Friday, November 10, 2006

REPUBLICAN VOTERS MAKE GLASS NEARLY HALF-EMPTY





DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Call me a cockeyed pessimist, but isn’t anyone else alarmed that approximately 47 percent of the electorate is still lame enough to vote Republican? Just who are these imbeciles and how did they get that way? Even Wiley Coyote knows there’s trouble when he looks down and sees he’s run off the cliff. How bad does it have to get before they agree it’s bad?

The way I look at it, the glass is 47 percent empty because how can anyone feel comfortable with all these cuckoo birds stumbling around and wandering into voting stations? NPR asked a congressional candidate in Georgia to identify the most important issue in the campaign and he answered gay marriage. He sounded sincere.

The Republicans have no energy policy, think it’s A-OK that we’re the only industrialized nation in the free world without national health insurance, and provide only slogans to fix their failed hobby war in Iraq. For the Supreme Court they’ve been approving lying inept-ocrats whose eyes twirl around inside their skulls. They even voided our signature on the Geneva Convention and treated the Bill of Rights like it was a fatwa from Bin Laden. They borrow like there’s no tomorrow, and if they were to continue getting their way on global warming and the poisoning of air and water, there won’t be a tomorrow.

And nearly half the voters voted to keep these corrupt-oramusses in office. Some of them have an excuse. They want to reach the End of Times and are savvy enough to see that Bush, Cheney, Hastert, etc. are the shortest, quickest route. But what about the rest?

These people Lincoln was talking about when he said you can fool some of the people all of the time seem so much more numerous in the de-brained culture of MTV, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Britney Spears. Recent high school graduates who can find Afghanistan on a map are as small a fraction of the whole as the percentage share of Americans who are even aware that Bush’s handlers were caught inserting a fake journalist-gay prostitute into White House press conferences to lob powder-puff questions at their answer-challenged leader.

Yes, this election gave us grounds for cautious celebration. But as the next Congress seeks to undo some of the criminally corrupt practices of the last one – particularly in regard to the job of making an aquarium out of the fish soup they call Iraq -- it ought to pay serious attention to providing a decent education to our citizens so perhaps someday down the road Americans will be able to field our 1-800 calls as capably as native Hindi speakers.