All you guys who voted for Bush ought to be ashamed of yourselves. It leaves me speechless that this man is able to garner so many votes.

As one who held his nose and voted for Bush, Mr. Ring, I can’t say I’m happy or proud that I did so. I did so for the sole reason that in my estimation, John Kerry would destroy whatever is left of this country in a very short time.

I also don’t share the optimism about Republicans in Congress, who often have all the backbone of a Portugese Man-of-War (a jellyfish), that many of those who voted for third party candidates do. The one saving grace of this election (I write this at 2:00 AM CST) is that Bush appears to have won it narrowly. The real conservatives in Congress might stand up to him since he didn’t enjoy overwhelming popular support. If the GOP is to be saved, it needs to return to its roots.

We might even face the spectacle of court involvement again thanks to massive vote fraud at the hands of the Democrats, who seem to believe they have a Constitutional right to commit vote fraud. I’ll be interested to see if the Republicans are willing to challenge the gang of criminals and Marxists (I repeat myself) that make up today’s Democratic party.

I think Tom Wolfe explained Bush’s popularity pretty well in his interview with the Guardian:

“I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment. Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called ‘red states’ - a confusing term to Guardian readers, I agree - which here means, literally, middle America. I come from one of those states myself, Virginia. It’s the same resentment, indeed, as that against your own newspaper when it sent emails targeting individuals in an American county.” Wolfe laughs as he chastises. “No one cares to have outsiders or foreigners butting into their affairs. I’m sure that even many of those Iraqis who were cheering the fall of Saddam now object to our being there. As I said, I do not think the excursion is going well.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1340525,00.html

There is a whole book about this we’re-smarter-and-oh-so-much-better-than-you attitude caste: “Uncivil Wars”, by David Lebedoff.

The first chapter, “The Perfect Storm”, explains how Bush won without credentials simply because he represented the “Left Behinds” and Gore the “New Élite”, which tends to appall normal people.

John O’Sullivan makes much the same argument in the Chicago Sun-Times today:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/osullivan/cst-edt-osul02.html

“Ever since the 1960s power has been shifting from elected bodies such as Congress and the presidency to non-accountable institutions… This shift has generally gone un-remarked… President Bush, however, has been forced by events to recognize and block this silent transfer of power… Without ever intending to do so, however, he fired up the elites. They now see him as an obstacle to their silent draining of democratic power. And they are now maneuvering for his defeat…”

What a country! I know I am borrowing the tag line from an old Yakov Smirnov monologue, but I find it comedically ironic that I am living in the middle of a common-sense sandwich. The right coast and the left coast make up the bread (probably French!) and the middle of the country makes up the filling (probably ham salad!). How will we bring the two disparate elements back to being one country? The answer: I don’t think we can. I believe we are a country careening down hill without any brakes. We may be able to drag our feet to slow our progress down, but we cannot stop it. Liberalism and permissiveness, lack of personal discipline and responsibility, and wanton license have once again worked their will on this society just as they have done on many of History’s past ones. Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls had Robert Jordan say that one had to go on a suicide mission and be killed for him to know that it IS a suicide mission. Those of us who object to “IF it feels good, do it” are on that proverbial suicide mission and, I guess, we must follow through to the mission’s conclusion.