"You can fool most of the people most of the time and that's usually good enough."
The unofficial motto of the Republican party held true in this week's elections. With a lot of help from the Democrats, of course. This motto was perfected during the eight years of the Reagan administration. The current resident of the White House doesn't do it as well as Teflon Ron did, but the people seem to be more easily fooled than they once were. Or perhaps they just want to be fooled.
I can understand that. Given the fact that there's not much choice available to voters these days, we may as well delude ourselves that we actually have some say in our governance.
The good news is that every time I have thought that the right wing fundamentalist fringe is about to install a full-blown theocracy, I was wrong. They haven't succeeded before and they probably won't this time. Not that they won't try and not that they won't feel that they have a mandate to do so after this debacle.
We are sometimes blessed and sometimes cursed with a system that has immense inertia. This time it's a blessing. Before the whackos can get very much done, they will be swept out of office. Then there'll be somebody else who will want to change things and will also be unable to get much done.
My editorial assistant, who is from Canada, observed today that he thought our system was supposed to contain built in checks and balances. How, he wondered, could those work if one party controls all three branches of government? The answer, of course, is that built-in inertia.
There seems to be a good deal of that in the Democratic party, as well. I become more and more convinced that I did the right thing by voting Green in 2000. Unless the Dems can somehow re-equip themselves with some cojones, they won't be the ones to replace the GOP in 2004.
Given the arrogance that Shrubya and Co. will undoubtedly derive from this election, they should have plenty of time to self-destruct in two years.
If the cowboys in DC get their way, we'll have a bloody and disastrous adventure in Iraq that could make Vietnam look like a walk in the park. It will further polarize the Muslim world, alienating the few friends we have there and creating a new and even more fanatic generation of bin Ladens.
With no one at the wheel, the economy will continue to crumble. The aging boomers will wake up eventually when they find that their Social Security benefits have disappeared, Medicare won't pay for a fraction of health care costs, and prescription drugs will be completely unaffordable. THEN they'll vote for somebody, anybody, other than the corporate toadies who are running the show now.
If the Dems can come up with something to offer other than tired old political hacks like Fritz Mondale, Tom Daschle, and Richard Gephardt, maybe someone will vote for them. If not, we can only hope that some other party can step up to the plate.
One thing this election proved beyond a shadow of a doubt: trying to straddle too many fences is hard on the testicles.
9:34:03 PM 
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