.
I live next door to them. Wanna trade?
By three, I was dreadfully, dreadfully afraid that it had gone wrong. I made the mistake of sitting on the CNN election reports page, which didn’t quite break stuff down by county but had a lot of geographic info inside the states. Certainly more than the networks were talking about – CNN kept saying on air that it didn’t have information that was right on their web site. Can probably guess why that was.
I think it was all the bits of Florida that didn’t move that finally got to me, but even looking at the early states… no, there was nothing good happening.
The people have spoken. The bastards.
R
there is so much alienation and fear in my house right now.
I read Andrew Sullivan argue that the administration will now have to face the consequences of its actions. But from the administration’s point of view, almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong since December 2000. The economy tanked and didn’t rebound, the invasion (either from the stated goal of finding WMDs to the revised goal of “liberating the Middle East”) was a catastrophe. And they still got re-elected. So sadly the opposite seems to be true: they can get away with anything.
“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”. The crucial point is surely that the voters have not yet felt the consequences of the Administration’s actions. If the kill ratio in Iraq were something other than 1000/1 in favour of the occupying armies, that would be different.
But quite probably the republicans feel now they can get away with anything. There is a name for this condition. It’s hubris.