Perhaps it’ll seem that the government is going to start acting like the schemers behind this Blimp Enterprise here…

But you know, I wasn’t really kidding about the “Satanic Revival” bit. Scoff at MtV: it’s not about to broadcast 24 / 7 Christian Rock.

I don’t know. Here’s your next president, the Democratic governor of the one Southern state that is trending the Democrats’ way. He should be shoved down our throats in a few years, never mind what or where he stands anywhere… he’s… Southern

Tonight’s newspaper front pages are plastered with those Pentagon-delivered green-image photographs of troops running into Fallujah. Like we used to see back in March of 2003. The kind that belong next to similarly unreal Playboy Centerford Pages, enhanced breasts and all.

The Thomas Friedman maxim from post-Triumphalism Iraq rings in my mind. It’s time to re-re-re-re-invade.

The defenders of the Vietnam War can always attest to the fact that the Americans won every battle. To which, the detractors will point out that the Americans “won” every battle. I don’t know if “we’re” going to “win” or win, or even what it means if we win, or what the difference between a “win” and a win are.

I’m watching the World Series with a group of guys. Someone says “Al Qaeda would love to strike at the World Series.” Perhaps true, though it’s not keeping me up at night. Then he says, “And just as dangerous the Iraqi Cells that are in the US.”

This is a Laurie Mylroie / Oliver North fantasy. I desire to smack him around, but there’s really nothing I can say to him.

This man is standing outside by the street waving a “Bush / Cheney” poster. An exercise in gloating, I suppose. He also has a second sign that he doesn’t have completely up. I go up to try to make out what it says, squinting and moving my head sideways. I gesture to him to raise the damned thing, but he doesn’t. What I make out: “I Believe” list of crossed-out terms “Whatever You Call Yourselves Are Pro-Terrorist.”

I feel insulted. Not by the political expression, but because this is simply the meekest display of inflamatary political speech imaginable. Display Yourself, Asshole!

It occurs to me that the conspiracy theory (and there’s nothing wrong with conspiracy theory, since the world runs off of conspiracies) that a process of Diebold Computer scamming in Ohio and Florida, provisional balloting nonsense, and such stole the election for Bush, which ties in with the discreprency between the initial exit polling and the vote tally — the sort of official explanation for the discreprency that the Bush faction were more weary of talking to the pollsters for some reason starts to make a bit of sense here. It seems counterintuitive to imagine the “redneck voter” is afraid to share his vote, but here it is: this guy is not waving his inflamatary sign.

A man sitting in Pioneer Square waving a sign to “blackboxvoting.com, and another guy waving a sign saying “Bush Is A Terrorist”. Someone walks by, turns around to gesture at his shirt and give a thumbs up sign. The shirt says “Dumb And Dumber” with pictures of the elder and the lesser Bush.

I defend the elder Bush, as these things go. Listen to how Bush reacted in Act Two of this program. Compare that to Bush’s last press confrerence (seemingly the first in a month), where he extorts the press on “the will of the people” to “enforce the one-question rule.”

And so it goes…

2006.

The only thing I can say is Rick Santorum is a Senior Senator of the God Caucus (a caucus that has been expanded with this last election), in a state that just went to Kerry. Easily Target #1, whatever the polls suggest about Santorum right now.

Other than that, Lincoln Chaffee is extremely uncomfortable with his party right now. I have the highest sympathies toward him. Olympia Snowe is a “moderate Republican” from deep in the blue Northeast, and must be made to feel equally uncomfortable — though, since she’s largely a standard political hack, for different reasons…

It’s interesting that the two (Bi-Partisan, in this case) chairs of the “Committee on Present Danger”, aka “The Committee to Make You Shit Your Pants”, are up for re-election. Both will win re-election, depressingly, and more depressingly one is, quote-in-quote “on my side” — so I “want him to win”. (That’s Jon Kyl and Joe Lieberman.)

I wonder if Robert Byrd will retire. The King of Pork, and a pork that doesn’t really help West Virginia that much, and a man you can occasionally see his KKK past slip through. But he’s everyone’s hero for providing a batch of opposition to the War in Iraq and stark criticism to Bush Administration.

Other blogs more serious than I and a bit more attuned to the Donkey — Elephant Game will no doubt have better focus on this matter than I.

#1: Gay is the new Black.

#2: Lincoln Chaffee must is going to hate sharing a Majority Caucus with David Vitter, Tom Coburn, and Jim DeMint. He voted for George Bush’s father, incidentally.

#3: The Democrats’ electoral stranglehold of the Northeast and West Coast seems to have hardened. The Republicans’ stranglehold of the South and vast West seems to have hardened. The Democrats’ hopes of a Return in the South ride through Virginia. The Democrats have stemmed the tide in Colorado.

#4: The “Flyover Country” Problem is confounded by the inequal balance of the Senate. Every state gets two Senators. If not for that, looking toward the Southeast States and the upper MidWest states would look desirable.

#5: History may well regard Howard Dean as the Democrats’ Goldwater. Take it from there. His influence thus far: early backing for an obscure state Senator from Illinois running an insurgent primary campaign against the picks of the Democratic Party machine… who would then go on to a 20 point poll lead over the Republican candidate who would bow out due to a sex scandal, and who would proceed to defeat his replacement by 40 or so points.

#6: The Oklahoma Senate race was a race between a Republican and a member of the Constitution Party.

#7: I don’t know if there are too many obscure Southern Democratic governors for the Democratic Party to choose from…

#8: On the Senate level, the “Conservative” or “Moderate” (ie: Southern) Wing of the Democratic Party is largely decimated. The ironic thing being if the Democrats had done well, it would look a bit like “Zell Miller’s Revenge”. Alas, the new Republican Senator from Georgia is a peg or two to the left of Zell Miller, so it’s probably moot to begin with. On the other hand, this is sort of good: Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose. (Note the sorry Tom Daschle, stuck in dualing roles, is gone… meaning the caucus is no longer compromised by constituency interests of supporting South Dakota.)

#9: I don’t know where I’m taking this blog now. Suggestions? Do I continue something akin to the “Good Fight”?

I’m looking at the cover of the British magazine “The New Statesmen”. Inside, there is a cover article on the many comparisons between Tony Blair and Joseph Stalin.

I think it’s high time we stop beating around the bush and start comparing every leader of every nation with infamous dictators past and present.

Who’s Mao?

Dear “Flyover Country”:

You are always very annoying in your defensive posture. “Those Coastal Elites just don’t understand us and are always running their mouths about you” and “never even think about us”.

I’m arguably come from “Flyover Country.”, though from a Coastal “Blue” state. I’m quite hickish, really. I can’t say I disliked the place. I know that 2000 county-by-county map, showing that the large rural areas voted for Bush, and the small densely populated urban areas (and smatterings of Indian Reservations) voted for Gore.

Actually, no… I really don’t understand you… as per the Salon article excerpt you’ll see a little later on.

Do “we” (whatever “we” is) think about you? You’re weighing heavily on us right now. The Senate is an area that flummoxes me… it’s structure of 2 seats per state heavily favours you guys… sparsely populated states end up with more representation per person than heavily populated states. The result is… Oklahoma just elected an Alan Keyes clone.

Actually, you want to know something that’s going to depress you? Osama Bin Laden doesn’t even know you exist. The parts of the nation that Bin Laden does know exist voted for Kerry. New York — and neighboring New Jeersey, DC… I’m pretty sure he has California on his map. He doesn’t know about you guys, with your “America … Fuck Yeah!” attitude.

Maybe he’s learning about you now. And laughing at the news reports.

Insane, ain’t it?

Well, gotta run and tivo “Will and Grace”, “Queer as Folk”, and various other sundry tv programming.

………

By the time I had gone to bed, the chorus of pundits had fixed on a single tune, as they always do, and remarkably quickly, too. (Do they watch one another’s feeds in the green room?) They had dusted off the old theme that the Democrats need to “reach out” more to the “heartland.” Reach out? How, exactly? Forget that these folks blindly ignored all objective reality — and their own best economic and national-security interests — and voted for Bush. Look what they did at the Senate level. In Kentucky, they refused to use even basic sanity as a litmus test, and reelected a guy with apparent late-stage dementia; in Oklahoma, they tapped a fellow who wants to execute doctors who perform abortions, who was sued for sterilizing a woman against her will, who pled guilty to Medicaid fraud, and who largely opposes federal subsidies, even for his own state; in Louisiana, they embraced a man who has made back-door deals with David Duke and who was revealed to have had a long-running affair with a prostitute; in South Carolina, they went with a guy who thinks all gay teachers should be fired; and in Alaska, they reelected a woman who was appointed by her father to the job after a spectacularly undistinguished career as an obscure state senator. And compared with the rest of the GOP Class of ’04, she’s the freaking prom queen. These are the stellar elected officials that the “heartland” has foisted on the rest of us.

Salon or Slate or some such Internet site of renown published an article last Summer to the effect that, to a particular narrow age group Reagan’s Legacy was inspiring a whole slew of butt-kicking politically charged punk rock. I confess that my awareness of that sub-genre more or less begins and ends with The Dead Kennedys, but various other “hardcore” blasts run through my head when I think about it.

But I picture a fatigue that comes eventaully. Nixon is re-elected in 1972 to a resounding landslide. The politically charged music that permeated the Vietnam era just… stops. Place your faith in McGovern, and the Idealism will kill you.

The Youth of America thus places their faith in Satan… in the guise of Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, and others.

During the Reagan Administration, Satan flourished. It got to be so bad that Al Gore had to ban him. There seemed to be a slap in the face going on toward Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons of the nation. “Sure, you have your guys in power, but you ain’t stopping Satan, now are you?”

It went beyond the usual suspects of Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest. Take that Wham video with George Michael prancing around in short shorts and those dancers with “Choose Life” shirts. Very subversive to stick homosexuality next to conservative “pro-life” messages.

In the wake of an election that evidentally turned on a massive rightwing turnout marching against gays, and a promise to pump the flag just a little harder…

We’re about due for a Satanic Uprising.

One Nation in a permanent stalement.

When will it all end???

Is this a design from the master controllers?

The “Solid South” is marked in concrete to Bush. Arkansas is the one “purple” exception… notice that Bill Clinton is shouting stuff from Arkansas. Florida is only party Southern, they say, so it doesn’t quite count: you drive north and you’re in Southern Georgia, you drive South and you’re in the sixth Bureau of New York. (If that’s code word for “Jewish”, well… there’s a reason Lieberman was picked as Gore’s running mate, and it wasn’t to excite the Unions.)

I’m guessing Virginia will be closer to Kerry than West Virginia. West Virginia was billed as an internal contest amongst a populace of “culturally conservative economic populists”. It appears that cultural conservatism has carried the day, and it seems it may have pretty permanently. That internal conflict shifts to Ohio for this political fight — where that Sinclair broadcast “Kerry: Honorary Member of the Viet Cong” (or whatever it was called) was supposed to have its biggest impact.

New Hampshire will likely swing Kerry’s way, which will cement something novel altogether: the solid Northeast. Toss in a solid blue Pacific Coast, and mark a whole terrain of people-less land through the West as solidly red and we get to brass tasks: a Southwest that the Democrats are counting on changing demographics for their political future and a Midwest that Republicans are counting on changing demographics for their political future. A V-Shape of Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and (when McCain can be tossed aside) Arizona. And an upper-crust of Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Who the hell knows?