I started to write this last night, and got about 40 minutes in before my computer crashed. Not sure what’s wrong with it. I smell a hard drive formatting coming on. Anyway…

It’s been an interesting 48 hours. Once I got over my initial disbelief, the shock settled in. Then came the confusion. Yesterday I actually felt stunned, like I’d…I don’t know, lost my job or watched my house burn down. I was in a fog for most of the day; watching Kerry concede didn’t seem at all real. The length of the campaign could’ve been a factor; it’d been going on so long it was hard to believe it had finally ended. But after that concession speech, around noon, the disappointment set in. It wasn’t that Kerry had lost; I was never that big on him anyway (how can someone be the #1 liberal and still be against gun control and gay marriage?). Nor was it that Bush had won. It’s no secret that Americans think differently than I do when it comes to politics so his victory didn’t surprise me. In fact, it was only last week that I even got an inkling that Bush might lose, so at least half of me expected Bush to be re-elected. No, what bothered me, what depressed me was this: that the American voters, trapped inside a burning house, calmly chose to ignore the danger. Rather than looking for a fire extinguisher or a bucket of water, they walked over to the man holding a flamethrower and asked him how often he attended church.

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.” .:Thomas Jefferson

See, at first I thought that Bush had pulled off a brilliant move, that he had learned from his father’s mistake. Bush Sr. had his war a bit too soon, and his ratings plummeted as his term wore on. Bush Jr. finished his justifiable war too early as well, and it made tactical sense that he manufacture another one to keep his ratings high well into the re-election campaign. But it turns out that the war was a minor point for people this time around. It was Karl Rove who made the brilliant move this time: making it all about God. Exit polls showed that “moral issues” were the most important to voters, even moreso than Iraq, terrorism or the economy; by moral issues they apparently meant stem cell research, same-sex marriage and abortion.

I’m disgusted by this, for two reasons: first, John Kerry has said that he personally doesn’t agree with the last two, but doesn’t see how as president he can deny citizens the right to marry or have an abortion, as granted under a decades-old Supreme Court ruling. As for stem-cell research, I think I’m confused about how that is in any way a morality issue, but that’s a debate for another post. At the very least, Kerry believed that the potential to save millions of lives trumped those concerns. My second area of disgust lies with the selective vision of those declaring George Bush a moral being. This is a man who, as every person who can read is now firmly aware, started an unprovoked war which has cost the lives of more than 1,000 of his own soldiers, and more than 14,000 Iraqi civilians. As governor he signed the death warrant of 155 inmates, at least one of whom — Odell Barnes — was later found to be innocent. He does nothing about Guantanamo Bay. He refuses to join the International Criminal Court. He launched personal attacks against John Kerry, and John McCain in 2000, both Vietnam war heroes, in the worst kind of mudslinging. This is the bastion of morality? This is who Americans believe should be their moral compass for the next four years?

The American people, about 60 million of them anyway, chose to ignore the horrendous economy. They chose to ignore the military and civilian deaths, the human rights violations in Iraq & Cuba, the threat of diminished freedoms at home. They allowed themselves to believe the lies: that Iraq backed Al Qaeda, that Iraq was making nuclear weapons, that they were safer now than they had been under Clinton or would be under Kerry, that the tax cuts would help the middle and lower classes, that education and the environment were important issues. They ignored (or were denied) the world opinion, and do not seem to understand that the world now views them not just as dangerous, but utterly ridiculous too. As good as the Democratic machine is at spinning and lying, the Republicans are better…but to fool so many people is a task beyond even them. We are left with only one depressing, demoralizing conclusion:

Americans are dumb.

“In a Democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve” .:Winston Churchill