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The Sun Sets on the Right
Ask not for whom the sunset tolls; it tolls for thee
© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
11/08/06
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/sunset.htm
The evening before election day, we had a remarkable sunset. Reds and golds and
streamers of light from behind cumulus clouds, and the mountain bathed in a
deep, rich plum alpenglow, the fresh snow made royal velvet by the light.
You would think, living where we do, that such sunsets are common. But they
aren’t. The weather is a bit too seasonal. In the summer, the sun sets
uneventfully and colorlessly in a cloudless sky, no more remarkable than a bus
pulling away from a stop. In the winter, it’s marked by a darkening of a slate
gray sky, the most definite thing in a pallid white land. There’s not much in
between. We don’t get the sort of broken sky and mists that you see in places
like Kansas and Manitoba.
This was the sort of sunset that you expect to have tell you with a deep,
booming voice, that it is disgusted with the iniquity of Man, and so you should
get cracking and start building an arc, or even an entire circle, before he
reaches for the toilet handle. It’s the sort of fate Kansans and Manitobans
unconsciously believe they deserve, for daring to live under such wide, empty,
technicolor skies.
Sunsets are symbolic of something or other. I forget what. Probably isn’t
important.
Anyway, the night before the election, we had a real pretty sunset. I looked at
this sunset and thought trite thoughts. Ask not for whom the sunset tolls; it
tolls for thee. SOMEONE was gonna get their ass sunsetted the next day, and I
figured it was going to be either the country or the GOP.
I expected dirty tricks, voter deterrence, and outright vote theft, especially
from the GOP. And to be sure, there was lots of that going on. Big phone banks
located in California and Montana were calling Democratic voters all over the
country that they were calling on behalf of the local Dem candidate to advise
them the location of the polling place had been changed. These people need to be
hunted down, tried, and have their butts slung in jail for a good long time.
There were lines of voters several blocks long in Denver, and reports of places
where the little old ladies who volunteer selflessly for precinct duty couldn’t
even get the damned Diebolds STARTED, turned to provisional paper ballots, and
ran out of those by 10:30 in the morning. It was, in short, a chaotic mess of an
election, and it’s safe to assume that at least three million votes went
missing, one way or another.
But a party can only steal so many votes and keep it even remotely credible.
Think of that county in Florida where the population was top heavy with wealthy
retired Jews that somehow managed to cast 8,000 votes for Pat Buchanan.
(Buchanan, to his credit, guffawed and said that obviously something was wrong
with the machines.) That would be like Los Angeles waking up the day after an
election to discover that OJ Simpson was the new mayor, or the GOP discovering
they had just nominated Michael Moore as their presidential candidate. Someone
would smell a rat.
So I looked at all the polls, and concluded that the Democrats might pick up 40
seats in the House, and might tie in the Senate, and figured in an honest
election that would be a pretty good prediction. And watched the returns last
night with bated breath.
I honestly didn’t know what to expect. Decency and common sense suggested that
the Republicans would draw the line at how many dirty tricks and outright fraud
they would try, but in recent years the Republicans hadn’t shown much in the way
of decency or common sense. And the Democrats had, in past years, acted like a
bunch of damned weinies who were unwilling and unable to muster up protests when
they had election after election flat-out stolen.
The country, however, was angry. Perhaps the most angry it had been since 1932.
Certainly as angry as it was in 1994. Poll after poll showed that people were
really upset about Iraq, and didn’t believe the “good economy” the vacuous
blow-dried blowhards on the tube claimed they were enjoying was real. People
weren’t just dissatisfied with Putsch’s job performance: they had developed an
intense personal dislike for the glib, strutting, lying little fraud. They were
tired of hearing about how if they didn’t support Putsch they supported
terrorists (in real life, I have conservative friends, and if anything, they
were more furious about that gibe than Putsch’s intended liberal targets were).
They didn’t support massive deficits, the religious right crapola, or the
occupation of Iraq, and they weren’t amused at having their patriotism
questioned because of it. And certainly not by a smirking little clown who had
betrayed them quite thoroughly.
I think people are fed up with the right wing media, too. The best Faux could do
in the election night ratings was a tie with CNN, and neither did anywhere near
as well as in previous elections, despite the higher-than-usual interest in this
one. They weren’t interested in what Sean Hannity or Wolf Blitzer thought. They,
and all the bozos like them, had been cheerleading for this administration for
six years, and look what it got them. America, reviled and disgraced, in two
losing occupations, and with an economy that everyone senses is just plunder for
the superwealthy and bad news for everyone else. Sean and Wolf couldn’t do their
little dance number around that.
Republicans showed a true genius for shooting themselves in the foot. There
isn’t a Democrat on earth who could have topped the Neo-Con attack on Putsch in
Vanity Fair for an embarrassing November surprise for the GOP. And what genius
sent Cheney out duck hunting with his daughter on election day? Was there anyone
in America who didn’t wonder if she was going to survive the experience? Sure,
let’s remind everyone that the Veep shot someone in the face! Good leadership
reminder there, you betcha!
The genius reached its peak in Montana. There, Conrad Burns was in a
monumentally close race against Democrat Jon Tester. Burns, an incredibly stupid
man, had entered peak campaign season by chewing out a group of First Responder
firefighters for taking so long to put out a 40,000 acre blaze. Montana might be
a red state, but they understand what the guys on the line do, and they don’t
appreciate Senators pissing on their firefighters. Thus, the heavily favored
Burns wound up in a close one.
Back a couple of years ago, the Republican assembly decided to avoid the sorts
of embarrassments the GOP had encountered in Florida in 2000, and simply make it
the law that there were to be no recounts if the initial talley showed the two
candidates to be more than a half a percentage point apart. The last precinct
reported this afternoon, showing Tester leading by some 3,100 votes out of
200,000 cast. That’s more than one half percent, so GOP hopes of keeping the
issue alive with a recount automatically died. Hoist on their own petards!
(Those readers who know what a “petard” is are invited to make the appropriate
rich, fruity noises.)
So it’s a sunset on the GOP congress, and for the first time since 1994, the
Dems control Congress.
Time to take a break. I can write about things besides politics for a while now,
but don’t worry; I’ll get back to it soon enough. There’s just too much free
material, just lying around, begging for a lazy writer to come along and pick it
up.
But for now, I think I’ll just relax and listen to a little Widespread Panic.
Which album? Oh, I think “Ain’t Life Grand?” will be a good choice....