…but I can sympathize with Montgomery Burns, who famously said, “Ironic, isn’t it Smithers? This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That’s democracy for you!”
Smithers: You are noble and poetic in defeat, sir.
If the Republicans lose tonight, they’ll have gotten what they deserved. I hope that at least they’ll do some soul searching.
Unfortunately, the Democrats will have gotten what they didn’t and don’t deserve–political power, in wartime.
We really need a new party.
N. Z. Bear (where does he find the time to program this stuff?) has set up a very readable page to track election results as they come in.
Greg Mankiw has some thoughts. I don’t believe that high voter turnout is an intrinsically desirable goal, which is why I’m opposed to “motor voter” and other means designed to increase participation. If people aren’t willing to do a little work for their franchise, they don’t deserve it, as far as I’m concerned. The goal should be informed votes, with quality, not quantity. Of course, that wouldn’t work out well for the Dems.
From Lileks. He seems a little pessimistic (perhaps with good reason–we’ll find out as the sun goes down across the nation):
It
The CPUSA has endorsed the Democrats. And the libertarians are supposed to? Really? You’d have to have a real bad case of cognitive dissonance.
No matter how atrocious they’ve been on so many issues. Just to wipe the smile off of Chris Matthews’ face. And of course, there’s hardly an issue on which I disagree with the Republicans on which the Dems wouldn’t be much worse.
Austin Bay has written what I’d like to hope is John Kerry’s political epitaph:
John Kerry
Grassfire.org says that we should apply the “Pelosi Standard” to Kerry’s apology:
…of John Kerry. It takes a Brit to point it out:
US servicemen are revered in a way that the British squaddie can only dream of. Soldiers travel in uniform and are routinely ushered to the front of queues and given upgrades to business class with no questions asked. On an American Airlines jet from Dallas last Sunday, a flight attendant made a spontaneous announcement about “the sacrifice our young men and women are making to keep us safe”. The whole plane applauded her.
This is not just rah-rah jingoism. The aching reality of war is also apparent. At Houston airport on Wednesday night I pulled up behind a white hearse with two soldiers in dress uniform inside it. “That’s one of our boys coming home from Iraq,” said a sombre Avis representative, waving me past.
As Kerry has found out, you try to exploit this sentiment for political gain at your peril. The military is the most integrated sector of American society. Poor youths with a bit of get up and go about them use it to get funding for college to pull themselves up a rung on the economic ladder.
I have sat in Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles with black sergeants from Alabama, marines from Mexico and good ol’ boy snipers from Kentucky in places like Fallujah and Ramadi as they described their hopes with an affecting optimism that belied the mortal danger they were in. In many ways, they embody what is great about America.