Bitter

I've been saving all of the unfair, whiny, angry, ranting lefty stuff I've been seeing in the wake of the election for one big primal scream. If you care to see them, I have a collection of the best of the bitter ...

A lot of Americans just want to say they're sorry to the world.

Many wags joke about walking away. An anonymous successionist declares a new blue republic of California ...

We spoke to God, and she agrees that this split will be beneficial to almost everybody, and especially to us in the new country of California.

... which probably should be coordinated with this plan ...

For the past three years, we have, in conjunction with a handful of MIT engineers, been constructing a giant, cordless circular saw, which is now complete. With this saw, we plan to carve our thriving, prosperous eastern Blue nation away from the spreading infection of red America. We will then set a mighty sail, which will carry us around the tip of South America and allow us to join our Blue compadres on the West Coast.

... unless Californians decide to go it alone, or we all just join Canada.

And that's all I have that's good humoured. One guy gets angry and serious about dividing up the country, saying fuck the South.

Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves --- yeah, those are states we want to keep.

Ken MacLeod grieves and starts planning how to fight back.

Well, now the American people have legitimised the bastard. Of course many, perhaps most, of those who voted for the President didn't consciously and deliberately vote for all he stands for. This is because not all, but a substantial portion, were too fucking stupid to find out. These knuckle-dragging cousin-fuckers who are LIVING PROOF that Darwin was right and who were piped to the polls by shills for crony capitalists who are LIVING PROOF that Marx was right still think America was attacked by Iraq, and payback is a bitch. I have news for them. It is. My only problem with that, frankly, is that I love too many folks who don't deserve to be collateral damage.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden thinks that Bush voters only now realize how serious this all is.

You know what’s really happening? They’re seeing our reactions, and they’re scared. It’s like that moment where someone tells you what they’ve done, and it’s disastrously wrong, a complete catastrophe; only they haven’t understood that until now, when they see you stagger and turn pale at the news. And as you’re standing there steadying yourself, feeling your heart pounding and a terrible weight descending on your shoulders … you realize that the other person is preemptively yelling at you. They still don’t quite know what’s happened, but they can tell they’ve screwed up big time, so they’re screaming that they certainly hope you aren’t going to pretend that this could somehow have been their fault, because …

They can tell we’re not just acting like we’ve lost an election. They know that politically, they haven’t been acting like responsible grownups. So now, their reaction is to raise and sharpen their voices, and say they certainly hope we aren’t going to pretend that this could somehow have been their fault …

Well, yes. It is. They’ve been stupid and self-indulgent and irresponsible.

Timothy Burke says that Republicans have no one left to blame, now.

With eyes wide open, in full possession of their faculties, acting as sovereign individuals, around 51% of American voters leapt consciously and clearly into the abyss, taking us with them.

Are you one of them? The nation is yours, but you are not stewards generously preserving something precious to us all. You are destroyers.

And Big Media Matt says that "values voters" are not only wrong, they're chumps.

This is what decades of voting for conservative politicians has wrought: nothing.

Or, rather, not nothing, in another sense it has wrought a great deal. Tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors to Republican-friendly corporations and campaign contributors have proliferated faster than gay pride parades and pornographic websites. Back in Washington for his victory lap, Bush claimed a mandate from the voters and proceeded to outline his agenda for his second term -- tax cuts for the wealthy, subsidies for energy companies, tax shelters for the wealthy, a massive giveaway to the insurance industry, and a larger giveaway to the financial services industry. The faith-based agenda of his most loyal flock was left on the cutting room floor. Just as it always has been, and just as it always will be. The powers that be in the Republican Party are, as in Andrew Sullivan's memorable phrase, "closet tolerants," uninterested in the values agenda except as a hateful prop to be deployed at campaign time.

A large bloc of their voters are, meanwhile, chumps. Not because they support a party whose economic agenda departs from their interests, but because they support a party that consistently refuses to take action on the issues that matter to them. It's the product of the same warped worldview that led most Bush voters in 2000 to tell exit pollsters that it's more important to have a president who provides "moral leadership" than one who can "manage the government." Their conception of the presidency -- of politics itself -- is detached from the reality of what can be achieved through political action. The president is not the preacher in chief; he's the chief executive.

Okay, I feel better, having got that out of my system.