Enjoy your vacation, Plaid Adder.

[tomreedtoon]

As stated in her article, "The Fat Lady Sings," the Plaid Adder is going on hiatus. She has stated that she wants to investigate life in the "red states" or "red areas" or whatever you want to call them. She wants to find out what values these people actually have, and what theirs and hers have in common.

To which I say, brava. Thank you for having the sense and courage that is so rare among people on the left.

Ever since the election, what I've seen from all kinds of writers here and elsewhere could be classified as a "whine and cheese party." Among nuclear physicists, a "wine and cheese party" is slang for a nuclear test. But the "whine and cheese party" I'm referring to is the fizzle of a broken firecracker.

"We wuz robbed! The election was a fraud! We really won, but Bush and Diebold stole it all!" Or "We should secede from Jesusland!" or "Fox News outshouted us!" or "The hell with America! I'm going to a real liberal democracy!" Which are all really just disguised versions of "Mommy! Daddy! There's monsters under my bed! Come hold me, please!"

Look, I understand how you feel. That kind of reaction is perfectly understandable...for about a week. But to see people continuing to talk like this is nauseating. Especially people who claim that they have beliefs and a philosophy that help people. Do they really believe in helping people? Or do they view politics as a nice, warm hot tub into which they can relax and feel comfortable? If they do, then Karl Marx was wrong; it's politics that's the opium of the people.

Fighting for a cause isn't easy, and it isn't a hobby. It means going through some dark nights of the soul, in which the only light is a strong belief in principles. Call it "faith," for want of a better word. That is the faith that people on the left have lacked - and it is not necessarily separate from the religious faith we've been told we're missing.

The Adder has faith; I've seen that from her columns. She's trying to find her light through the dark clouds that sweep over us. (And part of those clouds are being raised by the whiners.) I have full confidence that she'll find that light again. I just wish more people were looking for it, instead of cursing the darkness.

[Blue_Tires]

1. hope she comes back soon

[saracat]

2. Whoopee! So some people are idealists.

It isn't going to do any good to "learn" about these people. And I do not really believe in my heart of hearts that Bush won. Your contemptuous dismissal of the viewpoints of those of us who view this election as a farce is what is nauseating. This type of reactionary thinking is why American's aren't out in the streets protesting as they are in the Ukraine. With your attitude, MOVE ON would never have been formed. We "whiners" as you call us may be the only thing standing between Democracy and the complete sellout to the corporate dictatorship. It was "whiners such as we who stopped the Vietnam War and "whiners" who protested the British ,and formed this nation.

"Look, I understand how you feel. That kind of reaction is perfectly understandable...for about a week."

A week is all you would give to consider the theft of an election? A week is all it took you to cave in and "move on". Well, there are many of us who are committed to the long haul. And our anger will survive far longer than a week.My anger has not receded since 2000. Why anyone should think this election would abate it is beyond me.

Our problem is not that we didn't "understand" these voters or reach out to them as implied by Plaid Adder, nor is it true that Kerry was a lousy candidate. What is true is that we wasted too much time pandering to both them and the undecided voters who didn't exist. We didn't draw a deep enough line in the sand because we were trying too hard to appease the right and people who will NEVER cote for us.We blurred our own message. We need to be as black and white as Bush was, That is a winning strategy with the voters. You must give them a choice and when you try to "please everybody" you aren't offering a clear choice. What you and others like Plaid Adder are doing is advocating more of the same. A lurch to the middle, translation to the right. It won't work.As Truman said ,"when the voters have a choice between a Republican and a Republican ,they will vote Republican every time"!

The votes are still being counted. I am going to continue to "whine", and I will keep and I will keep "whining" until every vote is counted and that bastard is out of the White House!

[tomreedtoon]

7. A week is all you need...

...to get over a bad date, a disappointing dinner. Understand something. It is mostly YOUR FEELINGS that are being hurt. I don't mean this to be personal, but since we're talking about emotions, you'll probably see it that way. So be it.

Yes, there are problems in the nation, with Democrats, with Bush. But the disappointed little-kid reaction I'm seeing in these places...and I'm sorry to say it, but it's from you too, saracat...comes from your reaction to events, not the events themselves.

I'm sure you worked hard on the campaign. You're angry that Bush won. But you have to work through the entire grieving process...denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. You seem to be stuck on Number Two, along with far too many other people.

The longer you stay there, the more certain it will be that you won't effectively contribute to the effort to change things. You have to wipe off the blood, bury your dead, say a quick prayer for them, and move on to the next battle.

[saracat]

8. Just exactly what I would expect you to say from your prior

post. I am amazed that you have the temerity to judge how long anyone should mourn anything let alone the death of a nation. I am also astounded that you feel it is not presumptuous to not only tell me what I feel, but what I am supposed to feel . You have also indicated what you think I should think. Apparently you think there is only one conclusion that can be drawn from the current election and that is your own. This is exactly the problem I am referring to in my post. I am sorry to offend you by not marching in lockstep with whatever manner you think I should regarding the election results.

[tomreedtoon]

9. I'm not worried about the last election, but the next.

And your reply with words like "temerity" and "presumptuous" show that my judgment about your emotional state is spot on.

Go ahead and mourn while Randi Rhodes makes cynical remarks. Me, I'm going to stores and malls, and planting leaflets to help get phone cards to our wounded soldiers in veteran hospitals - with the subtle comments that "the Bush administration has cut veteran's benefits" and "please care for our soldiers, especially because the White House doesn't."

Maybe it's not setting myself on fire on Jeb Bush's doorstep, which might please your sense of despair, but it's intended to make the "red state" people realize how Bush has betrayed the people he sent to fight for him. And it's better than sitting and sobbing.

[saracat]

11. So sign yourself Don Quixote. If you think there will be a real election

in 20008 ,if things are left as they are. You are much worse off than you claim I am. Campaign your heart out. There is no way to win with the deck stacked against you. Red the post from the person living amongst these people.
BTW, what is wrong with the words temerity and presumptuous? They are indicative of your assumptions regarding my emotional state. How about outrageous? Is that word okay?
And you know what they say about assumptions. I am a Dem Party officer .I am a District Chair and I work everyday trying to bring more people over to the Dem side. I am a co host of a television political talk show for the Democratic Party I also work constantly to "correct" our right leaning philosophy. People will only realize Bush has "betrayed" them if they have something to compare it with not "republican" lite. And if no one counts the votes, it won't matter who anyone votes for. I daresay I do more than sit around and cry, and a great deal more than leafleting. And mourn while Randi Rhodes makes cynical remarks? I have no idea what you are talking about.Clearly it is not my attitude that needs adjusting.

[girl gone mad]

10. This wasn't a bad date..

or simply a matter of wounded pride. Lives are at stake, our economic security is at stake, our children's futures our at stake.

I live in a red state. I'm around Bush supporters every day. I know about their (often non-existent) value systems. I have a pretty good sense of what makes many of them them tick. They run the spectrum, from RINOs who vote Bush despite their underlying liberal ideologies, because he's a Republican and Republicans "do things better", to full-on Fallwell and David Duke clones that thrive on hate and think America should "nuke all of the Muslim countries".

With all due respect, I have no desire to ponder differences or cede political ground to the RWingers, and I think it will be impossible to win elections by doing so. If you're asking me to try and understand my Bush supporting neighbors, and appreciate their world view - forget it. I've yet to meet a Republican who isn't fundamentally hypocritical and I've met very few who were willing to listen to any point of view not pre-appoved by the White House, Rush Limbaugh or any of his clones.


Btw, those are the five stages of coping with a terminal illness, not coping with grief. It's a common misconception propogated by pop psychologists misinterpretation and misrepresentation of a seminal mid-twentieth century book on the emotional states of cancer and other terminal patients.

[tomreedtoon]

16. I'm sorry. You MUST understand your red neighbors.

There are reasons your red neighbors voted for Bush. And it isn't explained as simply as the mass media (for which I work, by the way) or Diebold or Cobra Commander using his Mass Hypnosis Device on the populace.

Part of it is clarity of image. Bush had an easily-understood vision of what he wanted and expressed it simply. Maybe that bothers all you B.A.'s and Ph.D.'s out there, but having a plainly-spoken and clear image is very appealing to ordinary people. And yeah, maybe Bush's actions are betrayals of his words, but his words were what people based their votes upon.

Kerry felt the need to explain and qualify everything. That adds complexity. Complexity confuses most people, like it or not. Few people are elected by nuance. Worse, Kerry didn't sharply contrast himself with Bush's opinions until far too late in the campaign. The "strong at home, strong alliances" stuff he uttered in his campaign commercials sounded too much like "Bush Light."

I could go on, but this is the intrinsic message: Your neighbors had what they saw as good and valid reasons to not vote for Kerry. That doesn't make them bad people, or the frothing dogs many progressives are calling them. They were lied to, and nobody - especially not Kerry - effectively told them the emperor had no clothes.

So stop hating them blindly, like they were blacks and you were a plantation owner. Walk a mile in their shoes - which, by the way, are probably rather sweaty from their universal fear of everything. Then maybe you can start looking for a candidate that's passionate enough to update an old Democrat's speech about "fear itself."

[billyskank]

3. Please come back soon!

:cry:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Good luck, Plaid Adder!

C ya! :-)

LL

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

5. In 2020, I'll still be saying, "The 2004 election smelled fishy as Hell."

And if you don't like it, tough shit.

[cornfedyank]

6. Mr. Soros is in the same monastery---contemplation is abundent

we thought we knew people better.

[Plaid Adder]

12. I want to make two things clear.

1) I do not want in any way to give the impression that I think the 2004 election was clean. It was obviously dirty. It was clear from before the election happened that there were organized and deliberate attempts at vote suppression in swing states and I'm sure that the investigations currently underway will yield a lot of interesting discoveries. I don't know whether there was enough fraud to affect the outcome or not, but either way it's got to be exposed.

However, the reality is that a president as bad as Bush is should have been polling in the 30s, not the high 40s. This is also a problem that needs fixing, just as much as the voting machines. We need to operate on the assumption that this election was both lost AND stolen.

2) I don't think the solution is to move the party more to the right. I think if anything it makes more sense to move to the left--but there are a lot of ways to do that. IMHO, the problem we have is that because the party has lost its gumption when it comes to economic issues, we rely almost exclusively on social issues to differentiate ourselves from the Republicans, and htis makes us easier to demonize and reject. If you give people a material incentive to vote for you it becomes less important what Karl Rove is saying about your boy. But in order to counteract that we need a REAL material incentive, one concrete and transformational enough to get people as excited about it as they are about God. This is what I meant when I was talking about finding out what people *need* as opposed to finding out what Rove has told them they want.

But, as I said, I'm wrong a lot, so WTF do I know.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[linazelle]

15. "lost AND stolen"....

I have to say that lost IS stolen--the two are synonomous when it comes to the election. They own the media which pushed ** in the polls for the entire pre-election season. They moved on to other news ignoring Kerry's leads and harped on any leads Bush had--thereby strengthening the perception that Bush had an edge. Pushing that perception without even relating it to narrow margins of previous incumbents further strengthened the lead perception. I'm not whining, or making up excuses. I don't have scientific proof. I just know what I saw and read and heard in the media. I know that the message was rigged just like the election. It's not our fault Bush didn't poll lower.

[Lisa]

13. and another "brava" from over here!

Don't go having nightmares about Lynne Cheney's novels, now!

[Arkana]

14. WTF?

"We wuz robbed! The election was a fraud! We really won, but Bush and Diebold stole it all!" Or "We should secede from Jesusland!" or "Fox News outshouted us!" or "The hell with America! I'm going to a real liberal democracy!" Which are all really just disguised versions of "Mommy! Daddy! There's monsters under my bed! Come hold me, please!"

Maybe you haven't seen the mounting pile of evidence for election fraud this year. Not sure how you missed it, unless you deliberately ignored it all in your rush to tell us to "get over it."

[tomreedtoon]

17. Yes, I saw it. So what?

The "election fraud" existed. It might actually reverse the results of the election if it all works out. So what? If Kerry still gets the White House, it is still by a very slim margin.

By concentrating on vote theft, too many people are missing the basic facts: Kerry didn't provide a compelling alternative choice, aside from him being "not Bush." He was the party's choice, which means that the party didn't choose on sensible principles. (Was it so bad that Howard Dean yelled a little bit? Apparently, the party rank-and-file thought so.)

By all means, continue investigating election fraud. It's important. But don't claim that there was nothing wrong with the Democratic party, its selection process or the candidate we got stuck with.

[Arkana]

18. I'm not claiming that Kerry's campaign was flawless. It wasn't.

But for you to just tell us to "get over it" and "stop whining" is rather stupid. After all, if we don't fix our voting systems soon, we may never again win a Presidential election.

Basically, you sound like a bitter Deaniac who's pissed his guy wasn't chosen. I like Howard Dean too, but the party chose Kerry, and I proudly voted for him.

[tomreedtoon]

19. Actually, I didn't support any candidate before the election.

I was waiting to see who the party would select. I presumed that Democrats would have some degree of wisdom about choosing someone who would inspire the country and show up Bush. Boy, was I wrong.

That's why I am upset at the Democratic Party as a whole, but especially at those who pretend that "the process worked, but we wuz robbed." If the process had worked - if the Party had thought hard about what was wrong about Bush and what they needed to do to counter him - whatever vote stealing occured at this level would have been swamped out by a wave of support for the Democratic candidate.

Unless the Democratic party ponders its severe personality deficiencies and works to correct them, it will spend the next election sobbing into its pillow, once again the ugly girl that no one wants to take to the dance.