Buck Hill

Roy at alicublog has been expressing my own despair with a little more venom and efficacy than I can manage right now, and he's been fighting hard against the "plenty of reasonable people can find reasonable reasons to support Bush" argument with my full support -- honestly, right now, there are Bush-voting members of my own family who I would verbally abuse if I didn't live a thousand miles away from them (not many, of course, because all the reasonable ones, including two lifelong Republicans, voted for Kerry).

And Roy linked to this, "An Open Letter to the Democratic Party: How You Could Have Had My Vote".

After reading this reasonable young woman explain so reasonably why she voted for poverty, torture, and endless war against a vague threat, I can only paraphrase the great Robert Mitchum:
Baby, we don't care.

Fuck you and fuck your vote, if you're real and not just some insidious random-word-generator with a vendetta against me.

It's been two days since John Kerry conceded, and all I am seeing, hearing and reading from the Democratic party is that you guys think you lost on "moral values." You seem to think this means nothing more than opposition to gay marriage.

Of course not! We know it also means a principled objection to the existence of homosexuality, not to mention the legality of a safe abortion preformed by a professional doctor!

Many of us would have given our left arms for a Democrat we could have supported.

Like George Wallace!

Let's meet our poor, lost vote, and begin to feel the bile rise:

I am a single, heterosexual, college-educated woman in my late 20's with an annual income of about $30,000. I live in a solidly red state in the South, the region you guys wrote off entirely without even trying to persuade us to vote for you. [Note: This is the first point at which we begin to decide that perhaps we didn't really care about your vote to being with] I am not an ideologue, and I experience painful ambivalence about many political issues. The notion of an abortion makes me queasy, but I don't want Roe vs. Wade overturned. I have friends who've been impregnated by rape and friends who found out late in their third trimesters that they were carrying babies too malformed to ever have normal lives. [Aren't I compassionate?] The pictures of Iraqi children who've lost arms from the bombs my tax dollars bought make me shed tears, but I recognize that the war was the right thing to do, given the information we had available at the time the decision was made. [Information which I didn't question then and have no qualms with now] I had no health insurance for three years, but I'm still, hesitantly, not in favor of socialized medicine. [It is my understanding, because I am stupid, that Kerry's plan was precisely what he explained repeatedly that it wasn't. Also, I've never been to Canada. Or heard of western Europe. This self-evident principle of mine warrants no further explanation.] I know people who abuse the social services, but I also have friends who would be dead without the food stamps and SSI checks they collect each month. [God rest their souls.] I believe in God and consider myself a Christian, but I don't go to church, and Falwell, Robertson, and their ilk scare me more than they scare you.

Can you feel that, Democrats? That is me being sooooo close to being on your side. Can't you just taste my precious, precious vote?

More vote-dangling prickteasing continues in the next graf:

I have gay friends who are closeted and gay friends who couldn't be more open if they had QUEER tattooed across their foreheads, and I think they should be allowed to get married if they want to. [I don't think so very strongly, mind you, but I have been known to watch Will and Grace] I read The Onion, Dilbert, Dan Savage's sex advice, Salon.com, and quite a few blogs. [Your best humorists and sexperts could not sway me! I am the mighty lost voter!] The local librarians know me on sight. ["Here comes that woman who can't bring herself to vote for Kerry again. I bet she feels very conflicted about the Justice Department's extra-constitutional powers to force us to give them the records of every book she's checked out to investigate her loyalty. Look, she is borrowing a book by very reasonable hat-wearing former liberal mystery writer Roger L. Simon!"] ... I shop at Wal-mart, but I feel guilty about it, and if they unionized, I would never cross the picket line. [Thankfully, once I cast my very conflicted vote for Bush, I won't have to worry about crossing any picket lines.]

President Bush's close relationships to people like John Ashcroft scare me. I hate the PATRIOT Act and am fearful of what might be part of PATRIOT II. The two dumbest trial balloons I've heard floated for his second-term agenda are privatizing Social Security and abolishing the income tax. When he says that God chose him to be President during this time of trial, I am embarrassed. I roll my eyes. [I disagree with or am scared of the largest planks of my candidate's platform. I have very basic disagreements with his major beliefs and principles, and his agenda has the potential to personally hurt my and the people I love. I have made voting a form of masochistic self-flagellation.]

Now we get to the good bits. Why, exactly, oh you reasonable young moderate, did we lose your vote? Because of talking points transcribed directly from the RNC.

1. You didn't give me clear positions on the issues. I followed the news closely all through the campaign, but I still don't understand Kerry's position on Iraq. I know he voted for the IWR, but then he voted against the $87 billion. To you, that seemed to be a symbolic stand against Saddam Hussein (the IWR) but also a principled stand against a President who was out of control (against the $87 billion). To me, that was just confusing. He said he would have done everything different, but he also said that, knowing what he knew today (the day he was asked) he still would have cast the same vote. He said that he would bring allies to our side to share the burden, but he also said he would be sending 40,000 more of our troops. He said that we must finish the job, but he also said it was the wrong war at the wrong place and the wrong time. Huh?

Ror the sake of consistency, once John Kerry voted to support giving the President the authority to make war providing that he presented genuine proof that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction before beginning the invasion, he should have decided that Bush could do no wrong in waging the war.

2. You didn't convince me that you would defend America against the threats of terrorism. Kerry seemed to think that terrorism is like any other crime. You catch the people responsible and put them in jail, and that's that. After seeing the destruction – physical, financial, psychological, and emotional -- wrought by the September 11th attacks, [From far, far away in a "safely Red state"] I do not understand how he could believe this. The hijackers lived among us, ate at our restaurants, shopped in our malls, and wounded us worse than we have ever been wounded before. How Kerry saw this as a crime, and not as a paradigm-shifting event that deserved a military response, both in direct retaliation and to keep it from ever happening again by going on the offensive, is something I don't understand.

Yes, the actual targets of the 9/11 attacks, New York City, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. all demonstrated their confidence in Bush's ability to protect them from another attack by resoundingly voting out of office the man who sat on his ass while the hijackers rammed planes into buildings. In fact, almost all major urban areas, surely the most obvious targets of future attacks against America, expressed a little less faith in our war president than our suburban Southern young woman, here.

"We love you, New York," the Reasonable Republicans say, "and what we are doing hurts us as much as it hurts you, but we know what is best for you, for we occasionally visit and felt very bad on September 11th."

The rest of it is meaningless drivel that won't be foreign to anyone who's spent much time on a warblog or the comments section of a troll-infested lefty blog. This woman's a fake, obviously, but one on which a considerable amount of effort was expended. Go on over and say "hi." Show her a little of that Democratic Hate Speech which turned her off to our cause. |