No stomach for killing fascists? Marry a Canadian!

10:57:36 PM     leave/read comments []

Thank you.

Fight the evil that is the Bush administration.

Kerry concedes.. Xeni Jardin: Updated.

Click on thumbnail for full image (Igor Knezevic)

8:15am: Four more years of a nation led by criminals. I was making coffee with one eye on CNN when the news broke, and I called my dad, a man who's spent many years fighting for good things, sometimes at great personal cost.

"Get over it," he said, "The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term -- crushed. I just couldn't believe America was that stupid. But remember what happened to Nixon that term."

"Change comes from discontent," he said. "And right now, there's a lot of discontent."

I finish pouring my coffee, and agree when my dad says what we're faced with right now is considerably more frightening than Nixon. BB pal Jim Graham IMs a few minutes later: "Yeah, and Karl Rove makes Lee Atwater look like a choir boy."

Dan Gillmor sums up what the continuation of Bush's presidency means for America.

The Republicans have an even stronger congressional majority. They have shown how gladly ruthless they can be in using their power. Bush and his allies have never believed in compromise. They have even less incentive to govern from the middle now, even though the nation remains bitterly divided.

There's no secret about what's coming. We don't have that excuse this time.

Here comes more fiscal recklessness -- as we widen the chasm between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else, cementing a plutocracy into our national fiber, we'll pay our national bills on the Treasury Bill credit card for the next few years. Many economists expect a Brazil-like financial crisis to hit the U.S. before the end of the decade. If we muddle our way though the near term, we'll still have left our kids with the bill.

Here comes an expansion of the American empire abroad, a fueling of fear and loathing elsewhere on the globe. This is also unsustainable in the end. Empire breeds disrespect.

Our civil liberties will shrink drastically. This president and his top allies in Congress fully support just one amendment in the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment's right to bear arms. Say goodbye to abortion rights in most states. Roe v. Wade will fall after this president pushes three or four Scalia and Thomas legal clones onto the Supreme Court. Say hello, meanwhile, to a much more intrusive blending of church and state.

The environment? We'll be nostalgic for Ronald Reagan's time in office.

This is not sour grapes. This is reality.

I hope, but doubt, that the Democrats re-discover enough of their collective spine to block the most extreme moves. If they do it'll be a change for a party that stands for so little these days.

People say there are two Americas. I think there are at least three.

One is Bush's America: an amalgam of the extreme Christian "conservatives," corporate interests and the builders of the burgeoning national-security state.

Another is the Democratic "left": wedded to the old, discredited politics in a time that demands creative thinking.

I suspect there's a third America: members of an increasingly radical middle that will become more obvious in the next few years, tolerant of those who are different and aware that the big problems of our times are being ignored -- or made worse -- by those in power today.

That third America needs a candidate. Or, maybe, a new party.

If you follow South Park, maybe this is all about being forced to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.

BoingBoing readers are a good-humored lot, though. Some have suggested sending fecalgrams to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as an exercise of free speech. Reader Pete Setchell says, "There is still one chance to get him out of the White House - send him a pack of pretzels to celebrate his victory. I've just sent some via Amazon."

Reader Dave in the UK writes,

"As a British citizen, I just can't understand why. Does the British media unfairly portray Bush, or are more than half of American voters just fucking stupid? I write this as an appeal to BoingBoing - please, please help me understand how this could have happened, and why, why on God's earth would so many Americans support Bush?"

Presuming the elections were fairly conducted and accurately counted -- which remains a matter of some considerable debate -- I'm going with the latter.

Mateusz Pozar in Sweden (the place that has no army) echoes the emails of BoingBoing readers around the globe today: "I must say that iâo[dot accent]m surprised (and most of the world with me actually) that Bush got a second term. Seriously, would he have to rape kittens to get kicked out of office?"

Iranian expat blogger Hossein "Hoder" Derakshan says -- welcome to the Christian Republic of America.

"You know what? I really think Iranians should export their revolution to America. They badly need it. Unbelievable, half of Americans go to Church once week at least? Even Iranians don't go once a week to Mosque, thanks to the Islamic revolution. So I guess America really needs a Christian revolution, maybe people would see what religion really is."

BB reader Billy Hayes says,

"I am from Texas (born and raised). I am a white male. I did not vote for Bush. I guess we all have our reasons. I voted for Kerry. I find comfort in what you posted about what your father said about Nixon. Bush likes to use old Texas sayings a lot. I have one for him. In Texas there is a saying that goes, 'Give em enough rope and they will hang themselves.' Well, I guess the Republicans have all the rope they need."

Reader Hal Eckhart in Minneapolis says,

"Thanks for the consolation, however small. We can only hope and keep on trying.

"I, too, remember being aghast when Nixon won re-election, and the sense that everybody was blithely oblivious to his evil. My high-school civics teacher had a "four more years" sticker on his podium, and once bragged to us that he laughed out loud when he heard JFK had been shot.

"This country and this world are full of idiots. This country's idiots are just a little more cock-sure that they deserve what they've got. A lesson in humility is certainly on the way, and we can only pray that it will be no more painful than it needs to be."

John Shirley, another ex-BB-guestblogger, says

The newspaper today says that millions of young people who said they were anti-Bush and who were registered to vote Democratic *didn't show up at the polls.* They were too busy playing Grand Theft Auto or renting Jerry Bruckheimer movies or smoking weed or babbling in chatrooms. It's their fault we're heading into a theocracy. But they're not alone in their culpability."

BoingBoing pal Q-Burns Abstract Message IMs,

Bill Hicks once told a story about an American friend of his who complained about the USA. When told, "well, if you don't like it then move somewhere else" the friend's reply would be, "What? And become a victim of our foreign policy?"

Geek and new dad Glenn Fleishman tells BoingBoing,

I've been Jewish, not very observant, my whole life. I'm one of the first generations of Jews to not fear assault as they went to school or lived their lives in secular or religious ways. To not worry about slaughter. I have only met a handful of concentration camp survivors, including a teacher in college. I don't know what it is to be oppressed or insulted for my ethnic and religious heritage.

Today is the first day I am afraid in America because I am Jewish.

Today is the first day I fear for my new son, who is not, but has a Jewish father.

I'm lucky to live in Washington State, and specifically in Seattle. A haven of secular and broad-spectrum religious views in a sea of red. We went strongly, even among Republicans, to Kerry, and maybe I just won't leave this state much for the next four years.

Me, I just keep thinking about this kid's face. And promises of endless war. Link to portrait of LC David Murphy, shot at Camp Abu Graib near Falluja by Kevin Sites.

From Kerry's concession speech:

Audience member: We still got your back!
Thank you, man. And I assure you -- you watch -- I'll still have yours.

[Boing Boing]

10:43:56 PM     leave/read comments []

Learn to use them.

Kill evildoers.

The revolution begins today.

10:27:49 PM     leave/read comments []

My friend Jason pretty much speaks for me here. I've always been on the margins, a weirdo and outsider, but today is the first time in my life that I've felt that my countrymen would see me dead and that I'm surrounded by some sort of alien way of thinking. Without further ado, here's Jason Errett:

Fuck, I'm depressed. I've never felt much like a representative of the mainstream. I've always been the oddball. I was the weird kid from age 8. We moved a lot, almost once a year, so I was always the new kid, too. Even at a small college that was science intensive, a place where we didn't even have an English program, or a business program, or fine arts, or anything, a place where in order to fill your elective credit hour requirements you had to take core curriculum classes from some other hard science discipline, a place where the EE majors where considered the intellectual inferiors, I was still the weird smart kid. So, I've never fit in anywhere.

But, never before have I felt so alienated here in my native land. I felt less conspicuous walking through the Arab quarter of Jerusalem, where I was the only guy I could see wearing trousers instead of a robe.

Here I am in America, and I feel like I must've just been dropped off by a passing flying saucer.

"Moral values"... that's what the majority of Bush supporters cited as a reason for voting for him. "Security" was a close second.

My brain must be wired completely differently than these people because I fail to see the moral value of waging a pointless war that has killed over 100,000 innocent civilians, and I fail to see the security benefit of killing them, given that it will radicalize their cousins, their brothers, their uncles, their sons, and anyone else who cared about all these people we so callously slaughtered in the name of the neocon new order.

And now, we've got Iran busily enriching uranium, and North Korea reprocessing fuel rods, and there's no chance of us meeting a diplomatic solution with the current crop of vicious thugs in power. Those two nations see that they're on our hitlist, and now that the American people have spoken, apparently most of America thinks they need to be on that list. I'm not saying these are delightful and friendly nations that we should coddle, but I will say they're much more dangerous when they feel threatened than when they feel like they have other courses of action. If we stepped in with diplomacy and perhaps even something like the offer of nuclear power assistance, like we did with North Korea during Clinton's tenure, we could alleviate the threat. It was only when that support, plus the fuel and energy support we'd been giving North Korea was withdrawn that they broke the UN seals on the fuel rod cooling ponds and began reprocessing. And now, thanks to reincarnating the remains of their early fast breeder reactor program, which we had replaced with less nuclear proliferation friendly light water reactors, they have enough plutonium for a handful of nuclear weapons.

And Iran... Iran will probably go the fast breeder reactor route, too. It makes sense when you're on the hitlist of an emerging empire that has shown no reluctance to invade and destroy other countries. You get both power in the short term, and nuclear weapons in the not too distant future. Without the power to make Pu-239 from the cheap and abundant U-238 via a breeder reactor, there's almost no way to have a successful nuclear weapons program. Enrichment of uranium is one method, sure, but you're much better off enriching to reactor grade fuel uranium, about 30-60% pure U-235, running a breeder reactor, and converting literally tons of U-238 into weapons grade plutonium, which can now be chemically separated from the residual uranium bypassing the expensive and difficult centrifugal separation process.

With a newly radicalized Iraqi population amounting to thousands of new terrorists willing to die to strike back at those who slaughtered their families, and a threat of similar wholesale destruction held over the heads of Iran and North Korea, there is nothing to stop these nations from providing nuclear materials and weapons assistance to straight up terrorists. In fact, it starts looking like the only logical step. If you know you're on the hit list, why not hit first? Especially if you've got a proxy organization of radical extremists who don't care if they die in the process of inflicting damage on the enemy.

My prediction, one shared by a physicist friend of mine who is much closer to these issues than I am since she works for the Union of Concerned Scientists and has been elbow deep in weapons proliferations issues for years, is that we will see nuclear terrorism within two years.

So, maybe Bush won't get his full "four more years".

But, sadly, he won't be alone among Americans who won't get four more years. Thousands of soldiers pumped into an increasingly unstable Iraq, or sent into Iran, or, god forbid, a new war on the Korean penninsula, won't get four more years, either. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans civilians will die when a nuclear device, hidden in a shipping container, is detonated in one of our port cities. They won't get four more years.

And the civilians who continue to die in Iraq and Afghanistan won't get four more years.

And on economic and healthcare fronts, the American people will continue to die prematurely due to lack of decent medical care, and some may become despondant over their opportunities and fall prey to psychological maladies such as depression, and the increased risk of suicide that comes with it. They won't have four more years.

Four more years, my ass.

11:46:11 AM